Thunder Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

exploded with a heavy whump and a shudder as the HEAT rounds detonated.
    Few of the Iraqi fighters demonstrated much command of basic combat maneuvers. They would bunch up in the alleyways, firing wildly. The tank loaders would shove an MPAT round into the breech and set the proximity fuse for ten or twelve meters. The gunners would fire into the mass of men and the broad arc of the explosion would send their shattered bodies airborne.
    Gunmen crouched behind walls made of brick or cinder block, apparently unaware that not only the tanks and Bradleys but also the tank commanders’ .50-caliber machine-gun rounds could pound the walls to dust in seconds. The gunners watched the fighters’ bodies explode and disintegrate along with whole sections of the walls. Other fighters hid in thick stands of date palm trees, leaping out to launch RPGs. Some of the tank and Bradley gunners had discovered down south that a tree hit with a fifty-pound shell unleashes a wave of flying wood shards. It was wood shrapnel. The gunners tore into the date palms along Highway 8, shattering the trunks and impaling anyone crouched behind them.
    The tanks and Bradleys had a rhythm now, pounding, pounding, pounding. They were killing people by the dozens, but still the enemy kept coming. By now, gunmen were up on the overpasses, firing straight down on the tank and Bradley hatches. More and more vehicles were appearing. There were little Japanese sedans and bulky 1980s-era Chevrolet Caprices, some of them stuffed with husbands and wives and kids staring wide-eyed at the column as the cars zoomed past in the southbound lanes beyond the median. But other cars and pickups were packed with soldiers in uniform or men in civilian clothes blasting away with AK-47s poking out the windows. There were tan military troop trucks and “technicals”—white Toyota pickups with machine guns or antitank rockets mounted in the beds.
    It occurred to the battalion’s S-3, the operations officer, Major Michael Donovan, that the battalion was winging it. They certainly had not trained for urban warfare—much less for this battle, which involved urban areas at the highway’s margins, but also stretches of wide-open cross-country highway. It was like fighting on the New Jersey Turnpike. Donovan, thirty-eight, a slender, sharp-featured man, was the son of a Vietnam veteran, a Citadel graduate, and a student of military history. It dawned on him now that Rogue battalion was rewriting the army’s armor doctrine on the fly. He himself was certainly rewriting the role of an operations officer. His job was planning and organization. But now he was in the commander’s hatch of an Abrams—and firing an M-4 carbine at men in ditches on the side of a superhighway. He thought: Holy shit, I’m the S-3 and I’m shooting dudes with a rifle!
    This was nothing like Donovan had experienced in Operation Desert Storm in southern Iraq a decade earlier. Back then, his tank never got closer than two kilometers to an Iraqi tank. That was a standoff war, distant, removed, impersonal. This war, Schwartz had warned him the night before, would be unique: “This isn’t going to be anything like Desert Storm.” Now, on Highway 8, Donovan could see the faces of Iraqi fighters. His father had told him stories of Viet Cong guerrillas smiling as they fired. Now he was seeing young Iraqi faces, and their dominant emotion was fear. They looked terrified. Donovan spotted several armed soldiers in a bunker, just beyond the guardrail. They were huddled and afraid. He didn’t want to kill them, but he had to. They were the enemy. He opened up with the M-4 and watched them topple.
    More carloads of civilians were beginning to appear, complicating what the tankers called target acquisition. Donovan was worried about civilian casualties—what the military, in its wonderfully clinical articulation, referred to as collateral damage. The civilians were