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rear.
    Diaz and his crewmen were now exposed. It was a shock to be down on the smoky highway, out of the protective cocoon of the tank and its thick steel hull. The air smelled of cordite and burning fuel. It stung their nostrils. The crewmen heard rounds pinging off the sides of the tank and realized they were under fire. Gunmen in the crease of the overpass, where the bridge abutment meets the underside of the elevated runway, were firing down on them. Shipley, the driver, had fired so many M-4 carbine rounds that he was out of ammunition. He saw an AK-47 on the roadway, picked it up, and got it to work. He was firing away toward the overpass when one of the tanks traversed and cut down the gunmen in the crease with a burst of coax.
    The tank fire was behaving strangely now. When Charlie One Two aborted, its fire protection system kicked in automatically, spraying the fire with Halon, a chemical retardant designed to rob flames of oxygen. That doused the fire for a moment, but soon it came back to life. Diaz jumped down to the left side of the tank and yanked the red emergency fire handle, setting off another round of Halon. The fire smoldered.
    While his crew laid down suppressive fire, Diaz got on the back deck and inspected the rear grill. He opened up the rear compartments and saw that all the VEE packs—ventilation filters made of aluminum and filter paper with stiff, accordion-like folds—were on fire. In the lower compartments, the tank’s batteries were melting. Fuel was pouring onto the highway. It was bad, and Diaz knew it. But he also knew an Abrams was nearly invincible, and the only other brigade tank to catch fire in Iraq had been rescued with minimal damage.
    He heard a whooshing sound. An RPG screamed over his head and slammed into the roadway beyond the median in a flash of sparks and flame. Diaz hollered for somebody to toss him his M-4 carbine. He grabbed it and squeezed off several rounds at a bunker on the left side of the highway a few hundred meters to the northwest. He could see muzzle flashes, and he knew the gunmen inside had a clear shot at the tank. They were well concealed in a series of trenches next to a low wall.
    Diaz’s eyes burned and his throat was raw from harsh chemicals released by the flames. He jumped off the back deck and got his first look at the rear engine housing. Something had left a perfect hole the size of a quarter in the shock housing and punctured the right rear fuel cell in the back of the tank, where the protective steel is only about a quarter-inch thick above the Number Six skirt. The projectile went straight through the hull. It was a one-in-a-million shot—probably a recoilless rifle, Diaz thought. The projectile had to have been fired from below to enter at such a low angle. Diaz had seen recoilless rifles in alleyways, firing up at the elevated roadway, but he never imagined a round from one could actually stop an Abrams.
    And yet, if they could extinguish the fire, Diaz thought, they could tow the tank the rest of the way. He grabbed the tank’s handheld fire extinguishers and doused the flames. The fire went out—then erupted again. Diaz didn’t know it, but fuel was pouring onto the tank’s superheated turbine engine, bursting into flames each time the previous fires were snuffed out. Even after tank engines are shut down, they remain hot for a considerable time.
    By now, the delay was affecting the entire mission. It took a minute or two for word of the disabled tank to move up and down the column, but soon the entire battalion was stopped, spread out and exposed. In his tank, Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz was listening on the radio to events unfolding at the cloverleaf, growing more anxious by the moment. This was the last thing he wanted—to lose momentum, to get bogged down in a street fight with dismounts. But he also was determined not to lose an Abrams. It would be humiliating to have to leave it for the Iraqis, who