Thunder Run (35 page)

Ballanco loved adventure—skiing, mountain climbing, orienteering. He was drawn to dangerous situations where men relied on one another for survival. He had felt a thrill that morning when he awoke at dawn to the sound of the Rogue and Tusker tanks and Bradleys thundering up the highway to Baghdad.

“It's an amazing thing to see men headed to fight a major battle,” he wrote to his wife, Jeannette. “It sounds like training, and the guys do the same things they do in training, but they're on their way to fight and risk their lives. A wave of emotion overcame me. It's hard to describe. I felt proud for them and scared for them. I hoped that they all got through it OK.

“I think it's a strange thing to think to yourself, ‘This is the day I could be killed,' and to know how dangerous your mission is. And yet they all still drove forward to Baghdad. I thought all these things in an instant—like I said, it's hard to explain. But there we were, invading the city of Baghdad. We knew the world was watching us.”

Now Ballanco himself was headed into the city, jammed into the front seat of his Humvee, working the radio and pointing the barrel of his M-16 out the window. He was ready for whatever awaited him up the highway, but he couldn't stop wishing that he had brought the tank along with him.

Philip Luu's convoy had been rolling up Highway 8 for only a matter of minutes when the first small-arms rounds starting pinging off the asphalt. Green tracers were skipping off the roadway, little arcs of light streaking off into the milky haze. Gunmen were up on rooftops, firing down at the convoy from both sides of the highway. Almost every vehicle on the convoy returned fire—the Bradleys with coax, the .50-caliber gunners on top of the ammunition trucks and the Humvees, the front-seat passengers in the trucks and Humvees, and even the drivers, their automatic rifles braced
in the crooks of their left arms. One of the drivers got so carried away that he accidentally shot out his side view mirror.

They were lighting up the rooftops and windows of any building where the gunners saw people with weapons. The big .50-caliber rounds went right through the walls, and Luu hoped that any families in the neighborhoods had had the good sense to flee.

With just two radios, there was no way for Luu to control the .50-caliber gunners. He had to trust them to maintain their assigned orientations and to avoid friendly fire. He was worried, too, about how he would handle a casualty or a debilitating hit on one of the vehicles. He had given very specific orders: keep the convoy moving. That was paramount. They would not stop to try to save a stricken vehicle. The rear vehicles would evacuate the crews and the wounded and leave the vehicle to burn. “Remember the cargo,” Luu had told the drivers. “People in the city need that fuel and ammo.”

The enemy fire was steady, but not as heavy as Luu had anticipated. And each time they sped into one of the interchanges held by the American combat teams, a strange thing happened. The firing stopped, like it had been turned off with a switch. It seemed to Luu that the combat teams were finally beginning to seize control of the interchanges.

At Objective Curly, the firefight had raged for more than eight hours straight, but there was a lull when the resupply convoy rolled through. The engineers had cleared the northbound lanes of wrecked suicide vehicles and other detritus. Luu could see that the fighting had been intense. There were dead Iraqis everywhere, their weapons flung to the side. He got a good look at China's five burning fuel and ammo trucks. They were still smoking. Luu thought,
Good God, this is worse than
anything we've seen. This is serious.

Just north of Curly, the convoy came under heavy fire. An RPG streaked in from the left side of the highway. Another one bounced off the asphalt between Luu's Humvee and the ammunition truck directly behind him. Luu kept thinking about the fuel trucks, and how a single RPG would create a raging bonfire—like the burning vehicles he had just passed at Curly.

Luu was up in the turret, manning the .50-caliber. To his left, he caught a glimpse of a man lying on his stomach next to a low building about 150 meters away. He saw a puff of white smoke, and then the glowing red nose of an RPG sailing past the Humvee. Luu pressed the butterfly triggers.
As the officer in charge of putting together the ammunition for the support platoon, he had made sure that his guys got armor-piercing incendiary rounds, just like the tankers used. But instead of a tracer every fourth or fifth round, Luu made sure every single round was a tracer. That made it easier to walk the rounds to the target. These were bright red tracers, and Luu guided them straight into the man who had fired the RPG. It was like a straight line connecting him to the target.

“Hey, LT, you hit the guy!” his driver yelled.

