thedrifter
09-30-03, 05:32 PM
The Unknown Hero of the 507th
He received no book publishing offers or movie deals for his heroism in Iraq. But six months after the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Co. convoy in Nasiriyah, the full story has finally emerged of what Pfc. Patrick Miller accomplished in his valiant defense of fellow soldiers surrounded by an overwhelming number of Iraq fighters.
While the news media feasted on the glamorous -- and inaccurate -- accounts of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, few people outside the Army have ever been told of Miller's stand against the enemy that day -- until now.
The Baltimore Sun on Sunday, Sept. 28, published a 4,300-word account of how Miller rushed toward the attackers armed only with a disabled M-16 rifle that could only fire single-shot rounds. Nevertheless, he managed to kill or injure eight Iraqis before finally being captured. As a POW, he deceived his captors into believing classified radio codes were purchase orders for maintenance equipment. And he tormented fellow prisoners and guards alike with his off-key singing of a favorite song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue."
Col. Heidi V. Brown, the commander of the Army task force in Iraq that included Miller’s unit, said of Miller’s actions: “Would you do the things he did? Would you? Could you?”
Miller received the Silver Star, Purple Heart and POW Medal for his actions on March 23, 2003.
To read the full account by Military Reporter Tom Bowman
A famous fight, an unsung hero
Iraq: During one of the war's bloodiest battles, a young private saved fellow soldiers and then kept cool amid weeks of captivity. His name is Patrick Miller.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Tom Bowman
Sun National Staff
Originally published September 28, 2003
FORT CARSON, Colo. -- Pfc. Jessica Lynch is the celebrity soldier of the Iraq war. Pfc. Patrick Miller, a member of the same company captured with her in a ferocious firefight, remains one of its unsung heroes.
Lynch, Miller and others in their convoy mistakenly drove into the vipers' nest of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, early on a March morning and were encircled by Iraqi fighters. In the ensuing swirl of chaos and shouting, wrong turns and unrelenting fire, Lynch's Humvee crashed, and she lay unconscious among her dead and dying comrades.
It was Miller, a 23-year-old Army welder from Kansas, who single-handedly took on several Iraqis, manually slamming rounds into his assault rifle and firing as they prepared to lob mortar rounds at Lynch and other soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company.
"He's one of my heroes," said Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, who was wounded and leaning against her truck as Miller dashed past her up a dusty road toward the Iraqi mortar pit. "His actions may have saved my life."
Miller was the sole member of the unit to receive the Silver Star, one of the military's highest awards for valor. Nearly 130,000 Army troops served in the Iraq war and its aftermath, but only 86 Silver Stars had been awarded through mid-September, according to the Army Personnel Command. Lynch and other members of the 507th received Bronze Stars, a notch below the Silver Star.
"Shoshana yelled at him, 'Get down, Miller! Get down! You're going to get hit!'" said another soldier, Spc. Edgar Hernandez, describing how Miller charged toward the Iraqis. Hernandez recalled hearing automatic fire from Iraqi AK-47s and the single shots of Miller's M-16 rifle.
As a prisoner of war, Miller badgered his interrogators for three weeks, singing an off-key rendition of country singer Toby Keith's anti-terrorist song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." And he fooled them.
The Iraqis pressed him to explain a series of numbers and code words scratched on a piece of paper inside his helmet. Prices for power-steering pumps, he told them. The soldiers tossed the paper into a small campfire, unaware that they had destroyed information vital to an enemy: radio frequencies for an invading unit.
"He's a Pfc. in the Army and he exposed himself without hesitation to the enemy to save his comrades," said Col. Heidi V. Brown, who commanded the Army task force in Iraq that included Miller's unit and who wrote his medal ciTation, based on interviews with U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. "It doesn't get more heroic than that."
All the witnesses corroborated the tale of Miller's charging toward a mortar pit and shooting at the enemy, said Brown in a telephone interview, though no one could agree on a precise number of enemy dead. An Army investigative report said it could have been as many as nine. "Absolutely, he killed some Iraqis," Brown said.
