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DEL.ICIO.USTroops find cause for thanksgiving after brush with death
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ramadi, Iraq — The soldiers sat in stunned silence in the moments after a roadside bomb sent shock waves through their bodies and raked their Humvee with jagged shrapnel.
Staff Sgt. Joshua Winchester peered at his men through the cloud of brown smoke mushrooming in his vehicle. They appeared shaken but uninjured.
Curtis Compton/AJC
Staff Sgt. Joshua Winchester looks over a piece of shrapnel that was part of a roadside bomb that his Humvee on Thursday in Iraq.
“Drive forward!” Winchester commanded his driver.
He wanted to get his men out of the insurgents’ kill zone.
The Georgia National Guard soldiers were quiet Thursday morning as they sped away from the 3-foot-wide blast crater. Winchester turned to them again, grinning in a reassuring way.
“Well, fellas,” he shouted, “Happy Thanksgiving!”
Winchester, a 30-year-old Pepsi truck driver from Jesup, is one of thousands of American troops who had to go outside the relative safety of their bases in Iraq on Thanksgiving. Some manned lonely outposts in remote areas, skipping turkey and pumpkin pie. Others spent the holiday on patrol in areas plagued by insurgents.
Before the explosion rocked his vehicle, Winchester was heading back to Al Asad Air Base from a three-day mission to the Jordanian border guarding trucks loaded with fuel, food and water.
Bombs like the one that hit his vehicle are the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. Soldiers refer to them as IEDs, improvised explosive devices. They are often buried in dirt roads, planted in cement blocks or hidden in bushes.
The one that hit Winchester’s Humvee was in a concrete storm drain on the side of “Route Mobile,” a treacherous highway soldiers often travel from the border town of Trebil to Al Asad, west of Baghdad.
When Winchester and his men determined that there was no longer a threat, they returned to the blast site and found pieces of shrapnel the length of a man’s forearm. The bomb left gouges in the armored door of Winchester’s Humvee at the level of his head. It also shattered his side mirror, near where it says, “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.” The soldiers did not catch the bomb’s triggerman.
“I’m just glad we’re alive,” said Sgt. Curtis Wilmont, 45, of Pembroke, Winchester’s driver.
‘They know it’s a holiday’
The men had started their day at 2 a.m. at a small U.S. military base a few miles east of the Jordanian border. Winchester and dozens of other soldiers from the 48th Brigade Combat Team rolled out of their green cots, ready to escort the supply convoy under the cover of darkness.
Curtis Compton/AJC
After their convoy was attacked, Staff Sgt. Gilbert Sheppard of Millen and Staff Sgt. Joshua Winchester have Thanksgiving dinner with sparkling grape juice at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq.
Winchester brushed his teeth beside his Humvee in the bitter cold. He climbed inside his vehicle and wondered aloud whether the insurgents would attack him on Thanksgiving. Perhaps it was too cold, he thought, for the enemy to go outside.
“Maybe he is staying inside, cooking turkey,” Winchester told his buddies.
Wilmont was doubtful.
“They know it’s a holiday for us,” he said.
Their 20-year-old gunner, Spc. Steven Riley of Savannah, also had a troubled feeling. He told his buddies he had just had a nightmare. In his dream, he said, insurgents were planting roadside bombs in his hometown of Headland, Ala. He remembered teaching his sister in his dream to avoid the explosives by driving in the center of the road.
“They were placed in my church parking lot,” he said.
Hours later, the explosion snapped Riley’s head back, dizzying him and giving him an intense headache. He said he heard shrapnel ricochet around his metal gun turret, sounding like “Tink! Tink! Tink!”
“It’s not the explosions that drive soldiers crazy,” he said. “It’s the anticipation that drives people nuts.”
Winchester, who is almost unfailingly cheerful, brightened his buddies’ moods in the hours before the blast by playing country music in the Humvee. One of the songs he played, Tricia Yearwood’s “Georgia Rain,” made him think of his wife, Tracy. He said he mailed her a copy of one of Yearwood’s compact discs recently. He misses her and his three young children. He keeps a family photo strapped to the inside of his helmet.
Thoughts of home
If he were home, he said, he would be rubbing butter on a turkey, sprinkling it with salt and pepper and then popping it into the oven. He would ride bikes and play baseball with his children.
He said he also often thought of his dog, Leo, an 18-month-old black Labrador retriever. Winchester said his wife told him Leo had been moping around their home since he left for Iraq months ago. So he sent his dog a postcard reading: “Ruff, ruff. I miss you.”
As he rode outside the gate Thursday morning and toward the insurgent’s bomb, Winchester passed a military sign that warns against complacency and asks: “Is Today Your Day?”
“All right. Happy Turkey Day. At least we’re alive,” Winchester said to himself.
“I’ll miss this year,” he said of Thanksgiving. “I’ll see next year’s. There is plenty more of them to come.”
He paused for an instant and then added: “I hope.”
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By A Soldier's Wife
November 25, 2005 10:10 AM | Link to this
Hi Guys,
My husband, will not say who, was on that mission yesterday. I pray everyday that everyone makes it home soon. Spouses and Family members just remember that yesterday was stuff but know that this time next our SOLDIERS will be here, HOPEFULLY.
Love you guys, A PROUD SOLDIERS WIFE