NEWS FEATURE: Harm Finds the `Blessed Company’

c. 2005 Newhouse News Service BAGHDAD, Iraq _ After the ramp of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle came up, sealing his infantry team in the dark rear chamber, Staff Sgt. Thomas Berryhill struggled to find the peace of mind he had gained during the past two months of combat patrols. He offered a silent prayer. Since […]

c. 2005 Newhouse News Service

BAGHDAD, Iraq _ After the ramp of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle came up, sealing his infantry team in the dark rear chamber, Staff Sgt. Thomas Berryhill struggled to find the peace of mind he had gained during the past two months of combat patrols. He offered a silent prayer.

Since they arrived in November, others in Hard Rock Charlie Company had been hurt or killed by the almost daily roadside bombs. But this second squad of the third platoon seemed to hover above the battlefield, unscathed.


Weeks before this Jan. 10 mission, they had taken to calling themselves “the blessed squad,” crediting a thousand of their own combat prayers and thousands more from home in Louisiana. But on this day, Berryhill couldn’t fight off the gloom and fear he thought he had conquered.

In the second of the squad’s two Bradleys, trailing Berryhill by about 50 yards, Sgt. Cletus Baber looked at each of the three men huddled with him in the well of the vehicle.

No one said a word. On most routine combat patrols, chatter filled the cramped compartment until the roaring diesel of the tanklike machine killed all conversation. Baber bowed his head. He felt as if this might be the last time he would see these men. Reading their faces, they seemed to sense the same pall.

Before the patrol was over, their premonitions would prove horribly true. Two squad members would die and four would be seriously injured. The squad would summon heroic courage to save team members trapped in a burning Bradley.

They got their first taste of vulnerability just 15 minutes into the rumbling patrol out of Camp Liberty. The blast of a relatively weak roadside bomb bounced men around in the bowels of the lead Bradley and left them struggling for breath amid acrid smoke.

The bomb damaged one of the vehicle’s tracks and knocked armor plate off one side but wounded no soldiers. Berryhill exhaled in relief. Still blessed.

X X X

These citizen soldiers started off like many across the country. In a war that increasingly depends on National Guard units to reinforce or replace regular Army soldiers, they were the usual assortment of weekend warriors put together for a year-long deployment.


In civilian life they were police officers, prison guards and plumbers. As soldiers, they were administrators, scouts or cooks. As a group they were Hard Rock Charlie Company’s third platoon, Louisianians who had never worked together until they began their intense training at Fort Hood, Texas, about six months before hitting the sands of Iraq.

They were the third and last combat platoon created for the Lake Charles-based heavy mechanized infantry company in a conflict that needed more foot soldiers. Counting the company’s engineers, four platoons make up the company of about 150 soldiers.

The unit jelled impressively, posting some of the highest marks at Fort Hood and in follow-up training at Fort Irwin, Calif.

Rolling out that morning in two Bradleys was standard procedure. In addition to the four-man dismount team in the hold of the vehicle, each had a crew of three: a commander, a driver and a gunner who stayed with the vehicle.

As leader of a dismount team, Berryhill, 31, of Pineville, La., would take charge as the men sprang from the Bradley. During training and in Iraq, he had cemented his reputation as the squad eccentric, a strong but strange soldier given to quoting Scripture, telling animated stories and singing made-up songs about his men. He rarely went to church at home, but he pored over the Bible while he drank beer, and he knew it front to back. His memory for detail was photographic, and his rapid-fire speech, peppered with strings of 50-cent adjectives, prompted his squad members to call him a walking thesaurus.

Berryhill formed his closest bond with Spc. Matthew Carnicle, a 21-year-old from Deville, a tiny town next to Pineville. Carnicle, a furniture delivery man who chattered constantly about his young wife and 7-month-old daughter. On this day, Carnicle rode with Berryhill.


Berryhill’s counterpart in the other Bradley was Sgt. Robert Sweeney, 22, of Pineville. He loved nothing more than soldiering. If he had a fault, it was that he could be too harsh on his men. Lax weapons maintenance, in particular, set him off, the result of once seeing a man fire a dirty weapon that blew up in his face.

Baber, 35, also was in the dismount team on the second Bradley. As pious as Berryhill, he had put aside plans to become a pastor and joined the Guard as an infantryman in 2001, after four years as a cook in the active-duty Army. He thought almost constantly about his wife Tiffney raising their three sons back home in Oberlin, La.

