2 soldiers helped get 'battle buddies out of there'

FORT HOOD, TEX. -- They had been running errands on base all morning and the 21-year-old soldiers were hungry for lunch. But there was one last stop to make. Pfc. Marquest Smith needed to process his paperwork for an allergy shot.

So they pulled up to the soldier readiness facility on this sprawling Army base. Smith went inside while Pfc. Jeffrey Pearsall waited in his white F-150 pickup, calling his older brother to pass the time.

A few minutes later, after 1 p.m. Thursday, a gunman in Army fatigues opened fire on his fellow soldiers in the building. Smith, in a cubicle with the woman processing his papers, heard the noise and assumed someone was popping popcorn. Then he heard yelling and moaning. Someone shouted, "Gun!"

"I thought, are you serious? Is this really happening?" Smith recalled in an interview.

In two months, the buddies head to Afghanistan and into war for the first time. They don't have the aural memory of actual gunfire that so many share on this war-weary post of 60,000.

Smith pushed the woman under her desk and locked the cubicle door with a chair. They waited anxiously in the quiet for about 15 minutes until the popping stopped.

Outside, meanwhile, his buddy Pearsall knew what was happening. "I heard the gunshots," Pearsall recalled. "It was consistent gunshots, then a break -- I guess reloading -- and then more consistent gunshots."

Pearsall could have driven away, but he didn't want to leave Smith. They had become fast friends since they started training here several months ago -- Pearsall, a husky 5-foot-8 white man from Houston who lives in the barracks, and Smith, a thin 6-foot-5 black man from Fort Worth who lives with his wife and two children off base.

In January, they are scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan with the 20th combat engineer battalion. Neither has been to war before, but when gunfire exploded on this otherwise peaceful military installation, Pearsall and Smith were calm.

"They trained us not to do that, not to run, but to get our battle buddies out of there," Pearsall said.

As wounded soldiers started pouring out of the building, Pearsall drove closer to the entrance, jumped out and ran to their aid.

"When two of the people coming out were bleeding significantly and were within seconds of losing consciousness, they looked like they were about to drop, so we knew we had to get them there," Pearsall said.