Thunder Run (45 page)

Major Rideout also went out to have a look at the enemy corpses. He saw one young man with jeans and spectacles who gripped an AK-47 in one hand, with an RPG launcher slung over his shoulder. Rideout wondered if he was the knucklehead who had fired the RPG over his head while he was trying to sleep. The corpse, and most of the others, was already starting to swell and stink in the hot April sun. After another day or two, Rideout had the engineers start digging graves in the stand of trees across from the palace, where the Iraqi soldiers had been killed in their bunkers as Assassin Company burst through the arch on the morning of the seventh. The engineers and civil affairs teams saved whatever identification they could find on the corpses and marked the graves with eight-digit GPS grids. With the help of Iraqi volunteers, the bodies were washed and buried facing Mecca. The engineers spent the next several days pulling wet, oozing remains from burned-out cars and trucks, and peeling maggot-infested corpses off walls and bridge abutments.

Later that summer, after Rideout had rotated back to the States, he arranged to visit Annette Hale, the stepmother of Captain Ed “Jason” Korn, the officer killed by friendly fire. He wasn't sure how she would receive him, but it was something he felt compelled to do. He sat down around a coffee table with Korn's stepmother and the rest of Korn's immediate family in Savannah, Georgia. Rideout had recovered the captain's helmet, cleaning off the blood and affixing new Third Infantry patches on either side. He presented it to Korn's stepmother, along with Korn's wristwatch.

Rideout related Korn's entire Iraqi experience—how he had volunteered and rushed to catch up with the brigade in the desert, how eager he had been to get into the fight, and how he had walked away from the column in the palm forest without telling anyone. He drew maps showing the road and the trees and the two Iraqi tanks that Korn had gone to investigate. As he spoke, Hale interrupted and put her hand on Rideout's arm.

“Everything you have just told me is true,” she told him.

Rideout was startled. He wanted to tell her that this was one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do. He wanted to ask her why she thought he would lie to her after all that had happened. He told her, “Ma'am, everything I've told you
is
true.”

She handed Rideout a letter and told him to read it. It was from her stepson, written two days before he died. It had arrived just a week before Rideout's visit. Rideout read it and saw that Korn had told his stepmother some of the same things Rideout had just related. Rideout realized that the family bore no grudge against him, that they did not blame him for Ed Korn's death. As he poured out more details of the incident, describing how Korn had discovered the Iraqi tank in the trees and then sent a sergeant back to fetch an antitank weapon, the family members nodded and said, “Yeah, that was Jason.”

Early in their conversation, an alarm had suddenly sounded on Korn's wristwatch on the coffee table. His stepmother had looked at it and told Rideout, “He's talking to us.”

By April 9, the deaths of the two cameramen at the Palestine Hotel had triggered the beginnings of an international incident. Outraged journalist groups asked how an American combat unit, equipped with satellite technology and sophisticated computer equipment, could have fired on a building that was clearly marked as a hotel. It had been widely reported, they pointed out, that the Palestine was home to nearly one hundred journalists covering the war from inside Baghdad. They said the crews should have taken more care to identify their target before firing. The following month, the Committee to Protect Journalists published a detailed report on the incident, concluding that the attack on the hotel was not deliberate but was avoidable, in large part because the hotel was so well known and easily identifiable. The Second Brigade should have known not to fire on the hotel, the report concluded.

The U.S. military conducted a series of investigations, and Perkins, deCamp, Wolford, and others were interviewed several times. The commanders walked the investigators through the battlefield at the intersection and across the bridge. In August, the U.S. Central Command issued an investigative report concluding that the men from Assassin Company were justified in firing at what they reasonably believed was an enemy position. A CENTCOM statement said the unit's actions were “fully in accordance” with the rules of engagement because the soldiers believed they were firing on “a suspected enemy hunter/killer team.”

The summary of the report did not address assertions by journalists that higher U.S. military commands in Kuwait and Qatar, which had direct access to TV news reports and to journalists, should have alerted commanders in Baghdad that the Palestine was in the area where American tanks were engaging Iraqi forces on April 8.

The soldiers and commanders involved, from Colonel Perkins down to Staff Sergeant Gibson, expressed sorrow and remorse at the deaths of the cameramen. But they also felt frustration and anger at what they perceived as unfair and uninformed criticism of their actions by people who had little understanding of the speed, chaos, and terror of modern combat. They believed press reports had portrayed their attempts to locate the Palestine while also clearing an air strike on the beige high-rise as a conspiracy to fire on the hotel. There were personal repercussions as well. Captain Wolford's wife in Georgia answered her home phone one day and heard a man's voice ask, “Do you and your family want to die tonight?” Lieutenant Colonel deCamp's wife also received a threatening phone call. DeCamp, Wolford, and Gibson were indicted in Spain, home of one of the dead cameramen.

