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A detailed account of TF-1-64's charge into Baghdad...
"The battle for Baghdad had begun two days earlier, at dawn on April 5, a bright, hot Saturday. Task Force 1-64, a battalion nicknamed Rogue, pulled out from the operations center, led by 30 Abrams tanks and 14 Bradleys, their squat tan forms bathed in gold morning light.
This was to be a ``thunder run’’ up Highway 8, a quick, violent strike through 17 kilometers of uncharted territory. Rogue would be the first American unit inside Baghdad. The U.S. command wanted the battalion to conduct ``armored reconnaissance,’’ to blow through enemy defenses, testing strength and tactics. They were to slice through Baghdad’s southwest corner, linking up at the airport with the division’s First Brigade, which had seized the facility the day before.
In the lead tank was First Lieutenant Robert F.Ball, a slender, soft-spoken North Carolinian. Just 25, Ball had never been in combat until two weeks earlier. He was selected to lead the column not because he had a particularly refined sense of direction but because his tank had a plow. Commanders were expecting obstacles in the highway.
Ball had been stunned by the order to push into Baghdad. Since leaving Kuwait, the division had been told that no tanks would enter the capital. The division’s role would be to seal the city while airborne troops cleared it block-by-block. And on this day, the brigade’s other two battalions were still well south of Baghdad, killing off remnants of the Republican Guard’s Medina Division protecting the capital’s southern flank.
The Rogue commander, Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz, had been left speechless when Col. Perkins called him into the command tent the previous day to tell him he was going into Baghdad. All Schwartz could think to say was: ``Are you kidding, sir?’’
They had only a few hours to prepare. Ball had studied his 1:100,000 military map, but it had no civilian markings – no exit numbers, no neighborhoods. He was worried about missing his exit to the airport at what fellow officers called the ``spaghetti junction,’’ a cloverleaf maze of twisting overpasses and off-ramps on the cusp of downtown Baghdad.
Ball’s map was clipped to the top of the tank commander’s hatch as the column lumbered up Highway 8. He had been rolling only about ten minutes when his gunner spotted the first targets of the morning. A dozen Iraqi soldiers in uniforms were leaning against a building, chatting, drinking tea, their weapons propped against the wall.
``Sir, can I shoot at these guys?’’ the gunner asked.
``Uh, yeah, they’re enemy,’’ Ball told him.
Ball had fired at soldiers during battles in southern Iraq, but they were murky green figures targeted with the tank’s thermal imagery system. These soldiers were in living color. Through the tank’s sights, Ball could see their eyes, their mustaches, their steaming cups of tea.
The gunner mowed them down methodically, left to right. As each man fell, Ball could see a shocked expression cross the face of the next man before he, too, pitched violently to the ground. The last man managed to flee around the corner of the building. But then, inexplicably, he ran back into the open. The gunner dropped him.
The clattering of the tank’s coax, its rapid-fire medium machine gun, seemed to wake up the soldiers posted along the highway. Gunfire erupted from both sides – AK-47 automatic rifles and RPGs, followed minutes later by recoilless rifles and anti-aircraft guns.
Soldiers and militiamen were firing from a network of trenches and bunkers carved from the highway’s shoulders. They were shooting from rooftops and windows and alleyways. Some were inside cargo containers buried in the dirt. Others were tucked beneath the overpasses or firing down from bridges.
Schwartz had instructed his tank commanders to keep moving. Momentum was crucial. Schwartz wanted a steady 15-kilometer-per-hour clip and a tight, disciplined column. He didn’t want anyone slowing down to finish off a kill; they were to kill everything they could hit, then radio back to pass on the targets to other tanks and Bradleys.
In the southbound lanes, civilian cars were cruising past, their occupants staring wide-eyed at the fireballs erupting from the tank’s main guns and the bright tracer flashes from the coax and 50-caliber machine guns. From the on-ramps and access roads, other cars packed with gunmen were attacking the column. Mixed in were troop trucks, armored personnel carriers and motorcycles with sidecars. Maj. Rick Nussio, the battalion’s executive officer, killed a soldier driving a garbage truck.
The crews were under strict orders to identify targets as military before firing. They were supposed to fire warning shots, then shoot into engine blocks if a vehicle continued to approach. Some cars screeched to a halt. Others kept coming, and the gunners and tank commanders ripped into them. Some vehicles exploded. Others smashed into guardrails, their windshields streaked with blood.
