thedrifter
12-06-05, 12:35 PM
December 12, 2005
Saving their buddies
Three Marines earn Silver Stars for leadership, heroism in Iraq
By Gidget Fuentes and John Hoellwarth
Times staff writers
As enemy rounds and rocket-propelled grenades battered the Iraqi house, then-Staff Sgt. Ismael Sagredo saw the odds of his men’s survival diminish as their ammunition stock neared zero.
But as he looked at his severely wounded platoon commander, Sagredo knew that combat was becoming a hand-to-hand likelihood, and he quietly made the decision: They would, with every ounce of themselves, fight their way to keep their lieutenant, and themselves, out of insurgent hands.
Sagredo and his men with Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon already had run a gantlet of fire on April 13, 2004, when their burning Amphibious Assault Vehicle raced down a street deep inside enemy territory in Fallujah’s neighborhood called Queens.
Now, insurgents surrounded the house, some lobbing grenades at windows, as the 16 leathernecks with 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, fought them off with every round and grenade they had for nearly 90 minutes.
“We were going to make a run for it,” Sagredo, 37, recalled.
But they didn’t have to leave. A rescue force of four Abrams tanks and armored vehicles battled its way to the house, and its men shared magazines with 2nd Platoon and fought as the wounded, including 1st Lt. Christopher Ayres, were raced to 1/5’s aid station.
For his actions in leading troops that day, the Marine Corps awarded Sagredo the Silver Star. During a brief but emotional Nov. 30 ceremony outside 1/5’s headquarters at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Ayres placed the medal on Sagredo’s blouse and struggled to thank the platoon sergeant who helped save his life.
“It’s an extreme honor to have him and the rest of the Marines in 2nd Platoon and other elements save my life and pull me out of dire straits there. We were all in a pretty bad situation,” Ayres said.
The men’s bond — platoon commander and platoon sergeant — will forever be strong, he said.
“It’s kind of hard to put into words, and you just can’t find these words,” Ayres said, his voice trailing. “They are hard to come by.”
Sagredo was one of three Marines who received the Silver Star — one given posthumously — the week of Nov. 27. All were given to Marines for separate actions, and the men were from separate units. But all of them — Sagredo, Staff Sgt. Jason Navarrette and Capt. Patrick Rapicault — were united in the heroism that brought forth the rare honor of the military’s third-highest award for valor.
Short on ammo, tall on courage
Sagredo, who received a combat meritorious promotion to gunnery sergeant, stood before a formation on 1/5’s parade deck and thanked the battalion.
“Without this battalion, I would not be here today,” he said.
“A lot of Marines had no ammo. I had three rounds with me,” he told them. “It was the quick reaction force [QRF] ... that arrived to our rescue and resupplied and replenished us with ammunition. Without those Marines, I would not be here today, and I would not have my beautiful wife and my lovely daughter and my son.”
The actions on that ill-fated day, which drew handfuls of combat awards, including several Bronze Star and Navy-Marine Corps Commendation medals for valor, began with a deadly ambush when the QRF was protecting a downed military helicopter, and it continued into the rescue.
Talk about the actions that day and the Marines’ courage and bravery still crops into conversations today, even after the battalion’s return this fall from its third combat deployment.
The battalion was tested when it was ordered into Fallujah in the military’s initial foray in early April 2004.
“That two weeks in Fallujah was definitely the most intense as far as firefights go,” said Cpl. Abraham McCarver, 23, who made all three combat deployments with 1/5.
On April 13, insurgent fighters attacked a Bravo resupply of food for McCarver and his platoon’s squads, who were set up in observation posts in three houses in the eastern portion of the city. The Marines got into the amtracs to fight and push insurgents, “and we were going to cut them off there and kill them,” McCarver recalled.
But an RPG hit the other amtrac, knocking off its radio, and the two vehicles veered in opposite directions.
