Baker tied a line made out of cargo straps to Lake's bulletproof vest. Brooks stood along the embankment and tried to reel in the two men with his left hand. With his right he gripped a stretcher. Nahvi, leaning over the embankment on his stomach, held the other end of the stretcher while two soldiers clamped down on his legs to prevent Brooks from tumbling into the water.
As Baker, holding Lake, came within a few feet of the embankment, the strap broke.
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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Brooks lost his balance and fell in the water. Baker was now adrift in the surprisingly strong current. He desperately tried to hold on to Lake, who was weighted down with body armor and ammunition cartridges.
"I'm slipping! I'm slipping!" Baker cried out.
He lost his grip. Lake sank to the bottom of the canal, about eight or nine feet deep.
Brooks was near the embankment, but it was too steep and slippery to pull himself out. By now, Baker had been in the water for nearly 25 minutes; he could barely keep himself afloat.
As the rest of the platoon watched in horror from above, Baker and Brooks began to drift away in the current. Nahvi trained a light on the two men, then looked frantically down the canal for a way to save them.
Protruding from the embankment, about 100 yards away, was a drainage pipe. It curved into the water. Nahvi ran to the pipe and shimmied down to an indentation in the embankment, as if someone had flattened the concrete with a sledgehammer.
"Over here! Over here!" Nahvi yelled.
Brooks, with Baker clinging to him, swam toward the pipe. Nahvi helped both men out. He and another soldier, Cpl. Waylon Poitevint, 21, of DeBary, Fla., got Brooks and Baker back to the heated Humvees.
Baker was almost frozen, nearly delirious. He refused to remove his wet clothes, soldiers recalled. "Help them! Help them!" he yelled over and over.
Cursing, Sgt. Ernest Daniels, 29, of New York City, vowed, "I'm going in." He removed his body armor and tried to ease himself down the embankment. He fell in. Hagood and Workman, both exhausted, were still on top of the Humvee. Workman had frost on his eyebrows. Hagood was shaking uncontrollably as he continued to try to revive Gooding, about 30 minutes after he had pulled him from the Humvee.
"Dawg, I can't do it; I can't do it no more," Hagood told Daniels.
Daniels performed mouth-to-mouth on Gooding while Hagood weakly performed chest compressions. "We were doing that when I looked up and saw the birds," Daniels said.
