Thunder Run by David Zucchino

Couvertier offered to move but Hernandez he told him to stay there. Diaz was in the loader’s hatch, so Hernandez half sat and half lay on the top of the tank, next to the haphazard pile of gear and weapons from the burning tank, in front of Diaz and to the left of Gruneisen. There were now five men on a tank designed for four.
    The driver, Sergeant Derek Peterson, got the tank moving. It was urgent now. The rest of the column had already moved out, and the burning tank was about to blow. Flames were spitting out of the tank commander’s hatch, where Hernandez had tossed the grenades. But their overloaded tank was blocked now by an engineer vehicle that had stopped in the roadway. Diaz screamed at the engineers: “Move out! Move out! The tank’s about to blow!” The engineers, alarmed, gunned their engine and sped away.
    Creeping Death, with Hernandez exposed beside the cupola, was pulling up to the tail of the column when a series of muffled explosions rocked the abandoned tank. Diaz looked back and saw the glow of the flames. He felt heartsick. He had been with Charlie One Two since arriving in Kuwait six months earlier. It was like losing a member of his family.
    Behind them, Lieutenant Shane Williams was commanding Crusader II, the trail tank in the column. He could see that Charlie One Two was still intact, despite the fire and the thermite grenades. He decided to put a HEAT round into the tank to make sure there was nothing left for the Iraqis. Williams was a thirty-three-year-old combat veteran, a slender, light-haired Floridian who had served as a cavalry scout in the first Gulf War. He waited until the other vehicles had cleared out, then ordered his gunner to unleash a round. It hit just over the driver’s hatch. Charlie One Two shuddered and rocked. Williams thought to himself: I’m now the only tank commander in the entire U.S. Army who has killed an Abrams M1A1 tank. How was that going to look on his résumé?
    On Creeping Death, Gruneisen was struggling to catch up to the rest of the column. The crew had piled all the gear and rucksacks and extra weapons right in his field of vision. The stuff was like a little mountain in front of his face. He could see to fire the .50-caliber off to his right flank, and he could see behind him and off to his left. But in front of him all he saw was gear and rucksacks. He was under fire, on an unfamiliar highway, trying to catch up to an armored column, and he couldn’t see a damn thing.

THREE
    DOUBLE TAP
    A t the head of the Rogue column, Lieutenant Ball was relieved to be on the move again. Like everyone else in the battalion, he had spent the thirty-minute wait on Highway 8 fighting to keep enemy dismounts away from his platoon’s tanks. He found it hard to believe, but a couple of Iraqi soldiers had actually tried to charge the Abrams on foot. What were they thinking? Ball tried popping off a few rounds from his M-4, but he wasn’t quite capable of the acrobatics required to fire a carbine accurately while talking on the radio and maneuvering his tank. His wingman, the gunner in the tank behind him, took care of the dismounts with a blast of coax. But Ball couldn’t stop worrying about some Iraqi fanatic sneaking up his rear end and tossing a grenade into the hatch.
    Ball felt much better now that they were back on track and heading for the airport, even though the delay had given the Fedayeen and the Syrian street fighters time to regroup. Ball could see men with weapons jumping off of trucks that were now arriving from the city and from the increasingly congested warrens of houses and commercial buildings along the divided roadway. Air force pilots, circling far above the battle, were warning the battalion’s air liaison officer that more vehicles were on their way from the city center. The pilots were warning, too, about a collection of antiaircraft guns in a grove of date palm trees just off the highway—what they