McCarver said his driver, Lance Cpl. Matthew Puckett, tried to steer through the heavy fire, but as the vehicle moved deeper into the city, it caught fire from RPG hits. Blazing, it had stopped on a residential street when Sagredo noticed a house with a red door. The platoon sergeant sent a team led by then-Cpl. Ronnie Garcia to bust into the house, which was unoccupied.
Tense seconds passed as the men struggled amid smoke and fire to pull out Ayres and the other wounded, including Puckett, the driver, as the gunner, Cpl. Kevin Kolm, gave covering fire.
However, Kolm, 23, died in the turret. (Puckett, 19, was killed five months later in an ambush in Iraq.)
At this point, with Ayres down, Sagredo took command, went to the rooftop — exposing himself and his radioman — and got on the radio to call for help. As the fighting continued, an insurgent threw a grenade, which exploded inside the house, slightly wounding two Marines. The men were running out of ammunition.
“I told the Marines, do not fire more than two rounds unless you have a solid target,” Sagredo said.
The enemy surrounded them. One Marine shot and killed an insurgent carrying an RPG launcher who had gotten inside the compound walls and was outside the house. Two insurgents tried to get through the kitchen windows and doors, but the Marines fought them off with fire.
“We were so short on ammunition at that point that I made a mental note that we weren’t going to die in the building. We would just have to make a run for it,” Sagredo said. “The last thing that we wanted to do was to have a Marine Corps officer taken prisoner, whether he was dead or alive, by insurgents. No one wanted to be taken prisoner because we ran out of ammunition.”
Within minutes, the rumbles of tracked vehicles caught their eye, and the QRF rolled in, fighting off insurgents. A fighter jet soon rained fire on insurgents in the streets as the Marine force, with the destroyed amtrac in tow, raced back across friendly lines. As many as 80 to 100 enemy were killed that day, battalion officers have said.
“His leadership and calm demeanor under fire reassured the Marines and inspired them as they ran low on ammunition,” Sagredo’s citation reads. “Once the reaction force arrived, Staff Sergeant Sagredo moved with complete disregard for his own safety until his platoon commander was evacuated, the amtrac recovered, and all forces moved to safe positions.”
The soft-spoken Sagredo, who will attend the advanced course at the Staff Noncommissioned Officer’s Academy this spring, shook off some of the attention over the award. “It took a lot of individual efforts,” he said, adding, “I was just doing my job.”
Twice into the breach
Staff Sgt. Jason Navarrette was a member of a traveling team of explosive ordnance disposal technicians supporting 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines, when their convoy of five Humvees was ambushed in Lutafiyah, Iraq, on April 9, 2004.
The ambush started when automatic weapons fire and RPGs pounded the area around him. Navarrette, 28, from Phoenix, thought that staying near the vehicle was a bad idea because Humvees are easy targets for RPGs.
So Navarrette ran toward his attackers, according to his Silver Star citation.
Two of Navarrette’s fellow Marines followed suit, and soon the three-man team had “eliminated and severely wounded several insurgents,” the citation states. “The ferocity of their defense held the enemy at bay.”
Although Navarrette and his fellow Marines were mounting an effective assault, they were aware that the enemy forces had them “greatly outnumbered.” The enemy was firing on them from positions in buildings and alleyways, and from behind walled enclosures and parked vehicles.
Navarrette said the Marines weren’t completely encircled, but “it was pretty damned close.”
Driving through the ambush was not an option because the Marines knew there were explosives in the road ahead, placed there by the enemy to stop the convoy in the kill zone of the ambush.
“It was a great plot. It was a well-laid ambush, I just don’t think they expected us to be able to fight our way out of it,” Navarrette said.
A call came over the radio to turn around and retrace their path out of the kill zone.
Navarrette’s three-man team piled back into their Humvee and raced out of the city. When they arrived at the rally point, they learned that one of the vehicles in their ambushed convoy was still pinned down by enemy fire and unable to make it out of the kill zone. One quick U-turn later, Navarrette’s vehicle was on its way back to the fight. Navarrette was riding behind the driver with his rifle pointed outboard.
