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bobdina
10-19-2009, 03:37 PM
'Taking fire the whole night'

They had been warned that something like this might happen. They just didn’t know what convoy would be targeted, where or when. If they didn’t know anything, they’d have been almost as well off.

Cobra Company’s logistics convoy would have rolled regardless. The war wasn’t going to be put on hold until better information came in, and neither would they.

Just after dark Oct. 10, 2006, six trucks rolled off Camp Ramadi to resupply two combat outposts — COP Sword and COP Grant — in south central Ramadi. It’s an area of the city you’re guaranteed contact nearly every time, 1st Sgt. William Thompson said.

A fuel truck and a supply truck — the most vulnerable vehicles — rode in the middle of the convoy. Thompson’s Humvee led the pack, followed by another Humvee, while two more brought up the rear.

His driver, Spc. Thomas Tatum, and gunner, Spc. Sean Egger, scanned the road along with him for anything out of the ordinary.

They knew the stakes. The three soldiers and their Humvee were replacements for Cobra’s former first sergeant and his crew, who were blown up by a roadside bomb almost two months prior. First Sgt. Aaron Jagger, Spc. Shane Woods and Spc. Ignacio Ramirez were all killed in the attack.

Egger and Woods were close friends; former roommates who’d traveled Europe together and went to church together on Sundays.

Thompson and Jagger had been friends as well, and Lt. Col. V.J. Tedesco, the battalion commander, picked Thompson to replace the fallen first sergeant. Thompson picked Egger, who’d spent the last two months manning the radios in the battalion headquarters, to man the .50-caliber machine gun in the turret of his gun truck.

Egger “was definitely a steely-eyed killer and did not belong behind the radios,” Thompson said.

Their convoy continued its slow march through the Ramadi night. Thompson still hadn’t decided which of two available routes to take to COP Sword; the north or the south. Some last-minute intel crackled over the radio. There might be a bomb on the southern route.

The convoy edged on a bit farther before Tatum cranked the wheel to the right and onto the northern route.

Just as the last truck radioed it had made the turn, Tatum saw the bomb.

Thompson gave the order to back up. But the ambush was already on.

As they rolled in reverse, the bomb, a stone’s throw away, went off. Dirt and sand flew at Egger, exposed in the turret. A few small scratches streaked his face, but he didn’t even notice until later. Nobody else was hurt.

Tatum spotted the trigger man running down an alley and yelled to Egger, who swung his .50 cal to meet the fleeing terrorist.

The trigger man’s spotter popped up and started to take off, too, Thompson said.

“Swing and a miss, they should have stayed down,” he said. “Egger whacked ’em both immediately using the .50 cal.”

Seconds later, the convoy started taking fire from the left, right and behind.

Thompson had already jumped out of the Humvee to get a better view of the battlefield. What was happening wasn’t normal. Usually the enemy just staged a quick ambush and ran away. This time they’d stayed to fight and were trying to force his convoy forward.

This was the complex attack Thompson had been warned to look out for before he rolled out of the gate. It could have hit any of the logistics convoys, he said. Every company ran one a day. “It just so happened that we were the fortunate ones.”

The only way out was back where they came from, through the hail of bullets.

“We were basically caught and couldn’t move,” Thompson said.

He and another soldier, Staff Sgt. Ronnie Cunningham, directed the gun trucks to reorganize to protect the unarmored fuel and supply trucks as they turned around on the narrow street, threw smoke grenades to hide their movements and took shots at the enemy as they managed the chaos.

Egger, meanwhile, scanned the rooftops, windows and alleys for their attackers, laid down suppressive fire and called out enemy positions over the radio to help his comrades get a bead on them.

Staff Sgt. John Evangelista, gunner for one of the rear Humvees, took aim at the assailants, but heavy return fire raked the shield of his turret and flung his 240B machine gun from its mount.

Blistering bullet fragments pelted Evangelista from all sides bruising his arms and face, Tatum recalled, but he wasn’t wounded. Evangelista took his machine gun in hand and popped out of the turret like a whack-a-mole, strafed the enemy positions and popped down again to dodge the retaliatory fire.

Egger took aim at a rooftop machine gun as the gunman unleashed a stream of bullets at the soft-sided fuel and supply trucks. The attacker didn’t damage anything before “Egger engaged and destroyed that knucklehead,” Thompson said. Had the fuel truck been pierced, it could have been catastrophic.

More bad news came over the radio. A dozen engineers on foot patrol were pinned down by heavy fire just blocks away. Thompson and his gun trucks were in the best position to stage a rescue, but he was still neck deep in his own ambush.

It had taken just minutes to get turned around, but it felt like forever as they continued to take fire, Egger recalled. Their destination now was COP Grant, about a half-mile away. The only way there was the southern route where, as far as they knew, a roadside bomb waited with their names on it.

“Basically, we just cleared it with our fingers crossed and hauled ass up to Grant,” Thompson said.

Bullets flew at them the whole way to the gate. The supposed bomb didn’t go off, at least, but the night was still young. They still had a platoon to rescue.

Thompson left the supply and fuel trucks at Grant. Tatum drove as fast as he safely could down the northern route toward the ambush with two more gun trucks right behind. A pair of Abrams tanks bracketed the ends of the ambush zone and provided cover for Thompson’s team.

The engineers, who had been conducting a house-to-house census, were now stuck in a home with an Iraqi family. Enemy fire was coming in from about 10 directions when Thompson’s team pulled up, and the engineers concentrated their efforts on protecting the civilians, Tatum said.

There was no safe route out. Thompson’s team had to make one.

Thompson and Cunningham leapt from their Humvees to set up security, leaving Egger in charge of the gun trucks, which threw everything they had at the enemy. Thompson threw smoke grenades to create a shield as he and Cunningham moved up to make contact with the trapped soldiers and show them the way out.

They quickly made it back to the gun trucks, which surrounded them in a protective formation as gunfire continued to come in from all directions. Thompson walked with them as the Humvees shielded their egress to COP Grant. The bullets didn’t stop flying until they were back inside the wire.

“We were taking fire the whole night,” Tatum said. Somehow, nobody was hit. “We got really lucky.”

Egger said it wasn’t luck. Everybody executed what they’d been trained to do, and nobody backed down, nobody cowered, he said.

For their actions and bravery that night, Thompson and Cunningham were awarded the Bronze Star with “V.” Now-corporal Egger, a two-time Purple Heart recipient, and Evangelista were both was awarded the Army Commendation Medal with “V.” Tatum is still waiting for word on his ARCOM with “V.”

By Matt Millham

Stars and Stripes

GTFPDQ
10-19-2009, 05:03 PM
Good skills. Awareness and quick thinking.