“No shit,” Luu said, and everybody inside the Humvee laughed. It wasn't funny, really, but they laughed, stoked up on adrenaline and fear. Luu had no particular feeling about killing the man. The Iraqi had tried to kill them. He was the enemy—a mortal threat, and Luu had eliminated him. It wasn't something that bothered him, even later, after he had time to reflect.

They kept firing until they reached the big spaghetti intersection where, again, the enemy fire ceased. And here, too, Luu saw evidence of a fierce firefight—enemy corpses, weapons, thousands of expended brass casings. It was a confusing interchange, and at one point the lead Bradley commander got lost. Luu got him on the radio, and the commander asked Luu to stand by for a minute while he checked his grid. The elevated ramp put the convoy at rooftop level, and Luu sat for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for someone to fire at them from the rooftops.

He was trying to get a reading on a commercial GPS device he carried—he preferred it to the military GPS Pluggers—when the Bradley commander radioed to say he was backing up. All the truck and Humvee drivers had to get into reverse and go back down the ramp. Luu got on the radio to his section sergeant in the last vehicle and told him to back up. The entire convoy inched back down the ramp. After a brief delay, the Bradley commander found the right ramp, and everybody rolled forward and down onto the Kindi Highway.

Suddenly Luu saw the silver arc of the twin sabers at the military reviewing stand, and he realized they were home free. They were pulling into the government complex, where the main roadways had been secured by tanks and Bradleys from Rogue and Tusker. Luu was surprised by how quickly they had made the trip. He had expected it to take forever.

When the convoy turned onto the parade field, just beyond the tomb of the unknown soldier, the Rogue tank crews rushed over to greet the
support platoon. They were desperate for fuel and ammunition. Some of them were surprised to see the soft-skin Humvees and trucks. They had been told that no soft-skin vehicles were coming into the city. “You guys are crazy,” one of the tankers told Luu.

The drivers got out and whooped and high-fived and punched one another's arms. They ran from truck to truck, inspecting the vehicles for battle damage. Every fuel and ammunition truck had arrived intact. Luu joked around with his driver, Private First Class Lundquist. The private was an antitobacco zealot. He delivered an antismoking lecture every time somebody lit up inside the Humvee. Now Luu offered him a pack of cigarettes. Lundquist took two and lit up.

As Ed Ballanco's convoy sped up Highway 8, trying to keep the column moving as fast as possible, he suddenly had to slow down. They had gone so fast that the lead scout Humvee had caught up with the tail end of Philip Luu's resupply convoy. Ballanco could hear the scouts cursing and bitching over the radio net. He didn't blame Rogue—he had good friends in the unit—but Rogue's tracked escort vehicles were slowing down Ballanco's wheeled vehicles.

Ballanco had to keep slowing down his convoy to let Luu's vehicles get ahead of them. He didn't want both convoys pulling into the friendly interchanges at the same time. But slowing down defeated the whole purpose of using only wheeled vehicles, and Ballanco kept wishing he had brought along the tank.

Ballanco was in the front passenger seat of his Humvee, talking over the radio to the scout captain and keeping the barrel of his M-16 aimed out the window. Shortly after passing through the interchange at Curly, RPG teams opened fire on the rear of the convoy. Several RPGs sailed past the last vehicle, one of the scouts' armored Humvees, and several small-arms rounds pinged off the Humvee frame. Farther up the column, one of the ammunition-truck drivers spotted an Iraqi gunman on the right side of the road. The driver couldn't fire on the man from the driver's window, so he pulled his automatic rifle inside and pointed it at the windshield. He fired a burst at the gunman, peppering the windshield with bullet holes.

Toward the front of the column, an Iraqi soldier ran up behind Ballanco's Humvee from the left flank and opened fire with an AK-47.
Ballanco didn't realize he was being shot at until he heard the driver of the truck behind him open fire with an M-4 carbine. The Iraqi went down in a spray of dust and dirt.

A few minutes later, Ballanco spotted a machine-gun nest on the left side. A machine gun opened fire on one of the fuelers ahead of his Humvee. Ballanco's gunner, Private Morey, saw it, too. Morey was in the turret, firing the .50-caliber at bunkers on the right side of the highway, thrilled to be in a firefight. The turret was broken. It couldn't be traversed, and the .50-caliber was locked into position over the right side. Morey was determined to fire at the machine-gun nest to the left, so he crawled up on the Humvee's roof. He grabbed the .50-caliber and twisted the gun mount so that the weapon swung over to the left side. Even with the gun now aimed properly, it was still a difficult shot because Morey had to fire between the fueler and a concrete support pillar, with the Humvee rolling at a fast clip. But he shot straight through the narrow gap and laced the machine-gun nest with several bursts of tracer fire. The enemy machine gun fell silent.

