'How close I came to life and death'

Before starting off on a convoy trip through Iraq, Airman 1st Class Christian Jackson always made sure the slip of paper his mom sent him was tucked securely into his uniform pocket.

On the paper, in his mother’s handwriting, was Psalm 91, which many Christians call “the psalm of protection.” It reads, in part:

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day … There shall no evil befall thee.”

But evil did befall Jackson in Iraq, on Dec. 5, 2005.

Evil befell the 21-year-old from Niagara Falls, N.Y., as well as the entire convoy of five Humvees loaded with security personnel guarding 25 tractor-trailers driven by employees of the military contractor KBR.

Evil befell them in the form of an insurgent ambush, in a small village less than 30 minutes from the safety of their home base of Balad, one of the largest U.S. military installations in Iraq.

But as the evil rose out of the darkness and surrounded the convoy, the slender, short young airman — who had traded his normal, relatively safe driver’s spot on that mission for the gunner’s turret on a whim — found something inside him that he didn’t know he had.

“I learned that I’m willing to put my life on the line so other people can be safe,” Jackson said in a telephone interview from Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., where he is stationed with the 377th Air Base Wing.

Jackson received a Bronze Star with “V” device for his actions that night.

Jackson had been traveling Iraq’s roads since arriving at Balad in July 2005 with the 232nd Detachment of the 732nd Expeditionary Logistics Readiness Squadron. The squadron was part of the 732nd Expeditionary Mission Support Group, 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing.

Although Jackson was a driver, not a gunner, “we all knew each other’s jobs and positions,” and maintained that proficiency, he said.

He had struck a deal with one of his gunner buddies — coincidentally, someone he had gone to high school with — to trade places a couple of times during their deployment. He and that man had traded places once before, uneventfully.

The convoy they chose for the second trade was a short “milk run” between Balad and Camp Speicher. It was a cold night, late and very dark.

“We only had, like, a half-hour left to go,” said Jackson, who was in the second of the five Humvees, manning the turret-mounted .50-caliber machine gun.

The convoy was passing through a village when the first gun truck emerged to the sight of tracer rounds and muzzle flashes.

The truck’s gunner immediately sent up a red flare to warn the rest of the convoy, followed by a white illumination round so the gunners could spot targets.

It was Game On.

His driver, Airman 1st Class Charity Trueblood, maneuvered the Humvee into position. Up in his turret, Jackson’s reaction was automatic: he pushed the safety on the “fiddy cal” and looked for flashes of light indicating the enemy. Almost simultaneously, his index finger pulled back on the trigger. Bullets, already chambered and ready to rock, started to fly.

Then the gun jammed.

Jackson cursed and yanked the gun’s retracting handle backward. A dead round came tumbling out of the ejection mechanism.

But almost as soon as it started firing again, the gun jammed a second time, and Jackson cleared it.

He made his way through his entire ammunition load, 100 rounds, in about 40 seconds, even with the two jams, Jackson said. Then he turned to his M-4 rifle and began to fire that.

All around, the sounds of gunfire and screaming ripped the night.

As he fought, “I probably went blank,” Jackson said.

He had just one conscious thought, he said: “I want to make it home.”

All this time, the convoy was speeding out of the kill zone. The train of vehicles finally stopped about 3 miles down the road to tally the wounded: three KBR drivers, who didn’t have the protection of Humvee armor, had been shot during the engagement. Trueblood treated the most severely wounded contractor. None of them died as a result of their injuries.

Jackson’s Humvee, meanwhile, had been hit several times by bullets, but he didn’t have a scratch. Neither did any of the airmen on the security detail.

“It hit me how close I came to life and death,” Jackson said. “Other people got shot, but I’m sitting up there [in the turret], and nothing touched me at all.”

Jackson never memorized the words to Psalm 91 during his Iraq deployment.

But he knows the gist of it:

“Even though there’s a lot of stuff going on, it’s going to be OK,” he said. “God is watching over you.”