Colonel David Perkins was left with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. The Palestine incident had been one of the more tragic and painful episodes of the Iraqi campaign, and it was all the more difficult for him to endure given the efforts Perkins had expended to locate the hotel at the height of one of the most intense battles of the war. It was certainly unprecedented, Perkins thought, for a brigade commander in the middle of a firefight to enlist embedded reporters to help locate a building in an effort to avoid civilian casualties. That effort ultimately had fallen short, but Perkins believed in his heart that he and his men had acted with good intentions and honorable motives in a time of war.

As April passed into May, the American military focus shifted from combat missions to the vague and amorphous business of stabilization and rebuilding. The sudden and precipitous displacement was jarring and disorienting for soldiers and commanders who had trained for months to destroy the enemy and topple the regime. They felt adrift. The euphoria of taking Baghdad, of charging into the palaces and the ministries, had faded. They had achieved something remarkable and even historic—an armored charge by fewer than a thousand men into an enemy capital defended by thousands of soldiers and militiamen. The brigade's bold strike had forever altered established armor doctrine for urban warfare and had shortened the war by weeks. It had precluded the long, bloody siege anticipated by Pentagon planners, who had envisioned a drawn-out urban clearing operation by airborne infantry. At a memorial service on Saddam's former parade grounds, Perkins told his men, “Many different methods by many different countries have been tried to force the Saddam regime to collapse, but only one worked. The one that worked was putting the boots of American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad.”

It was true that the brigade had fought a dispirited and outmatched enemy whose strength and capabilities had been drained by the decisive coalition victory in the first Gulf War and by years of economic sanctions. The American military was the best-trained and most technologically superior fighting force on the planet. The Iraqi military had no navy, no helicopter gunships, a grounded fleet of outdated fighter planes, and armored units debilitated by a U.S. and British bombing campaign. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers had thrown off their uniforms and gone home. Even so, thousands more Special Republican Guards, Fedayeen, Arab
jihadis,
and Baath Party militiamen had mounted a furious and fanatical resistance on Highway 8 and inside the city. If the battle of Baghdad seemed a cakewalk to American TV viewers and the armchair generals serving as commentators, the soldiers who had conquered the Iraqi regime knew the truth.

The battalions held the palace complex for several more weeks, until the brigade was transferred to Falloujah, a crowded Sunni town in the flat desert landscape sixty-five kilometers west of Baghdad. They would spend a difficult summer there before the brigade returned to Fort Stewart that fall. Falloujah was a notorious center of resistance, perhaps the most virulently anti-American urban center in the broad swath north and west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle. Emerging “postcombat” responsibilities dictated that the battalions rely less on tanks and Bradleys and more on Humvees in order to more effectively patrol civilian areas. But the changeover exposed soldiers to greater threats from hit-and-run attacks mounted by a revitalized insurgency that was refining its tactics—an insurgency comprised of many of the same fighters who had survived the thunder runs. In addition to RPG, small-arms, and mortar attacks, the Iraqis and their Arab confederates turned to strategically placed suicide vehicles and to roadside bombs known as IEDs—improvised explosive devices. That July, an IED killed Specialist Joel Lynn Bertoldie, twenty, a driver for the Tusker battalion, as he drove a Humvee through a traffic circle overlooking the Euphrates River in Falloujah. The death of Bertoldie, the father of a ten-month-old baby boy, was a benchmark. He was the 148th member of the U.S. military to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom, surpassing the combat death toll of 147 from the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Well before Bertoldie was killed—in fact, shortly after the April 7 thunder run was over—many of the soldiers of the brigade had begun to experience a fleeting sense of loss. They had spent months training for combat. They had survived three intense weeks of relentless desert and urban warfare. They had been honed and focused. They had had a clear mission and a defined goal that drove them and united them in a singular, shared purpose. For all the terror and confusion they had experienced in battle, and for all the misery of their living conditions, they had felt a remarkable sense of clarity and fulfillment.

