Thunder Run Read Online Free PDF Page B

Death” by Metallica on speakers inside the turret. They had nicknamed their Abrams Creeping Death because they all loved the song, which they thought evoked something sinister and lethal. That’s how they felt going in that morning. Even so, the mood was oddly buoyant inside the turret—buoyant, but also focused and determined, with just a whiff of sweaty anxiety. The crewmen always cranked up the music going into a mission to jack them up, to blow away the butterflies and get them in the mood to destroy the enemy.
    It seemed to the crew’s gunner, Sergeant Carlos Hernandez, that they had been killing people for a long time, even though it had been barely two weeks. Hernandez had never been at war before, but he had discovered down south that time slowed down in combat. So many things happened all at once that it was almost as though time had to somehow pause and expand in order to accommodate it all. This enabled Hernandez to recall with utter clarity what it was like to kill a man. After the very first time, outside Najaf, he was pumped up and mournful at the same time. That conflicted feeling stayed with him even after he’d killed a few more people, but after a while he just got numb.
    Other guys in his company had different reactions. Once, also outside Najaf, they were pounding an Iraqi bunker complex with tank cannons when they saw an Iraqi soldier leap up, throw down his weapon in disgust, and stalk off. The man had almost escaped the kill zone when an American mortar crashed down right on top of him, a direct hit. The soldier’s body disintegrated. Everybody laughed—not necessarily at the man’s brutal death but at fate, and how a guy who had decided to just walk away from a fight got nailed anyway.
    Hernandez had thought a lot about death back in Kuwait. He was Catholic—not exactly a churchgoer but enough of a Catholic to be familiar with the phrase, “Thou shalt not kill.” He had sought out the battalion chaplain in Kuwait, for he wanted to make sure he was right with God in case he had to kill somebody. He and the chaplain had three or four good heart-to-heart sessions. Hernandez asked why people went to death row in the real world for murder but got medals in war for killing other human beings. The chaplain told him it boiled down to good and evil, and evil had to be conquered. Hernandez asked how the Iraqis justified killing to their God, their Allah. The chaplain sidestepped the question and told him that Saddam Hussein was evil and had killed thousands of his own people. Ending his regime would save lives. He reassured Hernandez and said, “You’re doing the right thing.”
    Hernandez decided then that he was going to do whatever was necessary to keep his crew alive and to get everybody back home safely, himself included. Twenty-seven years old, he was a family man these days, far removed from the restless, drifting kid he had been after he dropped out of high school in Tampa to work as a carpenter on a construction crew. Joining the army had given him structure, and marrying Kimberly, his high school sweetheart, had settled him down. If he had to kill somebody to get home safely to Kimberly and his little boy, Carlos Anthony, and his daughter, Louise Marie, that’s what he would do.
    As soon as the tank crossed the checkpoint on Highway 8, the crew killed the music. The lieutenant shouted, “Test fire weapons!” and Hernandez fired a few bursts of coax, which relaxed him and reassured him that everything was going to be okay. Then he heard the driver tell Lieutenant Gruneisen that the oil filter light was on. He radioed his buddy in Charlie One Two, Jason Diaz—Hernandez and Diaz and their wives played dominoes together back home at Fort Stewart—and told him, “Man, this doesn’t look too good.”
    Then the crews heard Lieutenant Ball’s radio voice at the head of the column announce “Contact!” The gunmen