The crews could see soldiers or armed men in civilian clothes in some of the smoking hulks. In others, they weren’t sure. Nobody knew how many civilians had been caught up in the fight and killed. They knew only that any vehicle that kept coming at the column was violently eliminated.
As the column lurched forward, buses and trucks unloaded soldiers, some of whom stood in the open and fired from the hip. Some were in uniform, some in jeans and sports shirts. Others wore the baggy black robes of the Saddam Fedayeen, Hussein’s security militia. To the Americans, they seemed to have no training, no discipline, no coordinated tactics. It was all point and shoot. The coax sent chunks of their bodies splattering into the roadside.
The Iraqis, and the Syrian and Jordanian gunmen fighting alongside them, seemed to have little appreciation of the destructive firepower of the tanks and Bradleys. Some approached to within 20 meters, an easy kill for weapons systems designed to hit targets up to several kilometers away.
The tank gunners had learned down south to shatter tree trunks with 120mm tank rounds, turning them into lethal shards of wooden shrapnel. The 50-cals and the coax pulverized brick or concrete structures, killing anything behind them.
At a nursery on the west side of the highway, Schwartz saw about 30 soldiers with rocket-propelled grenades crouched behind a row of huge clay flowerpots. He ordered several Bradleys to open up with 25mm high-explosive rounds from their main guns. They pumped nearly 100 rounds into the pots. Schwartz watched the pots explode and the men behind them topple, one by one.
The Americans were beginning to take casualties, too. A Bradley was hit by an RPG and disabled. The driver panicked and leaped out onto the highway, breaking his leg. He rolled on the pavement, directly in the path of the oncoming column. A tank commander on the Bradley behind him stopped, leaped out and dragged the driver to safety.
A rifle round tore into the communications helmet of a tank commander. He radioed his company commander, Capt. Jason Conroy, and said: ``I’ve been shot in the head.’’
``You have? You sound like you’re pretty fine,’’ Conroy said.
``No, seriously, something hit me in the head.’’
``You all right?”
``I guess.’’
The tank commander took off his helmet. A bullet was lodged inside.
``Keep moving,’’ Conroy told him.
At Objective Curley, a major interchange on the approach to Baghdad, Staff Sergeant Jason Diaz was watching his gunner rip holes in roadside bunkers when he was jolted by an explosion at the rear of his tank. He thought the tank directly behind him had fired its main gun.
He radioed back and asked if the crew had fired. No, they told him.
He continued on. Two minutes later, Diaz’ driver radioed up to him in the commander’s hatch. His fire warning light was on. Diaz looked over his shoulder and saw flames shooting up. A projectile, probably a recoilless rifle round, had penetrated the rear engine housing. The tank’s automatic fire control system switched on, dousing the flames with Halon, a fire retardant.
The tank lurched to a halt just beyond an overpass. The crew piled out, launching into a fire evacuation drill. The fire was still smoldering. Diaz pulled a red handle on the side of tank, firing the Halon system again. The flames seemed to go out.
The entire column was stopped now, and gunfire and grenades from the bunkers and overpasses intensified. Diaz and his crewmen fired automatic rifles at muzzle flashes from bunkers as they worked furiously to put out the fire. Other tanks pulled up beside them to provide cover fire.
The crew quickly trained the tank’s hand-held fire extinguishers on the flames. Crewmen from other tanks ran up and down the column, collecting two dozen more extinguishers from other tanks. With each new attempt, the fire would die down, then burst to life again.
After the fire extinguishers were expended, the crews collected five-gallon water jugs from other tanks. Diaz and his men poured the water on the flames, but it was hopeless. Nobody knew it then, but the round had penetrated a fuel cell. Fuel was pouring onto the super-heated turbine engine, bursting into flames after each new attempt to douse it.
Commanders decided to try to tow the tank. Several times, they hooked a tow bar to another tank. But each time the flames shot up again, they had to unhook the tow bar to move the towing tank to safety.
Enemy gunfire mounted. An RPG whizzed past Diaz’ head as he stood on the turret, firing a 9mm pistol at gunmen attacking from the highway shoulder. An RPG team was shooting at him from a bunker. A tank round ripped into the bunker, demolishing it.