As Navarrette’s Humvee re-entered the city’s outskirts, a bullet tore into his left arm.
When Navarrette, his team and security force Marines in two other Humvees arrived at the ambush site, they laid down cover fire for the embattled Marines, surprising the insurgents who thought they had the separated Humvee cornered, Navarrette said.
Crouching behind his vehicle, Navarrette provided cover fire. But the effects of his bullet wound became clear when he tried to reload his weapon.
“I remember having to reload, and my hand wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing,” he said. “When I was hit, I was holding the hand guard in my left hand. My hand just kind of froze up on me in [that position].”
Navarrette reloaded his weapon with his right hand, then started shooting again with his left.
“You could rest the weapon in the [immobile left hand],” he said. “Basically, it was a nice stable shooting position.”
“Ignoring his bleeding and immobilized arm, he continued to engage the enemy until all personnel and vehicles were ready to move,” Navarrette’s citation reads.
As the rest of his convoy left the ambush site, Navarrette was shooting at every insurgent he could see and some that he couldn’t from the covered position behind his armored Humvee.
“His actions inspired his fellow Marines to continue to repel the enemy attack, ultimately leading to their safe withdrawal,” according to the citation.
Navarrette, described by his co-workers as a humble man, was quick to vouch for the character of the Marines who fought alongside him.
“You work with a lot of good people, and a lot of people I’ve worked with have done a lot of great things,” he said.
A bold leader
For two months last autumn, Capt. Patrick Rapicault led the men of Weapons Company through Ramadi, pulling them through 50 firefights and enduring 27 roadside bombs in the provincial capital of Iraq’s insurgent-ridden Sunni Triangle.
In the end, though, a suicidal driver of a bomb-laden vehicle ended the life of the 34-year-old officer with 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, a naturalized citizen who his Marines affectionately called “Frenchie.”
For his “bold leadership” and gallantry, the citation reads, the Marine Corps awarded the Silver Star posthumously to Rapicault, a native of France who came to the United States and joined the Corps.
His wife, Vera, accepted the medal Dec. 2 for her husband.
“Always leading from the front, he directed the fire and maneuver of his company with complete disregard for his own personal safety. Despite being the first Marine in the battalion wounded and his company suffering the heaviest casualties during daily street fighting, Captain Rapicault always displayed an infectious enthusiasm that motivated every Marine to fight hard and recover quickly from battle,” his citation reads.
“On every mission, Captain Rapicault’s intuitive and calm combat leadership ensured success on the battlefield, with limited damage to vehicles and friendly casualties. He gallantly gave his life in the cause of freedom.”
It was a year ago, on Nov. 15, 2004, when Rapicault, a former enlisted Marine, died in combat. At the time, a crew from “60 Minutes” was accompanying the unit through missions in Ramadi.
The men were returning to Hurricane Point, their home base along the Euphrates River, when the Iraqi car approached on Route Michigan and exploded.
“We’re constantly under observation from those guys,” Rapicault said in the “60 Minutes” report, which aired in January.
“They know where we go. They know where we like to set up,” he said.
It was there, in Iraq, that Rapicault took the company’s command on Sept. 24, 2004. Today, a white marble headstone at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the Marine Corps War Memorial, marks the burial site for Rapicault, who grew up in St. Augustine, Fla.
“Patrick was so full of life, and he always liked to compete. When he had a goal, he accomplished it,” his sister, Christine Cappillino, told mourners at a Nov. 21, 2004, memorial service in St. Augustine, according to the St. Augustine Record.
“He never quit.”
The Iraq combat tour was Rapicault’s second.
His sister recounted how her brother frequently called and e-mailed his family every Sunday while he was deployed.
“He just wanted to say everything was OK,” she said, according to the newspaper.
