The Unknown Hero of the 507th [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

09-30-03, 05:33 PM

'A miracle he's alive'

Miller's mother, Mary Pickering, agreed. "Nobody's focusing on it. If it hadn't been for Pat, some or most would have died, including Jessica Lynch," Pickering said in a phone interview. "It's a miracle he's alive."

On resentment from her fellow soldiers that she has grabbed all the limelight, Lynch said: "I won't ever forget the brave soldiers of the 507th. I think about them every day."

Miller did not seem destined for battlefield heroics when he enlisted in the Army in May of last year. At basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., he scored an unimpressive 26 on the M-16 qualification on the rifle range, enough to earn a "marksman" badge, the lowest qualifying designation. At Fort Bliss, he honed his skills as a welder, a trade he learned at a community college in Kansas.

Before he raised his M-16 rifle toward that mortar pit in March, he had not fired his weapon since the previous August at the practice range.

At the same time, Miller has a strong sense of self-reliance and responsibility, say those who know him. He endured his parents' divorce when he was 6 and became a father while in his late teens, marrying a girl he met while a cook at a burger joint in Kansas.

"Most of the stuff I've done in life, I've done myself," he said. "The ability to be a good leader is built while you're growing up."

There is also a quiet tenacity and stubbornness to Miller. He will quickly tell you that he doesn't much like Army officers, or any kind of authority figures, for that matter. And those personality traits helped him in the harrowing days after the 507th left Camp Virginia in Kuwait and rumbled north into the vast and lonely desert of Iraq.

The battle at Nasiriyah

The lights of Nasiriyah were twinkling in the distant blackness as the 33 soldiers in the 18-truck convoy rolled along. There was an assortment of heavy vehicles, from Humvees to tractor-trailers and 2 1/2 -ton rigs. Miller was far to the rear inside the cab of a 5-ton wrecker pulling a water trailer.

Miller and the other soldiers assumed the illumination marked their planned staging area. But when the convoy crossed the Euphrates River and headed deep into the city, it soon dawned on the 507th that they were on the wrong road.

The Army later determined that a "navigational error" -- caused by the combined effects of "operational pace, acute fatigue, isolation and harsh environmental conditions" -- led the company to miss the route that was meant to take them around Nasiriyah and onto a highway north toward Baghdad.

The sun was just rising on March 23 when Miller spotted men carrying AK-47s strolling along Nasiriyah's narrow streets. The long line of American military trucks rolled through an Iraqi checkpoint, and two men with pistols simply watched them pass. Other armed men on the street waved.

"I was worried but not super-worried," Miller said. Then the company commander, Capt. Troy King, drove up alongside in his Humvee and appeared nervous. They would have to turn around and head south to find the right road, the captain said.

"We're in an unsecured area. Stay alert. Keep your eyes peeled," King told them, Miller recalled.

The Kansas welder grew even more skittish when he saw a small Iraqi civilian truck with a .50-caliber machine gun attached driving back and forth beside the convoy.

"Just watch it and make sure it doesn't do anything," said Sgt. James Riley, who sat beside Miller in the wrecker.

Suddenly the tell-tale pop, pop, pop of automatic weapons fire erupted.

"We're getting shot at!" Miller shouted and slammed his boot into the gas pedal. The truck surged forward, and the engine whined, the speedometer quickly arcing from 40 mph to 65. But the convoy soon overshot a turn and was forced to drive off the road.

Two soldiers in a 5-ton tractor-trailer, Pvt. Brandon U. Sloan and Sgt. Donald R. Walters, were stuck in the soft sand. Miller screamed for Sloan, a 19-year-old logistics specialist from Cleveland, to get into the wrecker. When Miller looked around for Walters, he was nowhere in sight.

The Army report later said, "There is some information to suggest that a U.S. soldier that could have been Walters fought his way south of Highway 16 toward a canal and was killed in action." The report also said, "The circumstances of his death cannot be conclusively determined," although his body was found in a shallow grave with bullet and stab wounds. Walters' family in Oregon believes that the blond, wiry soldier may have been mistaken for Jessica Lynch in the intercepted Iraqi radio transmission that referred to a blond American woman heroically battling attackers.

As Miller wheeled his wrecker around, he could spot Iraqis on the barren plain about a mile away, hurriedly setting up artillery and mortars and shouldering rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "We had to go through the kill zone to get out," he said.

In front of Miller was a Humvee driven by Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, according to the Army's investigative report of the battle. First Sgt. Robert J. Dowdy rode in the front passenger seat, firing his M-16 rifle out the window. Two other soldiers, Spc. Edward Anguiano and Sgt. George Buggs shot from each side of the rear seat with heavier weaponry, M249 Squad Automatic Weapons. Lynch sat between them.

Shells and grenades sailed toward the convoy and shattered with deafening explosions just 30 yards away from the line of American trucks. Bullets began to ping off Miller's rig from all directions. He reached out to adjust his side-view mirror just as a bullet shattered the glass. He then ducked close to the dash as he drove, while Riley loaded M-16 rifles in the middle seat and Sloan sat next to the window.

A bullet zipped into the cab and slammed into Sloan's forehead, just under his helmet, killing him instantly. "Never said a word," Miller said of Sloan.