From an exit ramp, a blue truck emerged and sped down the ramp toward the tanks. The crews fired warning shots. The truck kept coming. The gunners blew it up.
A minute later, a white Toyota pickup with three armed men inside rolled down another ramp towards Capt. Conroy’s tank. The tanks and Bradleys opened up, killing the driver as the truck careened down the ramp and smashed into a guardrail a few feet from Conroy. He could see one of the passengers moving around, a young man wearing a white headband. A tank fired again and the pickup exploded in a red mist.
From his armored personnel carrier just behind Diaz’s crippled tank, Col. Perkins had seen enough. The thunder run had lost momentum. The entire column was halted and exposed to withering fire. Perkins decided to abandon the tank. He had his driver pull up next to Diaz.
``Get off the tank! Now!’’ he screamed.
The crews were shocked. They had never heard the colonel raise his voice. He was a calm, controlled commander.
``Leave the tank, get your crew, get off – let’s move on!’’ Perkins hollered.
Diaz didn’t want to leave his tank. He was the commander, the captain of the ship. Tankers had a code: You don’t abandon your tank. Diaz cursed under his breath, readied an incendiary grenade, and tossed it into the turret. He jammed a second incendiary grenade into the breech. He leaped off the tank. The grenades exploded and burned.
His crew had already unloaded equipment and weapons and sensitive items like radios and communication codes and night vision goggles. They tossed some of the gear onto a tank commanded by Lt. Roger Gruneisen, Diaz’ platoon leader, and the rest onto the first sergeant’s armored personnel carrier.
Diaz assigned his crew to the first sergeant’s vehicle. Diaz joined Gruneisen’s crew, squeezing into the loader’s hatch with Sgt. Carlos Hernandez, who had helped try to put out the fire. There were now five men in tank designed for four, its turret and decks piled so high with gear and weapons that Gruneisen’s view from the commander’s hatch was obstructed.
They headed north up the highway. Behind them, Lt. Shane Williams, reluctantly following orders, fired a round from his main gun into the stricken tank to destroy it. His commanders didn’t want any part of the tank to survive and fall into Iraqi hands.
The column was back on the move. By now, the resistance was becoming more organized. Men who appeared to be dead were suddenly leaping up and firing at the backs of American vehicles as they rumbled past.
Col. Schwartz got on the radio and ordered his gunners to ``double tap,’’ to shoot anybody they saw lying near a weapon. ``Always check your work,’’ he told them.
The 30-minute delay caused by the burning tank had given the Iraqis and Syrians an opportunity to get off more effective shots. On foot and in vehicles, they were closing to within 20 meters of the tanks and Bradleys.
A military truck loaded with soldiers sped towards Perkins’ personnel carrier. At that moment, the 50-caliber machine gun on Perkins’ vehicle ran out of ammunition. Behind him, the 50-cal. gunner on a trailing personnel carrier fired into the truck’s windshield, sending the vehicle crashing into a guardrail.
Some of the troops survived the impact. They crawled out and kept coming, firing AK-47s. All but one was cut down by 50-cal. and shotgun blasts from the carrier behind Perkins. One Iraqi kept moving forward, pointing an AK-47. Perkins’ gunner, out of ammunition, threw a metal 50-cal. ammunition box at the man, but he kept advancing.
Perkins reached for the 9mm pistol on his thigh. He had not fired it the entire war. He squeezed the trigger and the soldier went down. It occurred to him at that moment that if the brigade commander had to whip out his pistol, they were in serious trouble.
At the head of the column, Lt. Ball was approaching the spaghetti intersection. His map showed the exit ramp splitting into two ramps. He knew he wanted the ramp to the right. He tried to focus. He was under fire, talking on the radio, looking down at the map, searching for highway signs to the airport. He had been following blue ``Airport’’ signs all the way up Highway 8, but now black smoke from a burning Iraqi personnel carrier obscured the entire cloverleaf.
In the web of overpasses and off-ramps, Ball found the ramp he wanted and stayed right. He was halfway down when he realized the exit had three ramps, not two. He should have taken the middle one. He was heading east into downtown Baghdad, the opposite direction from the airport - and the entire column was following him.
Ball looked across the divided highway and saw ``Airport’’ signs pointing in the opposite direction. He radioed back to his commander and his platoon and told them: ``I took the wrong turn. I’m going to jump this guardrail and go back left.’’
