Riding in the fourth Humvee, Staff Sgt. L.B. Baker, 38, of Shreveport, La., tried to make contact.
With growing concern, he repeated: Blue 4 to Blue 2. Blue 4-Blue 2, Blue 4-Blue 2. . . .
Iraqi soldiers prayed Friday at a memorial at Camp Paliwoda for the U.S. service members killed the previous Sunday in a Humvee accident.
(Ramin Talaie For The Washington Post)
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Sgt. Patrick Hagood, 23, of Anderson, S.C., yelled to the others, "Check the canal," he recalled. A soldier shined his flashlight toward the water.
The Humvee had settled upside down in the middle of the 50-foot-wide canal. The vehicle was under water except for the left rear tire, a three-foot section of the rear bumper and a sliver of the right rear tire.
Cursing, Baker yelled, "That's them!" He hurried down the 10-foot embankment, trailed by Hagood, Workman and Sgt. Stanley Brooks, 23, of Orangeburg, S.C.
Brooks stepped into the water. "Sergeant, that water's cold," Brooks recalled telling Baker, the platoon sergeant. Brooks paused.
"These guys got families, sergeant, let's get them . . . out of there," Brooks said. Baker dived in headfirst.
When Baker reached the Humvee he came up for air, he recalled, and screamed: "That water's cold! It's so cold!"
He dived underwater again and tried to open the driver's side door. It wouldn't budge. He came up for air, he said, and prayed: "Please, God, let me do this." Baker went back under and pulled. The armor-plated door opened this time, heavily, like a cracked safe.
Hagood arrived behind Baker and he, too, remembers praying, "Please, God, let me get these guys out of here." He dived underwater and reached inside the Humvee.
"I couldn't feel anything," he said. "I came up for air and then I went down a second time and I was feeling around, feeling around, and then I felt something. That was Sergeant Lake."
Hagood pulled Lake to the surface and handed him to Baker, who laid him against the left rear tire and began to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Hagood went down again. This time he found Knox. He handed him up to Workman, who by now was straddling the barely exposed right rear tire.
"I went down a fourth time and I didn't find anything," Hagood said. "By then I was freezing and I could barely breathe. So I held on to the top of the truck -- really it was the bottom of the truck -- and stuck my legs inside. I had my head half under water and I felt around with my legs until I hit something and pulled it up with my legs. That was Specialist Gooding."
None of the three soldiers appeared to be alive. But the platoon raced to get them out of the water.