“Hee-yah!” Morey screamed. “I shot that motherfucker!”

Ballanco had to admit it: it was an impressive piece of shooting.

The convoy was now approaching Objective Larry, where Ballanco's buddy, Lieutenant Mike Martin, was posted. Martin was the executive officer for Captain Hubbard's Bravo Company. There was no enemy gunfire as Ballanco's Humvee and the rest of the convoy made its way through the interchange, but some of the gunners behind Ballanco were still shooting. Later, Martin told Ballanco that one of the convoy gunners had accidentally fired at one of the tanks posted at Larry. The tank wasn't hit, but Martin took the opportunity to chide the Tusker crews. For a long time afterward, Martin would joke with the guys from Tusker every time he saw them, performing a mock radio report: “Here comes a LOGPAC. Holy shit! It's Four–Sixty-four ! Everybody get down!”

Ballanco didn't mind. He was glad to be alive. After passing Larry, the convoy came under fire only once more, from the right side. One of the Bradleys stationed on the roadway returned fire with its 25mm main gun, and the enemy guns stopped firing. The convoy threaded its way through the maze of ramps at Objective Moe and swung over a ramp and down into the city center, to their final destination at the four-head palace to resupply Tusker. Ballanco saw two Abrams tanks guarding the roadway and let out a sigh of relief.
We're good,
he thought.
We finally made it.
For the first time that day, he let himself relax, and he felt the adrenaline drain from him.

There were cheers from the Cyclone Company crews at the Fourteen of July circle when the convoy rolled through at dusk. And when they finally pulled up in front of the Republican Palace, Ballanco was struck by the sheer size of the structure and the deep green of the grass and the brilliance of the blooming red roses. He had seen nothing but dust and desert for weeks. The tank crews came over to greet them, and Captain Phil Wolford, the Assassin Company commander, sought out Ballanco and shook his hand. The drivers and gunners climbed down from the trucks, whooping and cheering. They gave one another bear hugs and high fives. Ballanco thought it looked like an end-zone celebration at the Super Bowl. It was the support platoon's own little Super Bowl, and they all felt that they had achieved something special. They had delivered the goods, and every last man was still alive.

Wolford showed Ballanco the Iraqi machine-gun nests that had been blasted by Assassin's tanks that morning. The stiff corpses of Iraqi soldiers were still inside, caked with dark dried blood. Wolford gave Ballanco a quick tour of the palace, where a couple of soldiers had stumbled across crates of bottled Pepsis. Ballanco hauled the drinks over to his guys, and they sucked them down. These were their first sodas since leaving Kuwait. They went down like champagne.

By the time the Rogue and Tusker resupply convoys reached the palace complex, the remnants of China's resupply convoy had already been escorted to its destination along the Kindi Highway. The trucks set up a fuel and ammunition supply point in front of the Baath Party headquarters, which had been seized that morning by the Attack Company attached to Tusker. The headquarters was across the highway from the Sujud Palace, where Colonel Perkins had set up his tactical command post.

Captain Polsgrove worked on getting the fuel and ammunition ready for Captain Wright at Objective Moe. He felt badly that the supplies had not been delivered at Moe during the chaos of the firefight, and he made sure someone radioed the GPS grid for their position to First Sergeant Moser at Moe. The guys at Moe would have to figure out a way to come pick up their fuel and ammo. They had missed out on the “tailgate resupply,”
where the trucks came to them. Now they would have to pull off a “service station resupply” and go to the trucks and fuelers.

At the interchange, Moser still wasn't sure exactly what was left of his original resupply package because some of the trucks that had burned at Objective Curly had been designated for his combat team. He discussed it with Captain Wright. It was dusk now, and the fighting had eased considerably. The Iraqis didn't like to fight at night. They seemed to realize that the Americans held a distinct advantage with their night-vision goggles and thermal imaging systems. The Iraqis usually stopped shooting at nightfall to eat and rest and drink tea.