Ellie
Saving their buddies
Three Marines earn Silver Stars for leadership, heroism in Iraq
By Gidget Fuentes and John Hoellwarth
Times staff writers
As enemy rounds and rocket-propelled grenades battered the Iraqi house, then-Staff Sgt. Ismael Sagredo saw the odds of his men’s survival diminish as their ammunition stock neared zero.
But as he looked at his severely wounded platoon commander, Sagredo knew that combat was becoming a hand-to-hand likelihood, and he quietly made the decision: They would, with every ounce of themselves, fight their way to keep their lieutenant, and themselves, out of insurgent hands.
Sagredo and his men with Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon already had run a gantlet of fire on April 13, 2004, when their burning Amphibious Assault Vehicle raced down a street deep inside enemy territory in Fallujah’s neighborhood called Queens.
Now, insurgents surrounded the house, some lobbing grenades at windows, as the 16 leathernecks with 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, fought them off with every round and grenade they had for nearly 90 minutes.
“We were going to make a run for it,” Sagredo, 37, recalled.
But they didn’t have to leave. A rescue force of four Abrams tanks and armored vehicles battled its way to the house, and its men shared magazines with 2nd Platoon and fought as the wounded, including 1st Lt. Christopher Ayres, were raced to 1/5’s aid station.
For his actions in leading troops that day, the Marine Corps awarded Sagredo the Silver Star. During a brief but emotional Nov. 30 ceremony outside 1/5’s headquarters at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Ayres placed the medal on Sagredo’s blouse and struggled to thank the platoon sergeant who helped save his life.
“It’s an extreme honor to have him and the rest of the Marines in 2nd Platoon and other elements save my life and pull me out of dire straits there. We were all in a pretty bad situation,” Ayres said.
The men’s bond — platoon commander and platoon sergeant — will forever be strong, he said.
“It’s kind of hard to put into words, and you just can’t find these words,” Ayres said, his voice trailing. “They are hard to come by.”
Sagredo was one of three Marines who received the Silver Star — one given posthumously — the week of Nov. 27. All were given to Marines for separate actions, and the men were from separate units. But all of them — Sagredo, Staff Sgt. Jason Navarrette and Capt. Patrick Rapicault — were united in the heroism that brought forth the rare honor of the military’s third-highest award for valor.
Short on ammo, tall on courage
Sagredo, who received a combat meritorious promotion to gunnery sergeant, stood before a formation on 1/5’s parade deck and thanked the battalion.
“Without this battalion, I would not be here today,” he said.
“A lot of Marines had no ammo. I had three rounds with me,” he told them. “It was the quick reaction force [QRF] ... that arrived to our rescue and resupplied and replenished us with ammunition. Without those Marines, I would not be here today, and I would not have my beautiful wife and my lovely daughter and my son.”
The actions on that ill-fated day, which drew handfuls of combat awards, including several Bronze Star and Navy-Marine Corps Commendation medals for valor, began with a deadly ambush when the QRF was protecting a downed military helicopter, and it continued into the rescue.
Talk about the actions that day and the Marines’ courage and bravery still crops into conversations today, even after the battalion’s return this fall from its third combat deployment.
The battalion was tested when it was ordered into Fallujah in the military’s initial foray in early April 2004.
“That two weeks in Fallujah was definitely the most intense as far as firefights go,” said Cpl. Abraham McCarver, 23, who made all three combat deployments with 1/5.
On April 13, insurgent fighters attacked a Bravo resupply of food for McCarver and his platoon’s squads, who were set up in observation posts in three houses in the eastern portion of the city. The Marines got into the amtracs to fight and push insurgents, “and we were going to cut them off there and kill them,” McCarver recalled.
But an RPG hit the other amtrac, knocking off its radio, and the two vehicles veered in opposite directions.
