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in the bunkers opened up on them, and the crew got straight into the fight. Up in the turret of Charlie One Two, Diaz started working the .50-caliber, pumping rounds into the bunkers and into technical vehicles trying to race up the on-ramps and onto the overpasses. His gunner was hosing down dismounts—foot soldiers—with the coax, keeping them away from the column. Diaz feared dismounts would try to get close enough to the tank to pitch a grenade down the turret.
    They were approaching the first overpass when Diaz felt a concussion rock the tank. He was wearing his CVC helmet, which muffled even the earsplitting booms of the 120mm main tank cannons, but still he could feel a shock wave washing over the turret. It felt like the concussion from a main gun, and he thought that perhaps Lieutenant Gruneisen in Charlie One One— Creeping Death —had pulled too close to him and fired over his back deck.
    Diaz radioed the lieutenant and asked whether he had fired his main gun.
    â€œNegative,” Gruneisen said.
    â€œCan you look at my rear and see if anything’s smoking?”
    The air was black with smoke from burning vehicles and bunkers and the exhaust from the Bradleys. Gruneisen couldn’t see much. Diaz’s tank seemed fine.
    â€œKeep going,” he told Diaz.
    Moments later, Gruneisen heard his ammo loader, Private First Class Donald Schafer, say, “Sir, something has hit One Two.”
    Gruneisen looked again and saw a trail of gray smoke snaking from the rear grill. Some sort of fluid was dripping underneath the tank.
    Inside Charlie One Two, Private First Class Chris Shipley shouted to Diaz from the driver’s hole, “The fire warning light is on!” And then, “The emergency lights are on!” The whole driver’s control panel was flashing.
    Diaz was reporting the malfunction over the company net just as Gruneisen radioed and told him, “It looks like something hit you in the back, right above the grill!”
    Diaz wanted to keep going and try to hobble all the way to the airport, but then Shipley radioed again from the driver’s hole: “The tank just aborted.”
    The engine shut down. They were slowing to a stop. Diaz didn’t want to stop under the overpass and expose the stricken tank to enemy fire from above. He willed the tank forward, shouting at Shipley to try to keep it moving long enough to clear the overpass. They rolled on and came to a rest just north of the bridge, in the far left lane of Highway 8.
    Diaz looked at his rear deck. Orange flames were shooting up out of the grill. He couldn’t believe it. He had never pictured an Abrams tank as helpless, as a victim. The entire brigade had had just one tank disabled by enemy fire in the entire war. Two days earlier, a fire in a tank’s auxiliary power unit, triggered by an RPG hit, had been quickly put out and the tank recovered and repaired. Even under punishing conditions and chronic parts shortages, the brigade had lost only 15 percent of its tanks to repairs at any given time. But now the back of Charlie One Two looked like a little bonfire. Diaz cursed and gave the order for the fire drill—the same drill they had practiced endlessly at Fort Stewart and in the Kuwaiti desert. He tried to sound calm as he hollered, “Evacuate tank!”
    The defining characteristic of combat is chaos. No operation plays out the way it was planned. The purpose of training is to bring order to chaos, to condition men to react in prescribed ways, no matter what the emergency. On Highway 8, the battalion’s training kicked in. Diaz’s crew evacuated the tank and took up fighting positions. Gruneisen pulled his tank forward to protect the stricken tank’s northern flank. The Charlie Company commander, Captain Jason Conroy, moved his tank ahead of Gruneisen’s to provide more combat power, and the trail platoon set up a perimeter of armored vehicles to protect the