'Take Off Your Gear!'
Two Black Hawk helicopters were descending toward the road. They carried Air Force firefighters from the 732nd Expeditionary Civil Engineer Squadron, dispatched from nearby Logistical Support Area Anaconda.
Two of the firefighters, Senior Airman Daniel Hernandez of El Paso and Senior Airman Phillip Quinn, of Sylmar, Calif., headed straight for the canal, the soldiers recalled. (Air Force officers declined to discuss details of the incident because of a pending investigation.) Within moments, the airmen were also struggling for their lives, the soldiers said. One airman began to drift in the current. The other lost his grip trying to extricate Gooding, who sank. Neither airman could get out of the canal; one clutched desperately at the embankment but couldn't get hold, the soldiers said. He slowly began to float away.
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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Air Force Staff Sgt. Ray Rangel, 29, of San Antonio, rushed down the embankment to assist.
Nahvi and the other soldiers watching from above recalled that they shouted to Rangel to remove his armored vest before he went in the water. "Take off your gear!" they yelled. "Take off your gear!"
Rangel entered the water wearing his vest, but it was unclear whether he jumped in intentionally. Daniels, who was watching from the Humvee, said Rangel "reached out his hand. He just lost his grip and fell in."
Weighted down by the armor plates, Rangel drowned.
Soon, the sun was coming up. The Charlie Company commander, Capt. Phillip Poteet, 30, of Lubbock, Tex., arrived to see Workman still on top of the Humvee, trying to secure Knox, to prevent the body from drifting.
As Knox lay in the water, the morning call to prayer wafted over the area from the nearby Jaafar Sadic mosque.
The 3rd Platoon was down to three soldiers; three were dead and five had been evacuated by helicopter to be treated for hypothermia. Another platoon was delayed after a Bradley Fighting Vehicle became stuck in the mud trying to reach the accident scene.
At that point, the Iraqi soldiers showed up, Poteet recalled. "They just appeared out of nowhere, about 30 of them, some walking, some running down the road."
Still in the Water
The Americans had not called the Iraqis for assistance. About 7 a.m., Sgt. Maj. Maitham Hadi Naouma of the Iraqi army's 203rd Battalion woke up to see U.S. Apache attack helicopters circling the western edge of Balad. He radioed the battalion commander, Col. Shujaa Jawad Hussein, and another officer, Maj. Mohammed Ali Abdul Mutalib.
The commanders gathered every soldier they could find and headed to the canal. When they arrived, Poteet explained that three American servicemen were still in the water.
Naouma and Abdul Mutalib, known to the Americans as "Major Mohammed," began to strip. Several Iraqi soldiers followed suit.
With no interpreter in sight, Poteet and the Iraqi soldiers began to argue in broken English, according to Poteet and other soldiers present.
