00:00On April 7, 2003, 88 Abrams tanks and 44 Bradley fighting vehicles drove into the centre of Baghdad,
00:10which every armoured warfare textbook says is how you lose them all.
00:15The Russians learned that in Grozny in 1994, when guerrillas with rocket-propelled grenades picked their tanks apart.
00:24But the Americans went in anyway. The plan had been finished the night before.
00:31From the street, it looked like a wall of steel. Inside, it was something else.
00:37Inside each tank, four people were doing a job no movie has ever shown you.
00:44And the hardest part came when the shooting slowed down.
00:48To see it from the inside, you have to start the night before the first run, on April 4, with
00:55a tank commander named Jason Diaz.
00:59In David Zucchino's book about the Baghdad Thunder Runs, Diaz is a husband and father of three from the Bronx,
01:07weary, filthy and longing to go home.
01:11He was also worried about his tank. Fair enough.
01:15By Zucchino's count, it weighed about 70 tonnes and burned roughly a kilometre of road per gallon.
01:24And it was the only thing standing between Diaz and a city that wanted him gone.
01:32The Marines ran their own tanks in that war, pushing in from the east.
01:36This story belongs to the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, and to the four seats inside each of its Abrams.
01:46So, here's the question the rest of this hangs on.
01:51What does it take for four people to work as one machine, while a city tries to get inside?
01:59Start with the seats.
02:01The driver sits alone, low in the hull at the centre front.
02:07The turret holds the other three.
02:10On the right side, the gunner sits in front, and the commander sits behind him.
02:15And on the left, the loader gets a stool to himself beside the main gun,
02:21with about 40 rounds stored behind a sliding armoured door at his back.
02:27The driver's seat is the easy one, and that isn't a compliment.
02:33By one reporter's account, he can pad it with pillows and blankets and gets the smoothest ride in the vehicle,
02:40while the turret crew take the bumps standing in their hatches.
02:45But he also sees the least.
02:48You're steering 70 tonnes through a hostile city, looking out through a night-vision periscope,
02:56and the only voice telling you where the danger is belongs to a man sitting above and behind your shoulder.
03:05Every turn is an act of trust.
03:08Every single one.
03:10Everything between the four of you runs through one intercom.
03:15The driver hears the commander.
03:18The loader hears the gunner.
03:20When the main gun fires, a flat concussion fills the turret,
03:24and you feel it in your chest before you hear it.
03:28And the loader is already reaching for the next round.
03:32Nobody has time to explain anything.
03:36Words get short.
03:38Orders get shorter.
03:39And every crew member learns to hear tone as well as content.
03:45You learn the voice of the man above you until a single word means turn, stop, or brace.
03:54Then there's the loader, and this is where the job turns physical.
04:00The Abrams has no autoloader.
04:03A person does it.
04:04Hand to steel.
04:06Behind you, a powered armoured door slides open for a couple of seconds each time you reach for a round,
04:14then shuts to seal the ammunition away from you.
04:19You pull the round, swing around, seat it in the breech,
04:23and get your arm clear before the gun fires,
04:27all inside a turret that may be moving.
04:31A well-drilled loader does it in a handful of seconds,
04:36and he does it with the cannon about to go off beside his head.
04:41Here's what surprised me.
04:44On the news, you saw the big gun,
04:47but in Baghdad, the 120mm did a small share of the work.
04:53One account of the operation says crews fired relatively few main gun rounds
05:00and an enormous amount of machine gun ammunition.
05:05Zucchino describes crews burning through thousands of .50 caliber and coax rounds
05:11and reloading again and again.
05:14So a loader's war in that city was mostly belts of machine gun ammunition,
05:20with the big gun only now and then.
05:23Slide one seat over, because the gunner's war is the opposite.
05:28You're pressed against the primary sight,
05:31and your world shrinks to a magnified picture
05:34with a day channel and a thermal channel.
05:37In thermal, hot things glow, and everything else goes grey.
05:43A laser finds the range, then you wait.
05:47You hold the crosshairs on a target
05:49and wait for the loader to call the gun ready.
05:53And for the next few seconds,
05:55the entire war is the size of that picture.
05:59Over your shoulder, the commander sees what you see
06:03through an extension of your sight,
06:05and he can fire the main gun himself if he has to.
06:09His hardest call is the hatch.
06:13Standing in it with his head and shoulders out,
06:15he can read the street and work the .50 calibre.
06:20And he is the most exposed man in the tank.
06:24Button the hatch and the steel keeps him alive,
06:27but turns the city into a handful of periscopes.
06:31In the heaviest fighting in Suchino's account,
06:34the order that goes out is two words long.
06:37Button up.
06:39Grenades hit with a heavy metallic jolt
06:42that makes the cupola shudder.
06:44And rifle rounds beat a steady ping, ping, ping on the steel skirts.
06:51And in that noise, with the hatches shut
06:54and four people breathing the same hot air,
06:57everybody inside finds out exactly what the tank was built to do.
07:04And then the heat.
