A Hero Who Didn't Save Himself

By then, two of the Marines they'd come to rescue were dead. Two other Marines dropped their bodies off a porch, then jumped down after them.

"One of the Marines comes stumbling out of this yard next to the house," Workman says. "He's covered with blood. He looked like a zombie. And he just falls over. I run up and grab him."

"Workman grabbed him and dragged him down the street while the insurgents were firing down at us from the rooftop," Kraft recalls. Workman carried the wounded Marine to a couple of Humvees, where a medical corpsman began working on him. Workman saw two other Marines sprawled in the back of a Humvee: Cpl. Raleigh Smith and Lance Cpl. Eric Hillenburg.

"Hey, doc!" he yelled. "Get up here!"

"They're all right," yelled the corpsman, who was treating the Marine that Workman had dragged to safety.

"I'm yelling, 'Doc, get your ass up here!' And he's yelling, 'They're all right, dammit, leave 'em be.' And I'm like, 'Get up here!' And he says, 'They're dead, man, they're dead.' "

Workman jumped out of the Humvee. "This was the first time I'd ever seen a dead Marine, ever," he says. "It was like somebody flipped a switch, like it wasn't even me anymore. . . . I grabbed whoever's standing around and we ran back into the house. Now it's like vengeance. I want to take as many insurgents out as possible."

The house was dark, the air heavy with smoke. Workman led another charge up the stairs and ran into another grenade.

"It knocked most of us down," he says. "At this point, none of us wants to get up. We're like, 'We're gonna die here.' My buddy, he gets up and fights and I hear this horrendous scream. They hit him with an AK47 and it literally tore the whole triceps off his arm."

Workman pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it into the bedroom where the insurgents were barricaded, and then the Marines tumbled back downstairs.

"I collapse at the bottom of the stairs," he says. "I'm, like, done. And Major [Todd] Desgrosseilliers grabbed me by the helmet and dragged me out of the house."

All the Marines were out of the building and an M1A1 tank had arrived. It blasted the house to rubble.