The withering fire finally struck the wrecker's transmission. The rig slowed, then rolled to a stop, barely making it over the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Miller turned to see several white Iraqi taxis on the road behind them, with gunmen spilling out and training their AK-47s on the fleeing American soldiers.

Grabbing his ammunition vest and rifle, Miller jumped from the wrecker. He and Riley raced forward to reach the others in the convoy, several hundred yards up the road. A tractor-trailer with Johnson and Hernandez in the cab had swerved off the road and stopped, while the Humvee driven at a high speed by Piestewa had crashed into the truck's rear, leaving only a tangle of metal and bodies. All five soldiers inside the wreckage appeared dead or nearly so. Miller saw Lynch's foot twitch and assumed she was in her death throes.

Miller and Riley stumbled ahead and found Johnson and Hernandez, both wounded, huddled in their truck. Riley, whose weapon had malfunctioned, tried desperately to grab an M-16 rifle from the demolished Humvee but was unsuccessful. He then tried to fire the rifles of Johnson and Hernandez, but they jammed, according to the Army's investigative report. Many of the company's rifles jammed because of the dusty conditions and lack of maintenance, the Army later found. The sergeant told his wounded subordinates to take cover, then stayed with them to protect them.

Miller, meanwhile, spotted an Iraqi dump truck and raced toward it, hoping to commandeer it and drive the survivors to safety. As he ran, he could see the smoky tails of rocket-propelled grenades sail past him. Bullets kicked up dirt on the road.

Miller reached an earthen berm just across the road from the Iraqi truck. Then he noticed a group of Iraqis in front of the dump truck, some 50 feet away, setting up a mortar tube. A rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the far side of the berm, and Miller rolled out the other side. When he crawled back inside and peered over the top, he could see an Iraqi ready to drop a mortar round into the tube.

But Miller's rifle was jammed. A spent round would eject, but the new round would only go halfway into the chamber. Miller slammed his palm into a lever on the side of the gun, and the bullet slid into place. He raised his rifle and fired. The Iraqi collapsed in a heap before he could fire the mortar round.

Riley, in a telephone interview from Aberdeen Proving Ground where he is now an instructor at the Ordnance Center and School, said Miller "was behind a berm returning fire while the berm was being shot at. ... He'd pop up and fire." Bullets and RPG rounds "were smacking into everything all around."

Miller said he was never scared or even thinking about what he was doing, just reacting. His Army training returned: how to breathe, aim and squeeze the trigger. "The only thing I was thinking was if they don't get a mortar loaded, they can't blow them up," Miller said.

The remaining Iraqis jumped up and started firing their rifles at Miller, all missing. But their attack was never coordinated by having one take on Miller while the others launched mortar rounds at the remaining Americans.

One by one, Miller, by his count, shot seven Iraqis as each popped up and tried to work the mortar. After it was over, a large bruise spread over Miller's palm from the constant slapping against the rifle.

When the mortar pit fell silent, Miller turned around and saw an armed man running along a tree line behind him, shielded by two women. He shot toward them, and they all folded into the ground.

Then the two women suddenly rose and dashed away, with the man lagging behind. Miller aimed once more and squeezed the trigger. The man fell forward. It was Miller's final shot of the war.

continued....

thedrifter

09-30-03, 05:38 PM

September 30, 2003

Ambushed soldiers recount their survival

Associated Press

FORT CARSON, Colo. — Pfc. Patrick Miller lost 25 pounds in three weeks as a prisoner of war, eating boiled chicken, rice and bread so hard he had to throw it against the wall to get at the soft food inside.
Sgt. Curtis Campbell said some of the things that happened while he was serving in the Middle East were miracles.

Both said Sept. 29 that they are lucky to be alive.

Campbell and Miller, formerly of 507th Maintenance Company from Fort Bliss, Texas, were among 33 soldiers ambushed March 23 near Nasiriyah, Iraq, along with Pfc. Jessica Lynch, whose rescue captured national headlines. Eleven of the soldiers died.

Miller, 23, a welder, was a prisoner of war; Campbell, 27, a supply sergeant, was seriously wounded but escaped.

“During the ambush, I was thinking about getting out. Saving my butt,” said Miller, a married father of two from Kansas. “Everyone knew what they had to do to survive.”

Campbell, a New York native who is married with a 5-year-old daughter, was shot in the leg but continued to assist in the fighting.

“We were constantly bombarded,” he said. “We just had to keep moving to sustain each other.”

Miller suffered only a scratch on his foot but was captured. At first he and his five other comrades were held in isolation, although they could hear bombs and planes going by.

The days were “were real long,” he said, “and real lonely.”

The rescue caught him off guard, though he never doubted it would happen.

“When the Marines kicked the door in, I was scared. I didn’t know what was going on at the time,” he said. “It was kind of surreal, like one of those weird dreams where you have to pinch yourself. I really didn’t say much, just ‘Get me out of here.’ ”

Campbell and Miller said they don’t plan to leave the service anytime soon. Both are assigned to the 43rd Area Support Group at Fort Carson.

Miller was awarded the Silver Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals. Campbell was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

The men declined to comment about Lynch’s celebrity status.

“I think the day was a tragic day and there were many guys who died, and we should not forget their sacrifices,” Campbell said. “Fortunately for us, we’re still here.”

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Copyright 2003 The Associated Press

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=1-292259-2257767.php

Sempers,

Roger
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