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Thursday, August 4, 2005
THE FIFTH MAN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bombs have killed pals just behind him – twice
By MARK DAVIS mrdavis@ajc.com The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Humvees were ready, and so were they.
They took their places in the last of the three vehicles setting out in a convoy. They sat with the ease that comes from training and bunking together. Since leaving the United States more than two months ago, the five had become a squad, five pals on one machine.
They knew their roles, knew their purpose: another patrol keeping Route Aeros, an east-west highway in the southwest sector of Baghdad, open for traffic. It was an unfriendly road, and it was theirs.
They awaited orders to pull out of Camp Striker, their temporary home as members of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team. They were assigned to Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment. The five-man squad hailed from Covington, Thomson, Valdosta, Sylvester, Butler.
Word came that the second Humvee lacked a gunner. Was anybody in the third vehicle available?
The five buddies took a moment to think: Which of them would go?
Staff Sgt. Carl Fuller was the old guy in the bunch. At 44, this was his second tour in Iraq. Before shipping out, the Covington resident worked as a warehouse supervisor.
Sgt. James Kinlow, 35, was a quiet guy from Thomson, near the Georgia-South Carolina line. A church deacon and truck driver in civilian life, he planned to celebrate the end of his deployment by buying a new truck.
Sgt. John Thomas was 33, so tough he was the only guy in the squad who went for a run after long patrols in Iraq. At home in Valdosta, the former Marine dressed up his pit bull and took it riding in his motorcycle sidecar.
Spc. Jacques “Gus” Brunson was 30. An avid outdoorsman, he hunted in the woods near his home in Sylvester, in southwest Georgia’s peanut country.
Spc. Rodney Davidson loved the outdoors as much as Brunson. He was a good shot, too; the walls of his home near Butler in Taylor County were covered with the heads of bucks he’d bagged in central Georgia.
After a moment, Davidson, 39, nodded. Sure, he’d ride shotgun on that middle Humvee. The three vehicles moved off into the dust, and the heat, and toward a waiting bomb.
It was just beyond a traffic control point. The first and second Humvees rolled over it without incident. The blast practically obliterated the last vehicle. Metal rained in all directions, some striking Davidson in the second Humvee.
He stared at the destruction. These were the guys with whom he’d shared tent space, jokes and private thoughts, men who had joined him in a harsh fraternity. He looked at the blasted spot where his friends had been, and knew: He was alone, the only guy from his squad left standing.
The fifth man.
‘Almost expecting’ death
Davidson may be excused if he thinks that death is one car behind him.
In less than a week’s time, he was on two patrols that ended in the deaths of his fellow fighters â€â€? the July 24 blast that killed the rest of his squad, and the similar attack Saturday that ended the lives of four more soldiers from the 48th.
In both blasts, he was in the middle Humvee, the last vehicle to safely pass the device that demolished the rear machine.
“I’ve gone from accepting death as a part of the job to almost expecting it,” he told his wife in a telephone call Wednesday, a day before the 48th honored the four killed in Saturday’s attack. Davidson’s pals, the first Georgia National Guard soldiers to die in combat since World War II, were honored a week ago.
Davidson’s wife, Valerie, is keenly aware of how narrowly her husband missed becoming one of those memorialized.
This past Sunday afternoon, she heard her cellphone trill. She flipped it open and was surprised to see a text message from her husband, an old-fashioned guy more comfortable calling than writing a text message.
“We got attacked again last night,” he wrote. “Four people dead. I am OK. I cannot talk right now. Rodney.”
Valerie Davidson, 33, stared at the message, then reread it. Then she started dialing.
She reached Brenda Redd, her mother-in-law. “I started crying,” she said.
So did Redd. “I’m proud of him,” Redd said, “but I’m scared to death, too.”
They are friends, mother- and daughter-in-law, linked by marriage, by fear, by prayer.
When Davidson called his wife Wednesday, she was sitting in her mother-in-law’s home near downtown Thomaston. It’s a neat little structure, a refurbished mill house where Rodney and his kid sister, Danielle, opened Christmas presents, celebrated birthdays and picked on each other. On a mantle are Rodney’s bronzed baby shoes; the walls are decorated with the antlered heads of whitetails he shot in the forests of Upson County.
When she looks at her house, Redd is reminded of happier days, when doors slammed and rooms echoed with boyish whoops.
This is her son’s second time in the service. In 1985, a few months out of high school, he joined the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, serving three years before returning to Thomaston.
He took a job as a piano tuner for Yamaha Corp. of America, which has a manufacturing plant in Thomaston. After nearly a decade, he quit for a better-paying job in construction. Then, about a year ago, Yamaha asked him to come back.
But the guy who returned to tuning work wasn’t the fellow who had left: The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had convinced Davidson that old warriors were needed to show the youngsters how to fight.
Last year, Davidson joined the Guard. He reveled in the weekend training, where he established that he could do more than tune a piano. He came back from one weekend trip saying, “I outshot ‘em all.”
At 39, he’s older than most of them, too; some younger guys call him “Pappy.” Recent photos show a man in the full of life, wearing four decades of muscle. His smile is the sort that comes with knowing that life can be short, and end suddenly: It is genuine, meant for the folks back home.
‘God’s not through’
Back home on Wednesday, the telephone call from Iraq was too brief, as all of them are.
“Remember,” Redd told her son as he prepared to say goodbye, “God’s not through with you.”
Nor are wife and mother. They are anticipating Thanksgiving, the time Davidson chose for a two-week leave. That date isn’t guaranteed, but they’re confident he’ll be home for a holiday of thanks. Why else would he have survived two attacks?
“When he comes home,” said Valerie Davidson, “he wants one day when he goes nowhere. He’s tired of all the driving he has to do.”
His mother, who makes sure his name remains on the prayer list at First Baptist Church of Thomaston, occasionally feels her strength slip. “You can’t help it,” she said. “He’s my baby. I changed his diapers.”
In Dalton, sister Danielle Jones regularly asks the Lord to bring her big brother home from a hot and hostile place.
“The last time he called, he told me he just wanted to come home and cut the grass,” she said. “We complain about cutting the grass in all this heat, and that’s all he wants to do.”
As he prepared to end his phone call Wednesday, Davidson said officers removed him from the patrol schedule for a few days to make sure he was emotionally ready to return to Iraq’s roadways. The gunner was confident they would give him the OK; good shots, he said, are needed these days.
“They’re hitting us pretty good.”
Hitting hard, and often. Davidson knows that as well as anyone on the dusty roads where enemies plant bombs and wait. He’s the fifth man.