A myth is born
The story of Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army supply clerk from West Virginia, began as a piece of faulty information. An intercepted Iraqi radio transmission referred to a blond American woman who repeatedly fired on her attackers, despite bullet and stab wounds.
The inaccuracy was passed on to reporters, and the myth of a slightly built clerk who morphed into a fierce warrior quickly circulated. Her legend only grew when Special Operations soldiers stormed a hospital in early April and rescued her. But to this day, according to Army investigators, there is no known evidence that she ever fired her weapon or killed any Iraqis.
Lynch, who left the Army with a medical discharge this summer, never portrayed herself as a hero. When she returned home to West Virginia in July, she thanked those who rescued her and said she regretted that some in her company never made it home.
"Patrick is a brave soldier, risking his life as he did to save others. I am proud of his courage," Lynch said Friday, in remarks relayed through Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf. The publishing house signed her to a $1 million book deal for her wartime experiences titled I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story.
She will also be the subject of a network TV movie, with a young Canadian portraying her. An industrial area in Dallas has been converted into a fictional Nasiriyah -- complete with Saddam Hussein bas-reliefs.
Early this month, ABC News personality Diane Sawyer scored the first on-air interview with Lynch. It is scheduled for November, the same month her memoir will arrive in bookstores.
There are no agents, books or movie deals for Miller, whom the Army transferred last month from Texas to this wind-swept military base hard up against the forested mountains of the Rampart Range in central Colorado. In May, he was grand marshal at an Armed Forces Day parade in Topeka, Kan., up the interstate from Valley Center, his rural hometown of about 5,000. Several weeks later he threw out the first ball at a Kansas City Royals baseball game.
Miller appeared on the NBC News show Dateline last month with four other prisoners of war from the 507th -- minus Jessica Lynch -- though his story was lost among the recollections of his comrades. One of his few interviews was with a small newspaper in Alabama, when he traveled there this summer for an Army event.
Gangly and bespectacled, with a loping gait, Miller speaks in a broad Kansas drawl that enlivens his casual grammar and the occasional "dang." His lower lip bulges with an ever-present wad of chewing tobacco.
Johnson, his fellow POW from the 507th, couldn't recall anything particularly special about Miller when they were stationed together at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the months before they headed off to war. "A down-to-earth country boy," Johnson remembered with a laugh. "He likes his chew. That's all I remember about Pat: He had that chew in his mouth."
Miller now spends his days toiling in a motor pool as part of the 2nd Company of the 43rd Area Support Group. Because most of the unit's heavy equipment has been shipped over to Iraq, his welding torch has been cold. Recently, he has been cutting the grass and slathering brown and white paint on the building's interior walls. Every so often, a fellow soldier will quiz him about his service in Iraq.
A $25,000-a-year private first class, Miller lives in a modest three-bedroom townhouse on base with his wife, Jessa,, and two children, 4-year-old Tyler and 14-month-old Makenzie. The children are in day care while his wife works making glasses for LensCrafters. One day, Miller hopes to rise to a higher enlisted rank -- an Army warrant officer -- and oversee a maintenance shop, perhaps putting in 20 years.
He brushed aside talk of heroism in an interview and recounted his actions in a matter-of-fact tone, as if the conversation had turned to the coming season for Kansas State football or needed repairs on his brown and dented 1989 Chevrolet Corsica. All but the most personal elements of his account were confirmed in other interviews by The Sun and the Army and official Army documents.
"I was doing what I get paid to do," he said. His Army training "kicked in" when he faced enemy fighters.
But the fact that Miller remains an unknown grates on Johnson and some in Miller's family.
"Jessica's a wonderful girl, and we're happy she's OK," Johnson said. "But it was Patrick; it wasn't Jessica. His weapon was working. He was doing everything possible. Patrick deserves so much, and he's not getting the recognition. He's still a private first class. He hasn't even been promoted."
continued.........