"The battle for Baghdad had begun two days earlier, at dawn on April 5, a bright, hot Saturday. Task Force 1-64, a battalion nicknamed Rogue, pulled out from the operations center, led by 30 Abrams tanks and 14 Bradleys, their squat tan forms bathed in gold morning light.
This was to be a ``thunder run’’ up Highway 8, a quick, violent strike through 17 kilometers of uncharted territory. Rogue would be the first American unit inside Baghdad. The U.S. command wanted the battalion to conduct ``armored reconnaissance,’’ to blow through enemy defenses, testing strength and tactics. They were to slice through Baghdad’s southwest corner, linking up at the airport with the division’s First Brigade, which had seized the facility the day before.
In the lead tank was First Lieutenant Robert F.Ball, a slender, soft-spoken North Carolinian. Just 25, Ball had never been in combat until two weeks earlier. He was selected to lead the column not because he had a particularly refined sense of direction but because his tank had a plow. Commanders were expecting obstacles in the highway.
Ball had been stunned by the order to push into Baghdad. Since leaving Kuwait, the division had been told that no tanks would enter the capital. The division’s role would be to seal the city while airborne troops cleared it block-by-block. And on this day, the brigade’s other two battalions were still well south of Baghdad, killing off remnants of the Republican Guard’s Medina Division protecting the capital’s southern flank.
The Rogue commander, Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz, had been left speechless when Col. Perkins called him into the command tent the previous day to tell him he was going into Baghdad. All Schwartz could think to say was: ``Are you kidding, sir?’’
They had only a few hours to prepare. Ball had studied his 1:100,000 military map, but it had no civilian markings – no exit numbers, no neighborhoods. He was worried about missing his exit to the airport at what fellow officers called the ``spaghetti junction,’’ a cloverleaf maze of twisting overpasses and off-ramps on the cusp of downtown Baghdad.
Ball’s map was clipped to the top of the tank commander’s hatch as the column lumbered up Highway 8. He had been rolling only about ten minutes when his gunner spotted the first targets of the morning. A dozen Iraqi soldiers in uniforms were leaning against a building, chatting, drinking tea, their weapons propped against the wall.
``Sir, can I shoot at these guys?’’ the gunner asked.
``Uh, yeah, they’re enemy,’’ Ball told him.
Ball had fired at soldiers during battles in southern Iraq, but they were murky green figures targeted with the tank’s thermal imagery system. These soldiers were in living color. Through the tank’s sights, Ball could see their eyes, their mustaches, their steaming cups of tea.
The gunner mowed them down methodically, left to right. As each man fell, Ball could see a shocked expression cross the face of the next man before he, too, pitched violently to the ground. The last man managed to flee around the corner of the building. But then, inexplicably, he ran back into the open. The gunner dropped him.
The clattering of the tank’s coax, its rapid-fire medium machine gun, seemed to wake up the soldiers posted along the highway. Gunfire erupted from both sides – AK-47 automatic rifles and RPGs, followed minutes later by recoilless rifles and anti-aircraft guns.
Soldiers and militiamen were firing from a network of trenches and bunkers carved from the highway’s shoulders. They were shooting from rooftops and windows and alleyways. Some were inside cargo containers buried in the dirt. Others were tucked beneath the overpasses or firing down from bridges.
Schwartz had instructed his tank commanders to keep moving. Momentum was crucial. Schwartz wanted a steady 15-kilometer-per-hour clip and a tight, disciplined column. He didn’t want anyone slowing down to finish off a kill; they were to kill everything they could hit, then radio back to pass on the targets to other tanks and Bradleys.
In the southbound lanes, civilian cars were cruising past, their occupants staring wide-eyed at the fireballs erupting from the tank’s main guns and the bright tracer flashes from the coax and 50-caliber machine guns. From the on-ramps and access roads, other cars packed with gunmen were attacking the column. Mixed in were troop trucks, armored personnel carriers and motorcycles with sidecars. Maj. Rick Nussio, the battalion’s executive officer, killed a soldier driving a garbage truck.
The crews were under strict orders to identify targets as military before firing. They were supposed to fire warning shots, then shoot into engine blocks if a vehicle continued to approach. Some cars screeched to a halt. Others kept coming, and the gunners and tank commanders ripped into them. Some vehicles exploded. Others smashed into guardrails, their windshields streaked with blood.
