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Unit's Mission: Survive 4 Miles To Remember Fallen Comrade
Sgt. 1st Class Corey King, left, planned the route, while Capt. Ricky Taylor decided if troops would ride or walk.
(By David Finkel -- The Washington Post)
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He looked down the street and saw a parked car, hood up, trunk open, and a man next to it who appeared to be holding a small container of gasoline.
He approached another concrete block and saw that it was actually a piece of foam -- and then he saw the wire.
"Get back! Get back!" he hollered.
"What is it?" Taylor, in the rear, radioed.
"IED!" King radioed back, and as soldiers began moving away, and King looked down an alley and locked eyes for a moment with a man peering around a corner, the bomb exploded.
The boom was ear-splitting, the air turned dark with flying dirt, and when the echoes ended, and the dirt settled, some soldiers were down on their hands and knees, stunned, filthy, unable to hear. Others began tracing the wire down the alley, and when they got to the spot where King had seen the man, they found only a mattress where someone could lie in comfort while gazing up the alley, waiting for a convoy to rumble past.
In came the reports: no one hurt, except for headaches and ringing ears. They searched for the triggerman, but he was gone. They searched for the man with the gasoline container, but he was gone, too. They rounded up two men in the vicinity who perhaps knew something, and as they regrouped to move on, all of them safe, a second explosion occurred.
It was another IED, this one from up by the orange truck.
A cloud of dirt moved down the street.
Then came the whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade, flying overhead and exploding in the distance.
And then came bursts of machine-gun fire, which was followed by much louder bursts of return fire from the mounted machine guns in the Humvees, and then everything went suddenly quiet until a few minutes later, when two Apache helicopters swooped in to escort the soldiers the rest of the way.
One helicopter stayed high and one came in low, only a couple of hundred feet in the air. It was low enough that the soldiers could see the pilot and co-pilot, who were looking down not only at them, but at rooftops, at roads, at awakening eastern Baghdad, and now, as the soldiers continued their walk, at something that made the pilots suspect there was yet another roadside bomb just ahead.
