Thunder Run Read Free Page A

said. He wasn’t the type of commander to kid around. “And I’m coming with you. We have to do this.”
    Just after dawn the next morning, April 5, the entire battalion was lined up on Highway 8 south of the capital, engines gunning, weapons primed, the squat tan forms of the tanks and Bradleys bathed in gold morning light. Jason Diaz’s tank, radio call sign Charlie One Two, was fifteenth in the order of march. He was up in the commander’s hatch, awaiting the order to move out, when his driver radioed up from the driver’s hole tucked below the turret. “The AIR FILTER CLOGGED light is on,” he said.
    They hadn’t even launched the mission yet, and already the tank was balking. Diaz was anxious enough—and now this. He climbed down to check it out and saw his platoon leader, First Lieutenant Roger Gruneisen, inspecting his tank. The lieutenant’s right track was damaged and the cooling tubes were worn. Every time the track turned a rotation, it made a horrible clanking sound. Gruneisen looked at Diaz and asked, “You think we’ll make it?” Though Diaz was an enlisted man and Gruneisen was an officer, Diaz had more experience as a tank commander. He didn’t want to lie. “Really, sir,” he said, “ I’m not sure.” And that was the honest truth.
    Diaz respected the lieutenant too much to try to bullshit him. Gruneisen was a platoon leader who trusted his men and let them do their jobs. He was the kind of man that Diaz, a Latino from the Bronx, probably never would have known if he hadn’t joined the military. Gruneisen was a white southerner, a pale young twenty-four-year-old, with a shaved head and a soft Kentucky twang. He was a West Point man, focused and resolute, commissioned less than two years earlier.
    Diaz, twenty-seven, had already put in eight years and was thinking about becoming an army lifer. He had drifted aimlessly after graduating from John F. Kennedy High in the Bronx, working odd jobs in Puerto Rico before wandering into an army recruiting station one day. The recruiter showed him videos of various military MOSs, or specialties—medic, personnel, supply. Then he put on the tanker video. Diaz saw the thermal sights and the computerized targeting system and all the other high-tech turret gadgets. He watched a tank pulverize targets, spitting out awesome bursts of orange fire from the main gun tube. He thought it would be cool to blow things up. He signed up to be a tanker.
    Diaz had a deep affection for his current Abrams, which he had trained on and fought in for the previous six months. He and his gunner, Sergeant Jose Couvertier, had nicknamed it Cojone Eh? The phrase had no literal English translation. Essentially, it meant “Yeah, right”—a skeptic’s challenge. All the tankers had spray-painted their main cannons with leering names that suggested a particularly aggressive and retributive brand of patriotism: Apocalypse and Crusader, Courtesy of the Red White and Blue and Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War . Charlie One Two’s nickname just happened to be more esoteric than most.
    Standing next to Diaz on Highway 8, Gruneisen did not seriously consider aborting his platoon’s mission. They were only going seventeen kilometers from their staging area south of the city, a straight shot north up Highway 8 and then west on 8 where the highway curved toward the international airport. There, the battalion would link up with the division’s First Brigade, which had seized the airport the day before, rechristening Saddam International as Baghdad International.
    This was an armored reconnaissance mission. Armor recon was just what it sounded like: the battalion was to smash through Baghdad’s defenses, drawing fire and shooting back in order to probe the Iraqis’ defenses and tactics—to determine, violently, how Saddam Hussein intended to defend his capital. It was recon by