The squad leader over both Berryhill and Sweeney had also piled into the second Bradley: Staff Sgt. James Johnson, 28, a fourth-grade teacher in Lake Charles, La. He was the kind of leader who led without screaming, asking his men politely when he had every right to order them. When Johnson went to war, he left behind a wife and a 4-year-old daughter with leukemia, now in remission. He took comfort in knowing that the military would pay her medical bills during his combat tour.

The leader of the third platoon, 1st Lt. Brian Stevens, 31, of Baton Rouge, regularly rode with its second squad, as he did this day, running the patrol as commander of the lead Bradley. A tenacious leader, he was one of the few full-timers among the Guardsmen.

Stevens’ close friend Staff Sgt. William Manuel commanded the second Bradley. Manuel had a reputation in the unit for an unfailingly positive outlook, and he beamed with confidence.

Rounding out the squad were:

_ In the first Bradley, gunner Sgt. Blake Quebedeaux, 25, of Leonville, a technician for a medical equipment outfit; driver Spc. Kyle Pilley, 20, of Natchitoches, a state corrections officer; Sgt. Jack Gunter, 25, of Sulphur, a student at McNeese State University; and Sgt. Cezar Francis, a medic and a student at Northwestern State University.


_ In the second Bradley, gunner Sgt. Gary Walters, 30, a construction worker from Sulphur; driver Cpl. Eric Sessions, 26, a pipe fitter from Lake Charles; and Spc. James Tidwell, 22, from Ville Platte, an Old Navy store manager.

X X X

Hard Rock Charlie Company and the rest of the 256th Brigade Combat Team operate out of Camp Liberty near the Baghdad airport. Charlie Company and its third platoon moved in there with a mix of Humvees, armored personnel carriers and the tanklike Bradleys.

The blessed-squad talk emerged on one of their first patrols in early November, when they got their first taste of enemy fire. As Berryhill stood on the track’s back ramp, handing out candy to Iraqi children, a missile screamed toward them and flew cleanly between the two Bradleys, just 5 feet from Quebedeaux.

He saw it as it zipped past: red and white with three fins. The anti-aircraft missile, pointed horizontally at the Bradley and guided by wire from a prime firing spot nearby, could have killed a dozen soldiers and as many Iraqi children. Instead, it landed harmlessly in an open field.

During the next two months, the bombs that missed the blessed squad were almost daily ripping open the Bradleys and Humvees operated by the other Hard Rock Charlie squads.

Insurgents employed an experimental arsenal _ mortars, rockets, small arms fire and bombs _ toying with ways to best attack the monstrous Bradleys. In December, after a period of uneasy calm, they started almost exclusively using roadside and car bombs, packing them with ever-stronger explosives.


The blessed squad’s confidence soared each day it returned to camp in one piece. Berryhill led his dismount squad on foot patrols, clearing routes, searching houses and capturing suspected bomb makers. He learned more Arabic each day, so he could be courteous when he invaded homes and cars and began asking for information.

Even when strolling through garbage-strewn hamlets, he made a point of keeping himself attuned to the warmth of the sun on his face and the sound of birds in the air.

On patrol one morning in mid-December, Berryhill and Johnson had riled their platoon leader by flaunting their good luck.

“If we’re lucky, we’re just lucky,” Berryhill boasted to Stevens.

“You all talk about it if you want to, but I’m not talking about it,” Stevens said.

“How many people you got praying for you back home?” Berryhill asked him.

“Too many to count,” Stevens said, thinking of the numerous prayer chains that had formed on behalf of the Guardsmen in Iraq. “People at churches I’ve never even heard of.”

“That’s why I figured we’ve been blessed,” Berryhill said.

Toward the end of December, Berryhill and the second squad responded to an order to secure the area right after an armored personnel carrier got thrown 20 feet into a canal by a roadside bomb, seriously injuring two soldiers from another company.


The sight of the charred wreckage, a vehicle similar to the Bradley that had made Berryhill feel so safe, pierced his sense of invincibility.

“Son, you can be touched,” he thought to himself for the first time.

That feeling of vulnerability lurked in Berryhill’s mind on the cold morning of Jan. 10.

But driving along in the second Bradley, Manuel felt none of the gloom that afflicted Baber and Berryhill.

Manuel followed the lead Bradley as it limped back to Camp Liberty on its damaged track. As he stood just inside the wire, between the concrete walls covered with grunt graffiti, Manuel shot the bull with Sgt. 1st Class Orise Cormier, 32, whom he had known since high school.

“Be careful out there,” Cormier told him.