McCarver said his driver, Lance Cpl. Matthew Puckett, tried to steer through the heavy fire, but as the vehicle moved deeper into the city, it caught fire from RPG hits. Blazing, it had stopped on a residential street when Sagredo noticed a house with a red door. The platoon sergeant sent a team led by then-Cpl. Ronnie Garcia to bust into the house, which was unoccupied.
Tense seconds passed as the men struggled amid smoke and fire to pull out Ayres and the other wounded, including Puckett, the driver, as the gunner, Cpl. Kevin Kolm, gave covering fire.
However, Kolm, 23, died in the turret. (Puckett, 19, was killed five months later in an ambush in Iraq.)
At this point, with Ayres down, Sagredo took command, went to the rooftop — exposing himself and his radioman — and got on the radio to call for help. As the fighting continued, an insurgent threw a grenade, which exploded inside the house, slightly wounding two Marines. The men were running out of ammunition.
“I told the Marines, do not fire more than two rounds unless you have a solid target,” Sagredo said.
The enemy surrounded them. One Marine shot and killed an insurgent carrying an RPG launcher who had gotten inside the compound walls and was outside the house. Two insurgents tried to get through the kitchen windows and doors, but the Marines fought them off with fire.
“We were so short on ammunition at that point that I made a mental note that we weren’t going to die in the building. We would just have to make a run for it,” Sagredo said. “The last thing that we wanted to do was to have a Marine Corps officer taken prisoner, whether he was dead or alive, by insurgents. No one wanted to be taken prisoner because we ran out of ammunition.”
Within minutes, the rumbles of tracked vehicles caught their eye, and the QRF rolled in, fighting off insurgents. A fighter jet soon rained fire on insurgents in the streets as the Marine force, with the destroyed amtrac in tow, raced back across friendly lines. As many as 80 to 100 enemy were killed that day, battalion officers have said.
“His leadership and calm demeanor under fire reassured the Marines and inspired them as they ran low on ammunition,” Sagredo’s citation reads. “Once the reaction force arrived, Staff Sergeant Sagredo moved with complete disregard for his own safety until his platoon commander was evacuated, the amtrac recovered, and all forces moved to safe positions.”
The soft-spoken Sagredo, who will attend the advanced course at the Staff Noncommissioned Officer’s Academy this spring, shook off some of the attention over the award. “It took a lot of individual efforts,” he said, adding, “I was just doing my job.”
Twice into the breach
Staff Sgt. Jason Navarrette was a member of a traveling team of explosive ordnance disposal technicians supporting 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines, when their convoy of five Humvees was ambushed in Lutafiyah, Iraq, on April 9, 2004.
The ambush started when automatic weapons fire and RPGs pounded the area around him. Navarrette, 28, from Phoenix, thought that staying near the vehicle was a bad idea because Humvees are easy targets for RPGs.
So Navarrette ran toward his attackers, according to his Silver Star citation.
Two of Navarrette’s fellow Marines followed suit, and soon the three-man team had “eliminated and severely wounded several insurgents,” the citation states. “The ferocity of their defense held the enemy at bay.”
Although Navarrette and his fellow Marines were mounting an effective assault, they were aware that the enemy forces had them “greatly outnumbered.” The enemy was firing on them from positions in buildings and alleyways, and from behind walled enclosures and parked vehicles.
Navarrette said the Marines weren’t completely encircled, but “it was pretty damned close.”
Driving through the ambush was not an option because the Marines knew there were explosives in the road ahead, placed there by the enemy to stop the convoy in the kill zone of the ambush.
“It was a great plot. It was a well-laid ambush, I just don’t think they expected us to be able to fight our way out of it,” Navarrette said.
A call came over the radio to turn around and retrace their path out of the kill zone.
Navarrette’s three-man team piled back into their Humvee and raced out of the city. When they arrived at the rally point, they learned that one of the vehicles in their ambushed convoy was still pinned down by enemy fire and unable to make it out of the kill zone. One quick U-turn later, Navarrette’s vehicle was on its way back to the fight. Navarrette was riding behind the driver with his rifle pointed outboard.