He received no book publishing offers or movie deals for his heroism in Iraq. But six months after the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Co. convoy in Nasiriyah, the full story has finally emerged of what Pfc. Patrick Miller accomplished in his valiant defense of fellow soldiers surrounded by an overwhelming number of Iraq fighters.
While the news media feasted on the glamorous -- and inaccurate -- accounts of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, few people outside the Army have ever been told of Miller's stand against the enemy that day -- until now.
The Baltimore Sun on Sunday, Sept. 28, published a 4,300-word account of how Miller rushed toward the attackers armed only with a disabled M-16 rifle that could only fire single-shot rounds. Nevertheless, he managed to kill or injure eight Iraqis before finally being captured. As a POW, he deceived his captors into believing classified radio codes were purchase orders for maintenance equipment. And he tormented fellow prisoners and guards alike with his off-key singing of a favorite song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue."
Col. Heidi V. Brown, the commander of the Army task force in Iraq that included Miller’s unit, said of Miller’s actions: “Would you do the things he did? Would you? Could you?”
Miller received the Silver Star, Purple Heart and POW Medal for his actions on March 23, 2003.
To read the full account by Military Reporter Tom Bowman
A famous fight, an unsung hero
Iraq: During one of the war's bloodiest battles, a young private saved fellow soldiers and then kept cool amid weeks of captivity. His name is Patrick Miller.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Tom Bowman
Sun National Staff
Originally published September 28, 2003
FORT CARSON, Colo. -- Pfc. Jessica Lynch is the celebrity soldier of the Iraq war. Pfc. Patrick Miller, a member of the same company captured with her in a ferocious firefight, remains one of its unsung heroes.
Lynch, Miller and others in their convoy mistakenly drove into the vipers' nest of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, early on a March morning and were encircled by Iraqi fighters. In the ensuing swirl of chaos and shouting, wrong turns and unrelenting fire, Lynch's Humvee crashed, and she lay unconscious among her dead and dying comrades.
It was Miller, a 23-year-old Army welder from Kansas, who single-handedly took on several Iraqis, manually slamming rounds into his assault rifle and firing as they prepared to lob mortar rounds at Lynch and other soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company.
"He's one of my heroes," said Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, who was wounded and leaning against her truck as Miller dashed past her up a dusty road toward the Iraqi mortar pit. "His actions may have saved my life."
Miller was the sole member of the unit to receive the Silver Star, one of the military's highest awards for valor. Nearly 130,000 Army troops served in the Iraq war and its aftermath, but only 86 Silver Stars had been awarded through mid-September, according to the Army Personnel Command. Lynch and other members of the 507th received Bronze Stars, a notch below the Silver Star.
"Shoshana yelled at him, 'Get down, Miller! Get down! You're going to get hit!'" said another soldier, Spc. Edgar Hernandez, describing how Miller charged toward the Iraqis. Hernandez recalled hearing automatic fire from Iraqi AK-47s and the single shots of Miller's M-16 rifle.
As a prisoner of war, Miller badgered his interrogators for three weeks, singing an off-key rendition of country singer Toby Keith's anti-terrorist song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." And he fooled them.
The Iraqis pressed him to explain a series of numbers and code words scratched on a piece of paper inside his helmet. Prices for power-steering pumps, he told them. The soldiers tossed the paper into a small campfire, unaware that they had destroyed information vital to an enemy: radio frequencies for an invading unit.
"He's a Pfc. in the Army and he exposed himself without hesitation to the enemy to save his comrades," said Col. Heidi V. Brown, who commanded the Army task force in Iraq that included Miller's unit and who wrote his medal ciTation, based on interviews with U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. "It doesn't get more heroic than that."
All the witnesses corroborated the tale of Miller's charging toward a mortar pit and shooting at the enemy, said Brown in a telephone interview, though no one could agree on a precise number of enemy dead. An Army investigative report said it could have been as many as nine. "Absolutely, he killed some Iraqis," Brown said.
