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would certainly haul out foreign TV crews to film a destroyed American tank. He was willing to give the crew a reasonable amount of time to get the fire out and have the tank towed.
    Schwartz decided to take advantage of the delay by ordering his crews to reload. They had expended an astonishing amount of ammunition. They had been shooting nonstop since crossing the checkpoint. Some of the .50-caliber barrels were so hot that they were unable to fire, so the crews replaced them with fresh barrels. Schwartz had half the tanks and Bradleys reload and rearm while the other half continued to lay down fire to keep the bunkers and snipers suppressed. The column was much easier to hit while it was stopped.
    Seventy meters behind the burning tank, the brigade commander, Colonel Perkins, was in the open hatch of an M113, an armored personnel carrier. His driver had stopped under the overpass, but Perkins ordered him to move back onto the open highway. He didn’t want to expose them to anyone hiding on the bridge. A Bradley behind him also pulled back to get a better firing angle on the overpass and to cover the brigade commander’s back.
    Like Schwartz, Perkins did not want to leave an Abrams in the hands of the enemy. The tankers had a code: you don’t leave your crew behind, and you don’t abandon your tank. They were like ship captains; they were willing to go down with their ship. So far, the crew of Charlie One Two was doing all the right things, performing the evacuation and recovery drill just as they had been trained. Perkins was willing to give them a little more time.
    After Diaz had expended his tank’s handheld extinguishers, the order went out for the other tanks to donate their extinguishers. Crewmen hopped out of the hatches, exposing themselves to fire, and delivered armloads of the red extinguishers. Diaz and his crew sprayed the flames. They smoldered, shot back up, and smoldered again.
    On Lieutenant Gruneisen’s tank, Sergeant Hernandez wanted to fire the main gun into the troublesome bunker, but the lieutenant thought they were too close to Diaz’s crew on the ground—the men were stressed enough without the concussive blast of a 120mm round knocking them off their feet. Hernandez was desperate to help. He had made a pact with Charlie One Two’s gunner, Sergeant Jose Couvertier: they would always watch each other’s backs. Hernandez had taught the fire evacuation drill in Kuwait, so he asked Gruneisen if he could go help. Gruneisen hesitated—their tank would be the tow tank once the fire was out, and he would need help. But after a long pause Gruneisen finally said he could handle the tank alone for the moment.
    Hernandez climbed down onto the highway. He was just now getting his first good look at his surroundings. He had seen nothing but desert on the march up from Kuwait, but now he was suddenly in a dense urban area. He was surprised to see homes and apartment buildings and shops. For the first time, he realized that Iraq—at least this part of it—was a modern twenty-first-century nation, with superhighways and late-model cars and congested suburban sprawl. “Oh shit,” he yelled up to the lieutenant, “we’re in an actual city!” He felt hemmed in, claustrophobic.
    Hernandez climbed up onto Charlie One Two and helped Diaz get the VEE packs out. Because the filter packs were burning so furiously, Diaz thought they could rob the fire of fuel by removing them. Hernandez reached down and grabbed one by its heavy aluminum frame. It burned his hand. He cursed and dropped it. Somebody doused it with water from a five-gallon jug. Hernandez and Diaz reached back down and struggled to lift the packs. They were melted and fused together by the heat. Hernandez pounded them with a hammer, broke them apart, and he and Diaz and others lifted them out.
    With the VEE packs removed, the fire settled down. Lieutenant Gruneisen backed up his tank to the