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Attacks Rock 'Foundation' That Marines Built in Anbar
It came from about 30 yards ahead. The second-to-last vehicle was hit. White sparks showered as the high-backed Humvee skidded to a halt a few feet forward of a crater three feet wide and about two feet deep. The explosion had come from an antitank mine planted in an opaque puddle along the road, only 200 yards from the end of the barbed wire and barricades protecting Hotel Hit.
"It's an IED!" a Marine in the front passenger seat shouted, using the military's term for an improvised explosive device. The convoy stopped and the Marines poured out of their Humvees. The empty street resounded with the Marines' hoarse cries: What happened? Secure the road! Is anybody hurt?
  Capt. David Handy, 31, is the commander of Charlie Company of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit's Battalion Landing Team. (By Nelson Hernandez -- The Washington Post)
VIDEO | Col. Frank McKenzie, commanding officer of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, leads a 3-mile foot patrol in the city of Hit. (Video by The Post's Nelson Hernandez, edited by washingtonpost.com's Jonathan Forsythe.)
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Their expressions were creased with a mixture of surprise, alarm, fear and anger.
Cpl. Tadeusz Zych of New York, the convoy commander and leader of 2nd Squad, 3rd Platoon, radioed in to the base. His squad fanned out, taking the front, rear and intersections of the street. Others rushed to the site of the attack.
The explosion had ripped the Humvee's tires off and sprayed the cab with shrapnel. Three Marines sitting in the rear stumbled out in a daze, deafened and shaken by the blast. The two others, who sat in the cab, were bleeding.
Lance Cpl. Janilson Silva of Brockton, Mass., was in the passenger seat and tried to get Pfc. Justin Reynolds, who had dislocated his ankle, out of the driver's seat. But Silva's elbow had been hit by shrapnel. Pfc. Alian Pequeno-Gimenez of Tampa came to help, getting Reynolds out of the car and onto the muddy asphalt.
It later emerged that Pequeno-Gimenez, known as "PG," was among those sitting in the back and was the most seriously injured. He had a concussion and was soon drifting in and out of consciousness.
Reynolds, of Elida, Ohio, lay on the ground as a corpsman stopped the bleeding with a temporary tourniquet. The Marines nearby pleaded with Reynolds not to look at the blood and swelling of his foot. Reynolds bore the pain with stoic groans as he was placed on a stretcher and loaded onto another truck. Handy, his face a mask of grim concentration, walked with swift strides from Hotel Hit to the shattered vehicle just down the road.
"Reynolds broke his leg. Silva hurt his elbow. PG is deaf," Zych said, adding an expletive as he sped back to the main camp northwest of Hit, leading the remains of his convoy. "Don't get off the road! Don't even think about it!" the 23-year-old native of Poland yelled at his driver while frantically fiddling with the radio, which had stopped working.
Zych reached the base and stepped out of his Humvee, enraged. "When I go out there again, there are going to be a lot of dead hajjis , I'll tell you that," he said.
Walking the Streets
Two days later, Zych felt no need to use the nickname given to insurgents. He had walked the city again since the attack. He was still shaken -- it was his first combat experience, he said -- but his anger had softened.
"We didn't take it out on kids," he said.