07:06Reporters riding with a tank crew in an Iraqi summer
07:10found the outside metal hot enough to blister skin
07:14through leather gloves by midday.
07:16And even the loader's stool, too hot to sit on comfortably.
07:21Army Captain Doft,
07:23who commanded a tank out of forward operating base Rostamia,
07:27east of Baghdad, in 2006,
07:30described a 36-hour mission
07:33where the heat made the smell worse
07:36and the pressure worse.
07:37He said the digital thermometers he'd seen in there
07:41stopped reading at 150 degrees.
07:45The same man,
07:46asked about firing the main gun in training,
07:49called it beautiful.
07:51Both of those are true at once.
07:54That is the job.
07:56Heat is one kind of fire.
07:59On April 5th,
08:00during the first thunder run,
08:02a battalion-sized raid up from the south,
08:05the other kind showed up.
08:08At a highway cloverleaf,
08:10a tank took a hit to its rear engine compartment
08:13and burst into flames.
08:16And the column stopped in the open
08:18while the crew tried desperately to put it out.
08:22After nearly 30 minutes,
08:24Colonel David Perkins,
08:25the brigade commander,
08:27ordered the tank abandoned.
08:29In Zucchino's account,
08:31Diaz burned through his own tank's handheld extinguishers,
08:35fighting a fire.
08:37And the order went out for other tanks to donate theirs.
08:41Crewmen climbed out of their hatches under fire
08:44and carried armloads of red extinguishers across the road.
08:48Which is the reason the tank is built the way it is.
08:52Crew survival was the driving goal behind the Abrams design.
08:57The ammunition sits behind those armoured doors
09:00and panels in the roof are designed to blow outward
09:04and vent an explosion up and away from the people below.
09:08A fire system in the crew compartment
09:11is meant to flood it with extinguishing gas.
09:14Later that year, on August 28th, by one report,
09:18an M1A1 on a routine patrol in Baghdad
09:21was hit by something nobody could identify.
09:25It crippled the tank,
09:27passed through the gunner's seat back,
09:30grazed the kidney area of his flak jacket
09:33and came to rest in the hull on the far side.
09:37The heat of the penetration set off the fire system
09:40and, by that account, the crew walked away with minor injuries.
09:46That account calls it one of only two Abrams
09:49knocked out by enemy fire up to that point.
09:53Picture being the gunner, pressed against your sight
09:56when something goes through the seat you're leaning on.
10:00But the hardest hours came on the morning of April 7,
10:04once the brigade reached the heart of the city.
10:07Perkins himself described the stretch between hour four and hour six.
10:13Two tank battalions were sitting in downtown Baghdad
10:16with their engines shut down.
10:19Out on the highway, units were nearly out of ammunition
10:22and at one position, they had about an hour's worth left.
10:27A little after seven that morning,
10:29an Iraqi rocket or missile landed in the middle of the brigade command post,
10:35leaving a crater ten feet wide and ten feet deep.
10:39And the first resupply package had been destroyed.
10:43Now put yourself back in the turret.
10:45The turbine you've listened to for days has gone silent.
10:49Your tank is parked, hatches locked,
10:54rounds drum on the steel
10:55and you're counting what's left in the rack
10:58at an intersection in a city of millions.
11:01While somewhere out there,
11:03a truck you can't see is deciding whether to come.
11:08Four people, one intercom
11:11and a single question nobody inside can answer.
11:15Is anyone coming?
11:17They came.
11:19The fuel and ammunition trucks drove up the highway through the fire
11:23while soldiers fired down the passing lane
11:26to keep Iraqi fighters off them.
11:29The brigade saved five ammunition trucks and four fuel tankers,
11:34enough to resupply the teams holding all three intersections.
11:38Then the engines started again.
11:41The city around them was still alive
11:43and nobody had cleared the road for the column.
11:47Cars still shared the road with the column.
11:50Some of them rammed the tanks
11:52and a driver looking through a periscope
11:55had to size up each one in seconds.
11:58A commander made that same judgment again and again
12:02with a hatch decision hanging over everyone
12:06and with three people below him trusting the call.
12:10That's the day.
12:11If you want more breakdowns of what it's really like inside these machines,
12:15subscribe because we put one out every week.
12:19But the last image from that city
12:21is the one tankers bring up when they talk about it.
12:24When the column pulled back out along the highway,
12:28the road was covered in shattered windshield glass
12:32from cars that had rammed the tanks
12:35and thousands of spent brass casings
12:38sparkling in the morning sun.
12:40Somewhere in all of that was a tank commander from the Bronx
12:44who had spent the night of April 4th wanting only to go home.
12:49Here's the trade every commander makes in that turret.
12:54Stand up with your head out and you see the street
12:57and you're the most exposed man in the tank.
13:01Button up and the steel keeps you alive
13:03while you fight a war through a periscope.
13:07Neither answer is wrong and either one can get you killed.
13:11So tankers, I want to hear it.
13:13When the rounds started hitting, were you out in it or locked in?