“Don’t worry. Three-two never gets hit,” he said, using the numerical designation for his Bradley. “Nobody wants a piece of three-two.”

They roared off again, with Berryhill and his men in a new Bradley. An hour and a half later, inside three-two, another uneasy feeling crept up on Baber. He pushed his earplugs in deeper.


In the lead Bradley, Berryhill, again agitated, said a silent prayer for each man in the squad by name. Then he reached for his electronic Yahtzee game. Something told him to look out one of the tiny, grime-coated windows that provide the track’s only outside view.

He heard the explosion and saw the Bradley behind him burst into flames.

He pounded on the metal cylinder that housed gunner Quebedeaux and platoon leader Stevens, screaming:

“Stop! Stop!”

Pilley brought the lead Bradley to a halt. He dropped the back ramp. Carnicle sprinted to the left side of the burning Bradley, from which the driver, Cpl. Eric Sessions, was emerging through the top front hatch, not yet realizing the enormity of the blast.

Then Sessions heard screams from inside. He turned to see Walters trapped in the gun turret, one ankle fractured, the other crushed.

Carnicle shouted to Sessions, “Drop the ramp! Drop the ramp!”

Sessions pulled the latch and hit the button controlling the back ramp. It came down only part way.

They heard the sharp cracks of 25mm armor-piercing rounds exploding inside.

It hit them: Their brothers inside were seconds from death.

Sprinting toward the burning Bradley, Quebedeaux saw one man, wounded and covered in oil, struggling to pull another soldier out of the back.


Quebedeaux watched as Staff Sgt. James Johnson gave up, weak and dazed. Johnson’s kneecap was broken and he had shrapnel in his face and leg, burned in by the powerful roadside bomb. Somehow, he was still standing. His throat burned from swallowing diesel fuel, he could barely speak.

Johnson saw Quebedeaux and Berryhill running to help. He managed four words.

“Help … me … help … him.”

Quebedeaux and Berryhill lunged forward as Johnson collapsed outside the Bradley. They grabbed the man Johnson was pulling, Staff Sgt. Robert Sweeney. Sweeney’s wounds were so severe Quebedeaux and Berryhill feared he couldn’t be saved. But he was their brother, so they took up where Johnson left off and continued trying to pull him out.

Flames roared inside the tank-like behemoth. The Bradley’s cache of high-caliber machine gun rounds continued to explode. The soldiers pulled Sweeney a few yards away. He felt so heavy.

He was dead.

“What do I need to do?! What do I need to do?!” Berryhill blurted to Quebedeaux.

“Just say a prayer,” Quebedeaux said, pulling a St. Michael the Archangel prayer card out of his flak jacket.

Quebedeaux cut off Sweeney’s shirt and used it to cover the dead man’s face. Berryhill vomited. Two other soldiers did the same later during the horrific half-hour rescue.


After Quebedeaux read from the prayer card, Berryhill put his hand on Sweeney and improvise:

“Dear Lord, please bless Sweeney and take his soul to heaven. Please forgive him, Lord, for everything he left unforgiven. … Please wash him in your blood, Lord, and take him in your hands. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.”

After praying over Sweeney, Quebedeaux ran back to the burning Bradley, trailed by Berryhill. Quebedeaux was only one soldier in a squad of men who, heedless of their own safety, threw themselves toward flames and bullets. But he played a key role in a flurry of attempts to rescue the soldiers trapped inside Bradley three-two.

Quebedeaux saw Sessions climbing back onto the armored vehicle, headed toward Staff Sgt. William Manuel, slumped in the Bradley’s command compartment. Quebedeaux climbed up to help.

Though drenched in diesel fuel from the bomb’s explosion near the fuel tank, Sessions was the only soldier in three-two not wounded by the blast.

Seconds before Quebedeaux’s arrival, Sessions had grabbed the handle on the back of Walters’ flak jacket and heaved him out of the gunner’s turret. He laid Walters on a ledge of the Bradley and jumped to the ground, but Walters rolled off onto him, screaming about his ankles and the burns on his hands.


Sessions stood Walters up against the side of the Bradley, not realizing the extent of his injuries. Sessions then climbed back up onto the Bradley and, joined by Quebedeaux, began to work on Manuel.

First Lt. Brian Stevens, the platoon leader commanding the squad from the lead Bradley, rushed over to direct the rescue.

“Is Sgt. Manuel alive?”

“Yes,” Walters answered. “I saw him reaching for the lever when I was getting out.”

