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Timothy Nein, Leigh Ann Hester, and Jason Mike
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
On the morning of March 20, 2005, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein was a frustrated man. A veteran of the 2003 Iraq invasion, he had voluntarily switched from one unit of the Kentucky National Guard to another so that he could return to the battlefield. He made his squad of military police -- seven men, two women -- spend their one day off every week cleaning and maintaining their three armored Humvees. "I had a dry-erase board on the wall [at the base]," Nein said, "and every intersection, we would have a plan for, just like a football coach before a game."
But insurgents were hitting harder and harder along the stretch of highway that his squad was assigned to patrol, a choke point near Salman Pak, a town south of Baghdad. "We had seen these guys hit real fast and get away numerous times; we were never able to catch 'em," said Nein. On March 18, Nein's squad had missed one ambush on a convoy by minutes. By the time they arrived at the stricken convoy, Nein said, "the fight was pretty much over -- 18 tractor-trailers out of 30 were disabled. A couple of the [civilian] drivers were lying out there on the ground, dead."
After spending 24 hours guarding the medics and tow trucks cleaning up the wreckage, Nein's squad got back to base. "While I'm laying there in my bunk," he remembered, "I'm thinking, 'I've got to come up with something or a lot more people are going to die.' " The next day, the 20th, Nein told his squad, "No breaks. If we don't have to stop to urinate, we're going to keep right on trucking." Again and again, his three Humvees swung round to shadow convoys passing through their sector. Finally, just before noon, they fell in behind some tractor-trailers escorted by another Kentucky National Guard unit.
"We must have driven for about five minutes behind them," Nein said, "when we started to notice their trail vehicles going left and right like they're trying to avoid something." The something was wreckage. Two convoys -- one northbound, one southbound -- had stumbled into the same ambush from opposite directions. One convoy's Humvee escorts tried to follow standard procedure and speed out of the kill zone, but disabled vehicles blocked every lane. Civilian drivers fled on foot while the soldiers intermingled with the convoys were scattered, pinned down, and taking casualties.
Nein's squad, however, had hung far enough back to escape the chaos and now could respond as a coherent unit. And the soldiers' preparation started paying off. "When we realized where the ambush was," Nein said, "we realized there was a road we could flank them on. What I didn't see, because they were behind berms and in entrenched positions, was probably 90 percent of their force." Nein's three Humvees raced through a gap in the stalled convoy and down the side road to cut off the dozen enemy fighters that intelligence had told them to expect. Instead they found themselves in the midst of 50 Iraqis.
"We get hit with an RPG," Nein recounted. "Casey Cooper, my gunner, goes down. I grab him, shake him, he doesn't respond. I think he's dead, and I start to climb over him when he springs up, yells, 'I'm OK,' gets back on the gun, and starts to lay down fire." Then the Humvee's driver turned on the windshield wipers: Nein looked up to see the shot-up engine splattering everything with oil as it ground to a halt. Another of Nein's Humvees had been hit as well, wounding every man inside -- except for the squad's medic.
"I could see two bodies on the ground," Nein recalled. "I could see my medic, Jason Mike, with an M-240 [light machine gun] in his right hand and an M-4 [carbine] in his left hand, shooting in both directions." Nein realized that they were surrounded. Moments later, Mike switched to an AT-4 rocket launcher. "About a week before, we were training on the AT-4s," Nein continued, "and he said, 'Man, I'm a medic. If I ever have to fire this, we're in real deep trouble.' "
The only Humvee left intact was Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester's, but she too piled out and ran forward under fire to join Nein. Unable to retreat, with no cover behind them, Nein told her, "We need to go on the offensive." Hester agreed, shot past Nein to kill an insurgent who was behind him, and then she leaped after Nein into the enemy's main trench. "I threw a grenade while she shot over my shoulder, then I'd shoot while she threw," Nein said. "I had a guy 20 meters from me spraying an AK-47 from his hip. I could hear the bullets impacting around me. I remember thinking, 'I cannot believe I'm not being hit right now.' But he wasn't disciplined enough to put that rifle to his shoulder and aim at me. I put three rounds into his chest."
Nein and Hester fought their way down the trench, under covering fire from the rest of their squad. Meanwhile, the convoys' other Humvee escorts had begun to regroup and move up to help. The ambushers, always intending a quick hit-and-run attack, broke and fled, leaving 33 of their own dead and wounded behind. Nein, Hester, and Mike were given Silver Stars -- making Hester the first woman ever to receive the award for active combat. Every soldier in their squad survived.