In all his years as an armor officer, nothing quite prepared Army Col. David G. Perkins for the order he received at his command post called Objective Saints in the southern suburbs of Baghdad on April 4: charge north up Route 8 into the capital and then veer west to the airport.

At the start of the war in Iraq, conventional wisdom was that Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles were vulnerable to shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades without protection from lots of dismounted infantry. But Perkins would soon prove otherwise in his first “thunder run” to Baghdad international.

It was a violent learning experience and proved a valuable primer for his next mission, a second thunder run into downtown Baghdad on April 7, in which Perkins’s 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division captured Saddam Hussein’s main palace and stayed overnight in the heart of the capital, signaling the collapse of the Iraqi regime.

Perkins, a 1980 West Point graduate now working on NATO policy issues for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at length in a recent interview of the thunder run tactics his three battalions, 464 Armor, 164 Armor and 315 Infantry, innovated on the fly during what become the war’s climactic battle for Baghdad, beginning on April 7. In that intense, eight-hour engagement, Perkins led 464 Armor and 164 Armor downtown. At the same time, 315 Infantry fought to secure three critical elevated intersections on Route 8 known as Objectives Moe, Larry and Curley. Controlling these intersections was necessary to keep the armored forces from being cut off deep in the city by Iraqi forces.

Here is some of what Perkins had to say about the Battle for Baghdad:

Question: I understand that much of the fighting took place at incredibly close range?

Perkins: The fighting would occur at varying distances. But a lot of their foxholes and fighting positions were dug right next to the road. It does present somewhat of a challenge for armored vehicles, because now you’re having to engage forces, which are right up close to you. So what we did as you would come to a bridge, tanks with their machine guns, which go out to a thousand meters or so, would start engaging far out, but then as you move into these bridges where these fighting positions are, the tank commanders would be using his M-16 to shoot right down off his tank at those guys in close.

What you would find is, as guys were going into battle in the city, they would take their various weapons and kind of lay them out in front of them on the tank, they’d have a 9mm [pistol], an M-16 and machine guns, and it was almost like a surgeon getting ready for an operation, and they would have all their ammo ready.

Q: How important was it to maintain momentum as your Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles moved up Route 8 to the international airport on April 5th during the first thunder run?

A: In fact, on the 5th, when we attacked up on this intersection, which became Objective Curley [on the 7th], one of the tanks became immobilized. Either a rocket-propelled grenade [RPG] or a recoilless rifle shot up underneath one of our ballistic shields on the side of the tank and punctured the fuel cell on the tank, and it started on fire. The crew got fire extinguishers and put it out. But then it started again. They kept putting it out. In the end, the crew was up there with about 25 gallon cans of water . . . they’re dumping water cans on the thing to try to put it out.

In the meantime, we had hooked another tank on there to try to pull it out. As we were doing that --and I was about two vehicles back from this--a lot of these technicals, pickup trucks with machine guns on them, started coming in at our flanks, because we’re stationary, kind of a sitting duck, so I’m calling the battalion commander, ‘Hey, get that tank moving, get it moving,’ because everyone else is stopped up behind you.

In fact, at one time, all three of the crew members are up there dumping water, and the tank commander jumps up on the tank to see how his crew was doing, and at that time an RPG crew is moving up along side to shoot at them. He has to pull out his pistol and shoot at them. So I’m thinking, ‘Here’s a tank commander who’s now down to his pistol, this is not good, we need to move on.’

”So we say, ‘OK, abandon the tank, get out of the tank, put them in another vehicle, and take off,’ which is what we did. But that becomes a key lesson then for the 7th--that you’ve got to have a plan for immobilized vehicles, because it becomes like a hornet’s nest, everyone descends on them.

Q: Does it seem now that these thunder runs you conducted were the best way to attack the Iraqi’s ringed defenses around Baghdad?

A: When you hit this ring, you get very intense fire, and a lot of it. Instead of being overly methodical and deliberate, you smash through this as quickly as possible and get to the center, maybe a little counterintuitive. And in the process, you want to create as much chaos as possible out here. Why is that? In the end, my forces can deal with chaos better than theirs can.

What we found is, if you can develop a lot of chaos, it is very difficult for them to reposition their forces inside the city. We found in interrogating previous enemy that this [Iraqi] company would have this city block, and the commander was told, you defend this to your death. What’s over on the other city block? He wouldn’t really know.

So if I could push through, and get in behind them and then re-attack out from the center, what I was doing was re-attacking from a direction that they weren’t used to defending from, and it was very hard for them to turn around and re-defend.

Q: After your first thunder run to the airport on the 5th, did the Iraqis take any defensive maneuvers that delayed your second run on the 7th?

A: The first thing we ran into was a 400-meter deep mine field they had put on the road. Luckily we had found that the night before doing a recon. So our engineers went out and did a breech of that minefield ahead of time, before we crossed the [line of departure]. They had put buses and concrete barriers and all that in the road. So our lead vehicles were plow tanks. And once we took the turn [off Route 8 toward downtown] they realized we were going, and they started reinforcing very heavily at Moe, Larry and Curley, from both sides.

Q: Three fuel trucks and two ammunition trucks were destroyed at Curley, trying to re-supply troops fighting farther to the north at Moe and Larry, not to mention your forces downtown. Given the level of Iraqi resistance, how were you able to re-supply those positions?

A: While the vehicles were burning, they grabbed the other vehicles that weren’t burning, put guys in them, and just hauled ass and just ran up here with fuel and ammo. So here are these kids driving basically on bombs, and get to Moe, because that was the critical point. And they start refueling that.”

Q: And Bradleys and tanks on overpasses were laying down covering fire for them?

A: We told them, what the Bradleys and tanks will do is they will take from your left headlight over, and will just put own a wall of steel on that passing lane over, and you worry bout taking out everything from the right. Again, pretty high risk, because what you have is soft skinned vehicles attacking the north, friendly vehicles shooting back at them in the opposite direction, but literally from the left headlight over. It’s very heroic, these young kids, and they’re combat support guys, not infantry armor guys, and they’re driving an aluminum vehicle full fuel or ammo.

Q: Is it true that the Iraqis, as a sort of last gasp attack on the 9th, came at you in boats on the Tigris?

A: I get this call, ‘Hey, we’re having an amphibious attack.’ I said, ‘Well, make sure it’s not the Marines.’ They were supposed to be coming up that day. So we engaged them in the water and destroyed them, and that kind of stopped that. And then later that day the Marines did come up and linked up with us. They were on the eastern side of the Tigris, we were on the western. And that kind of ended what I would call the organized resistance. The 7th through the 9th really was the battle for Baghdad.

Vernon Loeb’s email is loebv@washpost.com

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