As Quebedeaux and Sessions reached the hatch, more of the Bradley’s ammo exploded inside. The smoke thickened. Flames crept up from the bottom of the compartment. The men could see to the ground through the gaping hole left by the bomb. And they could see that Walters was wrong: Manuel is dead.

Quebedeaux and Sessions tried to pull Manuel’s body out of the wreckage but couldn’t lift his slumped frame.

Unable to extricate the corpse, Quebedeaux and Sessions jumped down and ran to the back of the Bradley. Stevens had been joined there by the medic from the lead Bradley, Sgt. Cezar Francis. The spreading fire ignited more ammo rounds, putting rescuers and wounded in the line of random fire.


Quebedeaux joined six men already dragging the wounded out to safer ground.

Stevens ran back to the lead Bradley to radio the leader of the first platoon.

Seconds seemed like hours as Stevens rattled off the bare minimum of information the unit needed to get a fix on the bombed Bradley and reach it. Stevens warned he wouldn’t be back on the radio.

“As soon as I give you this grid, I’m done.”

“Take off. I got it. I see you,” came the response.

The pops of the exploding rounds were increasing. Stevens yelled for the men to get the wounded farther back.

“Get everybody 50 meters away _ now!”

Sessions and Carnicle carried Walters to safety.

Inside the Bradley, Sgt. Cletus Baber had regained consciousness after being knocked out by the blast for about 15 seconds. Dazed, he gulped a mouthful of diesel fuel.

He wrested his trapped and cut leg from a pile of sliced metal, less than a foot from the flames. His fatigues were soaked in fuel.

He made his way toward the rear ramp, pulling Spc. James Tidwell and being helped by those outside.


Quebedeaux, Berryhill and Carnicle helped get them away from the Bradley.

The battered man Quebedeaux first saw, Johnson, somehow walked to safety on his broken kneecap.

Quebedeaux and Francis, the medic, started treating the wounded. Minutes before, when he first saw the damaged Bradley, Francis had broken into a sob. He lost focus.

But he pulled it together. Francis and Quebedeaux went first to Johnson. He was struggling for breath, disoriented. The medic inserted an IV and tried to calm him. Quebedeaux cut open Johnson’s pant leg, and Francis shot him with morphine.

Baber was next. Francis thought Baber had a broken leg, but he quickly determined the bones were intact.

“I’m breathing, not bleeding bad _ go check on the other guys,” Baber told him in a soft, cracked voice.

Francis tended to Walters next, putting ice packs on his face to soothe the minor burns. He didn’t realize Walters’ ankles were broken.


Then Tidwell: After Quebedeaux put a splint on his broken leg, Francis shot Tidwell with drugs in the other leg. “Don’t pull my leg! Don’t pull my leg!” Tidwell screamed in agony.

Quebedeaux heard the medevac helicopters coming.

“The birds are here! The birds are here!” someone yelled.

The stretchers came out. Soldiers grabbed the litters and loaded the wounded.

With the wounded men out, the Bradley still burning and the adrenaline still pumping, Stevens surveyed the scene. It will be forever seared in his psyche and in the memories of each of his men.

He was tortured, spiritually wounded. Yet he was as proud as he was pained. The men that stood before him, their chests heaving from stress and their tears beginning to flow, had done their jobs.

Ten minutes later, what was left of third platoon’s second squad climbed into the undamaged lead Bradley for the ride back to the base. No one said a word during the ride. Sessions, used to having a better view as the driver, sat in the back, staring out one of the tiny windows, scanning for threats.

Back at Camp Liberty, Stevens pulled his men together. They huddled, arm in arm, in a circle. Stevens knew what was going through their heads: Could I have done more? Did I hesitate? Did my fear cause men to die? Why didn’t I sit in Sweeney’s seat today?

He knew they would ask themselves those questions for days, and he wanted to make sure they didn’t wrestle with them for the rest of their lives.


Stevens told them they were heroes, that they used every bit of their training and courage to save four men, when seconds of hesitation would have killed them. The men took small comfort from the belief that neither Sweeney nor Manuel died in pain.

Then Stevens asked for a moment of silent prayer. They tightened their grips on one another.

Next, acting on orders, they saw a chaplain. He warned them about what to expect in the coming days: no sleep, no appetite, nightmares, the constant rerun of the incident in their heads, terror of going back out on patrol, survivor’s guilt.

(FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS)

All of it would come to pass, in different ways and different degrees for each man.

X X X

None slept that night.

After e-mailing his wife to say that he wasn’t dead, Quebedeaux sat alone in his trailer, his wounded roommate on his way home to Louisiana.