The crews could see soldiers or armed men in civilian clothes in some of the smoking hulks. In others, they weren’t sure. Nobody knew how many civilians had been caught up in the fight and killed. They knew only that any vehicle that kept coming at the column was violently eliminated.
As the column lurched forward, buses and trucks unloaded soldiers, some of whom stood in the open and fired from the hip. Some were in uniform, some in jeans and sports shirts. Others wore the baggy black robes of the Saddam Fedayeen, Hussein’s security militia. To the Americans, they seemed to have no training, no discipline, no coordinated tactics. It was all point and shoot. The coax sent chunks of their bodies splattering into the roadside.
The Iraqis, and the Syrian and Jordanian gunmen fighting alongside them, seemed to have little appreciation of the destructive firepower of the tanks and Bradleys. Some approached to within 20 meters, an easy kill for weapons systems designed to hit targets up to several kilometers away.
The tank gunners had learned down south to shatter tree trunks with 120mm tank rounds, turning them into lethal shards of wooden shrapnel. The 50-cals and the coax pulverized brick or concrete structures, killing anything behind them.
At a nursery on the west side of the highway, Schwartz saw about 30 soldiers with rocket-propelled grenades crouched behind a row of huge clay flowerpots. He ordered several Bradleys to open up with 25mm high-explosive rounds from their main guns. They pumped nearly 100 rounds into the pots. Schwartz watched the pots explode and the men behind them topple, one by one.
The Americans were beginning to take casualties, too. A Bradley was hit by an RPG and disabled. The driver panicked and leaped out onto the highway, breaking his leg. He rolled on the pavement, directly in the path of the oncoming column. A tank commander on the Bradley behind him stopped, leaped out and dragged the driver to safety.
A rifle round tore into the communications helmet of a tank commander. He radioed his company commander, Capt. Jason Conroy, and said: ``I’ve been shot in the head.’’
``You have? You sound like you’re pretty fine,’’ Conroy said.
``No, seriously, something hit me in the head.’’
``You all right?”
``I guess.’’
The tank commander took off his helmet. A bullet was lodged inside.
``Keep moving,’’ Conroy told him.
At Objective Curley, a major interchange on the approach to Baghdad, Staff Sergeant Jason Diaz was watching his gunner rip holes in roadside bunkers when he was jolted by an explosion at the rear of his tank. He thought the tank directly behind him had fired its main gun.
He radioed back and asked if the crew had fired. No, they told him.
He continued on. Two minutes later, Diaz’ driver radioed up to him in the commander’s hatch. His fire warning light was on. Diaz looked over his shoulder and saw flames shooting up. A projectile, probably a recoilless rifle round, had penetrated the rear engine housing. The tank’s automatic fire control system switched on, dousing the flames with Halon, a fire retardant.
The tank lurched to a halt just beyond an overpass. The crew piled out, launching into a fire evacuation drill. The fire was still smoldering. Diaz pulled a red handle on the side of tank, firing the Halon system again. The flames seemed to go out.
The entire column was stopped now, and gunfire and grenades from the bunkers and overpasses intensified. Diaz and his crewmen fired automatic rifles at muzzle flashes from bunkers as they worked furiously to put out the fire. Other tanks pulled up beside them to provide cover fire.
The crew quickly trained the tank’s hand-held fire extinguishers on the flames. Crewmen from other tanks ran up and down the column, collecting two dozen more extinguishers from other tanks. With each new attempt, the fire would die down, then burst to life again.
After the fire extinguishers were expended, the crews collected five-gallon water jugs from other tanks. Diaz and his men poured the water on the flames, but it was hopeless. Nobody knew it then, but the round had penetrated a fuel cell. Fuel was pouring onto the super-heated turbine engine, bursting into flames after each new attempt to douse it.
Commanders decided to try to tow the tank. Several times, they hooked a tow bar to another tank. But each time the flames shot up again, they had to unhook the tow bar to move the towing tank to safety.
Enemy gunfire mounted. An RPG whizzed past Diaz’ head as he stood on the turret, firing a 9mm pistol at gunmen attacking from the highway shoulder. An RPG team was shooting at him from a bunker. A tank round ripped into the bunker, demolishing it.