A myth is born
The story of Lynch, then a 19-year-old Army supply clerk from West Virginia, began as a piece of faulty information. An intercepted Iraqi radio transmission referred to a blond American woman who repeatedly fired on her attackers, despite bullet and stab wounds.
The inaccuracy was passed on to reporters, and the myth of a slightly built clerk who morphed into a fierce warrior quickly circulated. Her legend only grew when Special Operations soldiers stormed a hospital in early April and rescued her. But to this day, according to Army investigators, there is no known evidence that she ever fired her weapon or killed any Iraqis.
Lynch, who left the Army with a medical discharge this summer, never portrayed herself as a hero. When she returned home to West Virginia in July, she thanked those who rescued her and said she regretted that some in her company never made it home.
"Patrick is a brave soldier, risking his life as he did to save others. I am proud of his courage," Lynch said Friday, in remarks relayed through Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf. The publishing house signed her to a $1 million book deal for her wartime experiences titled I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story.
She will also be the subject of a network TV movie, with a young Canadian portraying her. An industrial area in Dallas has been converted into a fictional Nasiriyah -- complete with Saddam Hussein bas-reliefs.
Early this month, ABC News personality Diane Sawyer scored the first on-air interview with Lynch. It is scheduled for November, the same month her memoir will arrive in bookstores.
There are no agents, books or movie deals for Miller, whom the Army transferred last month from Texas to this wind-swept military base hard up against the forested mountains of the Rampart Range in central Colorado. In May, he was grand marshal at an Armed Forces Day parade in Topeka, Kan., up the interstate from Valley Center, his rural hometown of about 5,000. Several weeks later he threw out the first ball at a Kansas City Royals baseball game.
Miller appeared on the NBC News show Dateline last month with four other prisoners of war from the 507th -- minus Jessica Lynch -- though his story was lost among the recollections of his comrades. One of his few interviews was with a small newspaper in Alabama, when he traveled there this summer for an Army event.
Gangly and bespectacled, with a loping gait, Miller speaks in a broad Kansas drawl that enlivens his casual grammar and the occasional "dang." His lower lip bulges with an ever-present wad of chewing tobacco.
Johnson, his fellow POW from the 507th, couldn't recall anything particularly special about Miller when they were stationed together at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the months before they headed off to war. "A down-to-earth country boy," Johnson remembered with a laugh. "He likes his chew. That's all I remember about Pat: He had that chew in his mouth."
Miller now spends his days toiling in a motor pool as part of the 2nd Company of the 43rd Area Support Group. Because most of the unit's heavy equipment has been shipped over to Iraq, his welding torch has been cold. Recently, he has been cutting the grass and slathering brown and white paint on the building's interior walls. Every so often, a fellow soldier will quiz him about his service in Iraq.
A $25,000-a-year private first class, Miller lives in a modest three-bedroom townhouse on base with his wife, Jessa,, and two children, 4-year-old Tyler and 14-month-old Makenzie. The children are in day care while his wife works making glasses for LensCrafters. One day, Miller hopes to rise to a higher enlisted rank -- an Army warrant officer -- and oversee a maintenance shop, perhaps putting in 20 years.
He brushed aside talk of heroism in an interview and recounted his actions in a matter-of-fact tone, as if the conversation had turned to the coming season for Kansas State football or needed repairs on his brown and dented 1989 Chevrolet Corsica. All but the most personal elements of his account were confirmed in other interviews by The Sun and the Army and official Army documents.
"I was doing what I get paid to do," he said. His Army training "kicked in" when he faced enemy fighters.
But the fact that Miller remains an unknown grates on Johnson and some in Miller's family.
"Jessica's a wonderful girl, and we're happy she's OK," Johnson said. "But it was Patrick; it wasn't Jessica. His weapon was working. He was doing everything possible. Patrick deserves so much, and he's not getting the recognition. He's still a private first class. He hasn't even been promoted."
continued.........