He didn’t even try to sleep. He sat up in bed, folded his pillow behind him and put on some music. For the eight uninjured survivors, the horror of what had happened was like an endless tape loop, playing and replaying in their heads.


Hours later, Quebedeaux was still pumped with adrenaline and needed to do something _ anything _ useful, so he dropped by Stevens’ billet. Stevens had told the men to get some rest, but it was advice he himself struggled to heed.

Stevens told Quebedeaux to visit all the squad members. Make sure they’re out of their blood-stained fatigues, get them to shower, he said. Quebedeaux found some of the men sitting alone, dazed, still reeking of diesel fuel.

They had been a team. But with six men gone, the squad ceased to exist. They broke into smaller groups, each man relying heavily on his closest one or two comrades. Some, like Quebedeaux, would go back on a combat patrol the next night. Others needed more rest. Some would talk about the rescue to anyone who listened. Others had trouble sharing it even with their families.

(FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS)

The 14 men, including the two dead and four wounded, have been recommended for medals of valor, up to and including the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor among combat awards.

(SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

With no sleep since the attack more than 30 hours earlier, Stevens headed back out on patrol. He had to lead by example, to show his men they could conquer their terror. But he gave everyone the option of taking the night off.

He went to Quebedeaux’s trailer to present the option in person.

Quebedeaux told his lieutenant, “If you’re going, I’m going.”

Stevens got the same response from Sgt. Jack Gunter.

The rest of the men opted to stay inside the protected base.

Back in the gunner’s turret that night, watching the path ahead of the Bradley through the red, white and black images of a thermal scope, Quebedeaux’s sturdy frame tightened at the sight of every pothole. In the daytime, he could spot suspicious wires or freshly dug holes that might contain a bomb. This night, he felt blind. By sunrise, his jaw ached from clenching it.


Carnicle and Berryhill took it harder. Two days after the incident, both men decided they would ditch their plans to re-enlist, though they vowed to fight through the remainder of their deployment with all the courage they could muster. Both were terrified to get back in a Bradley, yet they knew that was the only way to conquer the fear.

Berryhill, especially, was tormented. Recounting the attack and its aftermath two days afterward, his red eyes and flushed face told the tale of waking nightmares. Apologetically, he said he had been snapping at other soldiers for minor slights. Especially the “fobbers” _ soldiers who stay inside the FOB, or forward operating base of Camp Liberty, working support roles. Fobbers always came in for their share of abuse from the men in combat, but in those first days, Berryhill’s disgust for them boiled over.

Some thought they saw signs in Berryhill of what once was called “shellshock” and now goes by the gentler “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Berryhill rattled on in graphic detail, each moment relived in slow motion and Technicolor. As he spoke, his knees fluttered up and down, venting his anxiety.

But people who knew him said Berryhill is always like that, his mind going a thousand miles an hour as his mouth tries to catch up.

Nightmares be damned, Berryhill wanted to get back into that Bradley, back with the grunts, to lead and be led.

“Sometimes I get such a sad feeling,” he said. “I guess I just miss my squad. … And I’m worried about Carnicle. We did everything together.”


Carnicle was given what counted as light duty in Hard Rock Charlie Company: guarding a checkpoint on a main supply route outside the wire. Still dangerous work, but at least Carnicle didn’t have to sit in the Bradley. Back at the base, he battled visions of fire and wounded men that shocked him from sleep. He’d sit at the edge of his bed, light a Kool and think about folks back home.

Carnicle yearned for the company of his wife of more than two years, Magan, and their 7-month-old son, Jared. But his wife seemed distant, hard to reach. She had dropped off Jared at her mother’s house and headed, she said, to the nearby town of Homer to help out her ailing grandmother. Her ex-boyfriend lives in Homer.

Carnicle had his suspicions. They were confirmed when he called her cell phone and the ex-boyfriend answered.

Furious, Carnicle didn’t talk to his wife for two weeks.

When he finally did, he told her he wanted to work things out. She didn’t seem to want to work too hard. He opened the door for his wife to end the marriage, and she walked right through.

He turned to Berryhill for counsel. Berryhill’s first wife had left him for another man when he was about the same age as Carnicle. Berryhill told him to keep trying to work it out. But he knew from experience that nothing between the couple would ever be the same.

Then they talked about the fear. Just before the memorial service for their two fallen comrades, Carnicle told Berryhill he didn’t want to get back in that Bradley.


Berryhill gave it to him straight: You have to. You don’t have a choice. I’m going to have to go back, too. It’s what the men who died would have wanted.