As Navarrette’s Humvee re-entered the city’s outskirts, a bullet tore into his left arm.
When Navarrette, his team and security force Marines in two other Humvees arrived at the ambush site, they laid down cover fire for the embattled Marines, surprising the insurgents who thought they had the separated Humvee cornered, Navarrette said.
Crouching behind his vehicle, Navarrette provided cover fire. But the effects of his bullet wound became clear when he tried to reload his weapon.
“I remember having to reload, and my hand wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing,” he said. “When I was hit, I was holding the hand guard in my left hand. My hand just kind of froze up on me in [that position].”
Navarrette reloaded his weapon with his right hand, then started shooting again with his left.
“You could rest the weapon in the [immobile left hand],” he said. “Basically, it was a nice stable shooting position.”
“Ignoring his bleeding and immobilized arm, he continued to engage the enemy until all personnel and vehicles were ready to move,” Navarrette’s citation reads.
As the rest of his convoy left the ambush site, Navarrette was shooting at every insurgent he could see and some that he couldn’t from the covered position behind his armored Humvee.
“His actions inspired his fellow Marines to continue to repel the enemy attack, ultimately leading to their safe withdrawal,” according to the citation.
Navarrette, described by his co-workers as a humble man, was quick to vouch for the character of the Marines who fought alongside him.
“You work with a lot of good people, and a lot of people I’ve worked with have done a lot of great things,” he said.
A bold leader
For two months last autumn, Capt. Patrick Rapicault led the men of Weapons Company through Ramadi, pulling them through 50 firefights and enduring 27 roadside bombs in the provincial capital of Iraq’s insurgent-ridden Sunni Triangle.
In the end, though, a suicidal driver of a bomb-laden vehicle ended the life of the 34-year-old officer with 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, a naturalized citizen who his Marines affectionately called “Frenchie.”
For his “bold leadership” and gallantry, the citation reads, the Marine Corps awarded the Silver Star posthumously to Rapicault, a native of France who came to the United States and joined the Corps.
His wife, Vera, accepted the medal Dec. 2 for her husband.
“Always leading from the front, he directed the fire and maneuver of his company with complete disregard for his own personal safety. Despite being the first Marine in the battalion wounded and his company suffering the heaviest casualties during daily street fighting, Captain Rapicault always displayed an infectious enthusiasm that motivated every Marine to fight hard and recover quickly from battle,” his citation reads.
“On every mission, Captain Rapicault’s intuitive and calm combat leadership ensured success on the battlefield, with limited damage to vehicles and friendly casualties. He gallantly gave his life in the cause of freedom.”
It was a year ago, on Nov. 15, 2004, when Rapicault, a former enlisted Marine, died in combat. At the time, a crew from “60 Minutes” was accompanying the unit through missions in Ramadi.
The men were returning to Hurricane Point, their home base along the Euphrates River, when the Iraqi car approached on Route Michigan and exploded.
“We’re constantly under observation from those guys,” Rapicault said in the “60 Minutes” report, which aired in January.
“They know where we go. They know where we like to set up,” he said.
It was there, in Iraq, that Rapicault took the company’s command on Sept. 24, 2004. Today, a white marble headstone at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the Marine Corps War Memorial, marks the burial site for Rapicault, who grew up in St. Augustine, Fla.
“Patrick was so full of life, and he always liked to compete. When he had a goal, he accomplished it,” his sister, Christine Cappillino, told mourners at a Nov. 21, 2004, memorial service in St. Augustine, according to the St. Augustine Record.
“He never quit.”
The Iraq combat tour was Rapicault’s second.
His sister recounted how her brother frequently called and e-mailed his family every Sunday while he was deployed.
“He just wanted to say everything was OK,” she said, according to the newspaper.
Ellie