After the adrenaline had drained away and they were suddenly at rest, some of them sought out the chaplains and poured out their emotions. They had been fighting and moving and killing for day after day, and suddenly it had all been shut down. They wanted—they needed—to sort through it all. Some soldiers confessed that they had not comprehended precisely what would be asked of them while in pursuit of the enemy. They had not doubted that they would win the war, but they had not fully realized what it would take to prevail. It was not that they felt guilty; they felt overwhelmed and somehow incomplete. A few of them realized that they had embraced the thrill of the fight, and this discovery troubled them deeply. But most of all, the men from the Second Brigade felt an ineffable loss of purity. They had been part of a unique moment in modern military history. They had captured something seductive and elusive, and they did not know how to get it back.

AFTERWORD

J
ust three months after the Second Brigade returned to the United States in the fall of 2003, the unit was issued orders for a second deployment to Iraq. By early 2005, the brigade was on its way back to the combat zone.

It was a much different unit than the one that led the charge into Baghdad in April 2003. Many of the men who had fought during the invasion had transferred to other units, and some had left the service. The Spartan Brigade's entire top command had moved on.

Colonel David Perkins, the brigade commander, took a Pentagon job as executive assistant to the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The brigade executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley, took command of a tank battalion with the 1st Armored Division, a battalion that was ordered to Iraq in early 2005. Lieutenant Colonel Eric Schwartz, commander of the Desert Rogues, joined the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. Lieutenant Colonel Philip deCamp, the Tusker commander, became a professor of military science at the College of William and Mary. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Twitty, the China commander, entered studies at National Defense University. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Gantt, the Battle Kings artillery commander, was sent to the Pentagon to work for the chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

For many of the lower-ranking soldiers from the tank and Bradley crews, the battle for Baghdad was the most searing experience of their lives. It continued to dominate their psyches, long after they were back home with their friends and families. Young and emotionally unprepared for the scale of the killing on the thunder runs, they could not find the words to express what they had endured. Several wives and girlfriends complained that their men were incapable of openly sharing what had happened to them in Iraq. The soldiers seemed to crave normality, embracing mundane chores and daily routines that kept their emotions blanketed. Many found a curious comfort in training drills, which gave them a sense of purpose distinct from their fractured domestic existence.

The soldiers had not yet recovered from their first deployment when they learned that they were headed back to Iraq. They accepted the news with stoicism, though their families did not. They knew the situation in Iraq had changed dramatically, but no one could articulate their new mission with any certainty. During the thunder runs, they had been aggressors. They had closed on the enemy and killed him. But during their summer in Falloujah in 2003, they had been confronted with the new, postinvasion reality: They were no longer on the attack. They were on patrol. They were targets.

For the Second Brigade officers and men sent back to Iraq, the country was a more confusing and menacing place than the one they had left just a year earlier. The insurgency had spread and mutated into a lethal and largely unseen force. American soldiers were dying every day, but rarely in the face-to-face combat of the invasion. They were more likely to be killed in hit-and-run attacks by insurgents who melted back into the civilian population, or by remote-triggered roadside bombs. On the worst days, the number of attacks spiked past eighty. Iraqi civilians were dying, too, either killed by terrorist car bombs or when caught up in strikes by American forces. The effort to rebuild Iraq faltered so badly in the face of relentless attacks on infrastructure and against officials of the interim Iraqi government that Washington diverted huge sums of money from reconstruction to security.

Only in retrospect did it become apparent that the thunder runs in Baghdad in April 2003 were a prelude to an expanding insurgency. Many of the same fighters who had survived the battle for Baghdad had refined their tactics. They regrouped, transforming themselves into a classic guerrilla force relying on stealth, surprise, and terror. The Saddam Hussein regime had been driven from power, but many of the men who once helped maintain Saddam's brutal police state were still at large. With the help of some of the same jihadis who had fought in the thunder runs, they were directing a shadow terror-state-within-a-state.

The two thunder runs had shown that tanks and Bradleys could fight and prevail in cities, at least under certain conditions. Though it was not immediately apparent in April 2003, conditions in Baghdad proved to be nearly ideal for an armored strike into the capital. American armor was able to seize the initiative, moving with speed and daring. Iraqi forces, with a few notable exceptions, were disorganized and poorly led. The main battlefields—Highway 8 and the downtown government and palace complex—were largely devoid of high-rise buildings and dense civilian neighborhoods.

The capture of Baghdad has come to represent the pinnacle of American combat achievement in Iraq. After the fall of the capital, it appeared that the U.S. military had avoided the bloody, grinding, disheartening urban warfare that so many Americans had feared. But less than two years later, as the Second Brigade returned to a much different battlefield, that fight was now upon them.