The day after the attack, most of the men in second squad and some of their commanders took off in a Humvee convoy to the heavily guarded Green Zone, down Airport Road, which some call the most dangerous route in the world. They went to see Sgt. Cletus Baber at the hospital. The other three wounded men were already headed home.

As the convoy rolled down the notorious eight-lane highway, Stevens wondered which of the cars in the heavy traffic around him might blow up, and realized he had never been so scared.

As the men walked into Baber’s room, he smiled broadly. But he looked like hell: stiff as a board one minute, shaking uncontrollably the next. He could barely move, couldn’t walk, couldn’t even dress himself.

Yet the doctors, based on an X-ray showing no broken bones, had listed him as “return to duty.” The men found the paperwork and argued, taking their complaints up the chain. The doctors agreed to more tests. But after his squad left that day, Baber got lost in the bureaucracy.

Unable to get to a phone, Baber ultimately asked a new roommate to call his commanders and get him the hell out of there. They came immediately, rolled Baber out in a wheelchair and loaded him into a Humvee. Back at Camp Liberty, Sgt. Sessions, who had been driving Baber’s Bradley when it exploded, committed to caring for him.


About a week after the attack, Baber clutched a well-worn Bible as he sat upright on his bed, his stiff body a study in right angles. Sessions sat next to him, patting his back, both men thankful for one another and thankful to be alive.

“I just saw the pictures of the Bradley for the first time since the attack; it was the first time I could stomach it,” Sessions said. “It’s amazing anybody walked away.”

Baber held up his black Bible with a worn zippered cover. “This is what saved my life,” he said. “I’ve been getting away from it, but I know my main purpose in life now, to do his work. And I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

While some rested, Quebedeaux, Gunter and Stevens went outside the wire every day, being added to squads that came up short-handed because of deaths, wounds or rest.

Sitting in the rear compartment on a cold night, Gunter vented.

“We can’t be coming out here with short patrols,” he said. “I’m not a heartless person and I know everybody’s got their breaking point … but you’re either going to get over it or you’re not. You have to drive on with it.”

X X X

The men who were with Staff Sgt. Robert Sweeney and Staff Sgt. William Manuel when they died were sitting side by side in the front row at the memorial service. At one point, as others sat ramrod straight in their chairs, Sessions slumped over, sobbing, rubbing his temples. He had been holding a lot of the pain inside. In that moment, he felt a heavy burden lift.


Sessions hasn’t been out on a Bradley patrol yet. He’s been working checkpoints. But he’ll be back in a Bradley soon. And he got some good news recently: He has been promoted from corporal to sergeant.

Baber is still in pain, but improving. When he gets home, after physical therapy, he said he’s going to concentrate on being a husband to his wife and a father to his three sons. Then he’s going to answer the call he’s been avoiding for four years: He plans to become a Baptist preacher.

Less than two weeks after the attack, Carnicle mounted a Bradley with another dismount squad on a night patrol. Despite a few jitters, he had an unexpectedly peaceful night. He went out on his first day patrol Jan. 23.

Between fear and his family crisis, the past two weeks had been among the lowest points in his life. And yet his face bore a serene smile as he and other soldiers walked through the dingy farms surrounding a school where ballots were to be collected in the Jan. 28 election.

Meanwhile, he and Berryhill have changed their minds about bailing out of the Guard. They signed on the dotted line and re-enlisted together the week after the attack.

“I did it for my son, for the health care and life insurance,” Carnicle said. “But I do love the military. … We both came to realize, this is what we do. It’s only fitting that we keep on going.”


He looked over at Berryhill: “He’ll have to look at my face for six more years.”

X X X

The reporting of this article:

Reporter Brian Thevenot and photographer Michael DeMocker of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans arrived at Camp Liberty in western Baghdad late Jan. 10 to spend a month covering the 256th Brigade Combat Team, made up of National Guardsmen based in Louisiana. Earlier that day, two members of second squad, third platoon, Hard Rock Charlie Company were killed when a roadside bomb destroyed their Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Thevenot and DeMocker visited with the survivors and discovered stories of heroism, camaraderie, fear and faith. The attack and the events leading up to it were recreated through extensive interviews with the remaining squad members. In the weeks that followed, Thevenot and DeMocker rode with the remaining members of the shattered squad on combat patrols and predawn raids. They also spent time with the men who were wounded, some in body, all in spirit. The soldiers allowed unfettered access to their missions as well as their hearts and minds. Without their candor, this story could not have been told.

KRE/RB END THEVENOT

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!