'I can't hear, I can't hear!'
21 December 2004 Jeremy RedmonRichmond Times-Dispatch
var clickExpire = "01/20/2005";Editor's Note: Jeremy Redmon is a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch embedded with U.S. troops in Mosul, Iraq.
MOSUL, Iraq (AP) -- It was a brilliant, sunny day with blue skies and warmer than usual weather in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
Hundreds of U.S. soldiers had just sat down for lunch in their giant mess hall tent.
It was about noon Tuesday when insurgents hit their tent with a rocket attack.
Soldiers were knocked off their feet and out of their seats. A fireball enveloped the top of the tent, and shrapnel sprayed into the men. Twenty-two people were killed.
Amid the screaming and thick smoke that followed, quick-thinking soldiers turned their lunch tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and gently carried them into the parking lot.
"Medic! Medic!" soldiers shouted.
Medics rushed into the tent and hustled the rest of the wounded out on stretchers.
Scores of troops crammed into concrete bomb shelters outside. Others wobbled around the tent and collapsed.
"I can't hear! I can't hear!" one female soldier cried as a friend hugged her.
Near the front entrance to the chow hall, troops tended a soldier with a gaping head wound. Within minutes, they zipped him into a black body bag. Three more bodies were in the parking lot.
The military asked that the dead not be identified until families could be notified.
Soldiers scrambled back into the hall to check for more wounded. The attack blew a huge hole in the roof of the tent. Puddles of bright red blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.
Grim-faced soldiers growled angrily about the attack as they stomped away.
"Mother [expletive]!" one mumbled.
Sgt. Evan Byler, of the Richmond, Virginia-based 276th Engineer Battalion, steadied himself on one of the concrete bomb shelters. He was eating chicken tenders and macaroni when the bomb hit. The blast knocked him out of his chair. When the smoke cleared, Byler took off his shirt and wrapped it around a seriously wounded soldier.
Byler held the bloody shirt in his hand, not quite sure what to do with it.
"It's not the first close call I have had here," said Byler, who survived a blast from a roadside bomb while riding in a vehicle earlier this year.
Byler saw a soldier collapse from shock on the side of the road. Byler and Lt. Shawn Otto put the grieving soldier on a passing pickup truck.
The 276th, with about 500 troops, had made it a year without losing a soldier and is preparing to return home in about a month.
"We almost made it. We almost made it to the end without getting somebody killed," Otto said glumly.
Insurgents have fired mortars at the chow hall more than 30 times this year. During the summer, one round killed a female soldier as she scrambled for cover in one of the concrete bomb shelters. Workers are building a new steel and concrete chow hall for the soldiers just down the dusty dirt road.
Lt. Dawn Wheeler was waiting in line for chicken tenders when a round hit on the other side of a wall from her. A soldier who had been standing beside her was on the ground, struggling with shrapnel buried deep in his neck.
"We all have angels on us," she said as she pulled away in a Humvee.
Maj. James Zollar, the unit's acting commander, spoke to more than a dozen of his officers in a voice thick with emotion. He urged them to keep their troops focused on their missions.
"This is a tragic, tragic thing for us, but we still have missions," he told them. "It's us, the leaders, who have to pull them together."
Just hours before the blast, Zollar had awarded a Purple Heart to a soldier from the 276th who was wounded in a mortar attack on another part of the base in October.
Zollar eventually turned the emergency meeting over to Chaplain Eddie Barnett. He led the group in prayer.
"Help us now, God, in this time of this very tragic circumstance," Barnett said. "We pray for your healing upon our wounded soldiers."
With heads hung low, the soldiers trudged outside. They had work to do.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/12/21/iraq.scene.ap/index.html