From an exit ramp, a blue truck emerged and sped down the ramp toward the tanks. The crews fired warning shots. The truck kept coming. The gunners blew it up.
A minute later, a white Toyota pickup with three armed men inside rolled down another ramp towards Capt. Conroy’s tank. The tanks and Bradleys opened up, killing the driver as the truck careened down the ramp and smashed into a guardrail a few feet from Conroy. He could see one of the passengers moving around, a young man wearing a white headband. A tank fired again and the pickup exploded in a red mist.
From his armored personnel carrier just behind Diaz’s crippled tank, Col. Perkins had seen enough. The thunder run had lost momentum. The entire column was halted and exposed to withering fire. Perkins decided to abandon the tank. He had his driver pull up next to Diaz.
``Get off the tank! Now!’’ he screamed.
The crews were shocked. They had never heard the colonel raise his voice. He was a calm, controlled commander.
``Leave the tank, get your crew, get off – let’s move on!’’ Perkins hollered.
Diaz didn’t want to leave his tank. He was the commander, the captain of the ship. Tankers had a code: You don’t abandon your tank. Diaz cursed under his breath, readied an incendiary grenade, and tossed it into the turret. He jammed a second incendiary grenade into the breech. He leaped off the tank. The grenades exploded and burned.
His crew had already unloaded equipment and weapons and sensitive items like radios and communication codes and night vision goggles. They tossed some of the gear onto a tank commanded by Lt. Roger Gruneisen, Diaz’ platoon leader, and the rest onto the first sergeant’s armored personnel carrier.
Diaz assigned his crew to the first sergeant’s vehicle. Diaz joined Gruneisen’s crew, squeezing into the loader’s hatch with Sgt. Carlos Hernandez, who had helped try to put out the fire. There were now five men in tank designed for four, its turret and decks piled so high with gear and weapons that Gruneisen’s view from the commander’s hatch was obstructed.
They headed north up the highway. Behind them, Lt. Shane Williams, reluctantly following orders, fired a round from his main gun into the stricken tank to destroy it. His commanders didn’t want any part of the tank to survive and fall into Iraqi hands.
The column was back on the move. By now, the resistance was becoming more organized. Men who appeared to be dead were suddenly leaping up and firing at the backs of American vehicles as they rumbled past.
Col. Schwartz got on the radio and ordered his gunners to ``double tap,’’ to shoot anybody they saw lying near a weapon. ``Always check your work,’’ he told them.
The 30-minute delay caused by the burning tank had given the Iraqis and Syrians an opportunity to get off more effective shots. On foot and in vehicles, they were closing to within 20 meters of the tanks and Bradleys.
A military truck loaded with soldiers sped towards Perkins’ personnel carrier. At that moment, the 50-caliber machine gun on Perkins’ vehicle ran out of ammunition. Behind him, the 50-cal. gunner on a trailing personnel carrier fired into the truck’s windshield, sending the vehicle crashing into a guardrail.
Some of the troops survived the impact. They crawled out and kept coming, firing AK-47s. All but one was cut down by 50-cal. and shotgun blasts from the carrier behind Perkins. One Iraqi kept moving forward, pointing an AK-47. Perkins’ gunner, out of ammunition, threw a metal 50-cal. ammunition box at the man, but he kept advancing.
Perkins reached for the 9mm pistol on his thigh. He had not fired it the entire war. He squeezed the trigger and the soldier went down. It occurred to him at that moment that if the brigade commander had to whip out his pistol, they were in serious trouble.
At the head of the column, Lt. Ball was approaching the spaghetti intersection. His map showed the exit ramp splitting into two ramps. He knew he wanted the ramp to the right. He tried to focus. He was under fire, talking on the radio, looking down at the map, searching for highway signs to the airport. He had been following blue ``Airport’’ signs all the way up Highway 8, but now black smoke from a burning Iraqi personnel carrier obscured the entire cloverleaf.
In the web of overpasses and off-ramps, Ball found the ramp he wanted and stayed right. He was halfway down when he realized the exit had three ramps, not two. He should have taken the middle one. He was heading east into downtown Baghdad, the opposite direction from the airport - and the entire column was following him.
Ball looked across the divided highway and saw ``Airport’’ signs pointing in the opposite direction. He radioed back to his commander and his platoon and told them: ``I took the wrong turn. I’m going to jump this guardrail and go back left.’’