'Everybody was shooting everywhere'

Capt. Colin Hoyseth got the Bronze Star with “V” device for courage in battle, but what he remembers about his first true combat in the days after the United States invaded Iraq was being mad.

“You get kind of angry when people are shooting at you, but as a leader you get more angry when people are shooting at your soldiers,” he said of that early-morning firefight outside the Baghdad airport. “I wanted to get rid of the danger as quickly as possible because we had people on the ground who were exposed.”

It was April 4, 2003, two weeks after the invasion. Hoyseth was traveling north to Baghdad from Karbala, about 60 miles away, and was among the first from his company to arrive outside the Iraqi-held Saddam International Airport, on the city’s western edge, at 2:30 a.m.

The airport was quiet for the next four hours as the rest of his company arrived. Then, he said, the Iraqis began to attack and “it just went nuts” — rocket-propelled grenades, small-arms fire, tanks being blown up.

“It was just nonstop chaos,” said Hoyseth, now 32. “I remember looking at my gunner as the day went on and saying, ‘Wow, this is bad, and it’s getting worse.’ We knew it was a little bit different fight that day.”

Iraqis began shooting at Hoyseth and his soldiers from an airport tower, but the Americans were positioned under trees and couldn’t see the Iraqis clearly. Hoyseth, then a lieutenant, moved his soldiers about 100 yards to the right, away from the trees, and began returning fire.

It was the worst fighting he had seen since the war began.

“That’s the day I thought it was most like combat was going to be — tanks shooting tanks, airplanes dropping bombs, high-intensity combat,” he said. “Other times, I guess I was more scared because it was more unknown. But that day, it was pretty straightforward, because everybody was shooting everywhere.”

He had spent the past year training with his soldiers. They became his motivation during the firefight.

“You get to know these people pretty well, and obviously you want to protect the people you know,” he said.

Thoughts of his two children, then 4 months and 19 months old, provided similar motivation, he said.

About two hours after the attack began, U.S. forces broke through a wall and got inside the compound. Hoyseth’s company detained 30 Iraqi soldiers. A few of his soldiers were wounded, but none was killed that morning.

Hoyseth is proud of his work, and of helping remove Saddam Hussein from power.

“I believe in the mission. Obviously, things haven’t gone the way everyone had hoped,” he said. “I would like to go back to Iraq, to see the difference, just to see what’s changed in four years.”