'Every window had someone with a gun'

People who have been in combat know that any firefight that lasts longer than five or 10 minutes is a relatively rare event, even in a “hot” shooting war.

The fight on the banks of the Euphrates River in As-Samawah, southeast of Baghdad, that earned Sgt. 1st Class Gerald Wolford a Silver Star for valor went almost four hours.

By the time it was over — in the early hours of April 1, 2003 — the Humvee that Wolford was using had survived two direct hits by rocket-propelled grenades.

Humvees are designed to “run flat,” or move even when the tires are blown out, Wolford noted.

“But this one looked like a Fred Flintstone cartoon — you know, where the stone wheels just keep getting more and more chipped away? Like that.”

Wolford, who was wounded during the fight but refused medical care until it was over, was fighting alongside two soldiers who were also badly wounded, but they, too, demanded to stay in the fight.

Three of his soldiers also received the Bronze Star with “V” device for valor that day: Sgt. Cory Christiansen, Spc. Michael “Woody” Woodward, and Sgt. Derek Rippee.

It is the dedication and loyalty of his soldiers, more than his medal, that makes Wolford recall that day with such pride, he told Stripes in an interview in Washington.

“They just blew my mind,” he said. “I never had a question that they’d do what I said. When I said, ‘Follow me,’ they were right there with me.”

When the battle happened, Wolford was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division’s 3rd of the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, out of Fort Bragg, N.C.

When the war kicked off, the heavy weapons section leader and his recon platoon were part of a ground attack convoy moving north from Kuwait to Tallil Airfield, southeast of Baghdad.

On March 31, he and his Humvee-mounted platoon were told to secure a series of bridges across the Euphrates River in As-Samawah, and then perform reconnaissance for the follow-on infantry units, who were on foot.

The mission got exciting at the first bridge, when Wolford told his driver to hold up — his gunner, Christiansen, had spotted a pickup outfitted with a machine gun on the back, positioned on the far side of the Euphrates, about 200 yards away.

Christiansen, who was up on the .50-caliber gun, asked his leader for permission to fire.

“I told him to go ahead,” Wolford said.

“Those were kind of, ‘the shots heard ’round the world,’ at least for our battalion, because they were the first time anyone had fired in the war,” Wolford said.

Christiansen’s first blast disabled the engine block.

A second round “disabled the driver.”

But those shots also “opened up a whole can of worms,” he said. “People started coming out of the woodwork.”

Suddenly, “it was like every house and every window had someone with a gun” in it — and all those weapons were firing at Wolford and his men.

One of the most immediate threats was coming from a house that had sandbags covering the door, absorbing the impact of Wolford’s unit’s machine-gun fire.

Wolford, who had been using a Mark-19 grenade launcher, decided this was a good time to pull out the AT-4, which is a 74 mm anti-tank shoulder-fired missile.

“Christiansen was busy; he had bigger fish to fry,” Wolford said. “Also, I wanted to fire one in combat; they’re really cool. This seemed like a good time.”

The missile worked even better than it had in training. It worked spectacularly — “the whole house fell in on the guy.”

Psyched by his first AT-4 kill, Wolford began looking for another target.

He saw fire coming from a foxhole in another direction. The shooter seemed to have figured out that the Mark-19 is a little slow in flight, and kept popping back into his hole like a rabbit, just in time to avoid getting hit by the grenade.

So Wolford readied another AT-4 round.

The results of this shot were even more dramatic than the first one: in an attempt to escape the incoming fire, the enemy fighter leapt from his foxhole and made a break for it.

But he zigged when he should have zagged, “and impacted directly with the missile,” Wolford said. “Basically, he ran right into the missile, or it went off right in front of him, I couldn’t tell. But he was gone. There was nothing left of him at all.”

The fighting continued as Wolford’s team moved toward the second bridge. At one point, working to extract a small group of engineers that had gotten pinned down, he and his men took their first RPG.

“My gunner and I both saw an RPG fired at our position at the same time,” Wolford said, “I had time to turn and yell ‘RPG!’ so the two other men had time to get down.”

The RPG hit the bridge above their Humvee, wounding Woodward and Rippee, and knocking Wolford over in the blast. Wolford got his dazed and bleeding soldiers to their feet, into the vehicle, and took them to a nearby casualty collection point, then went back to the fight.

During a lull, he went back to check on his men. Woodward had received less of a blow than Rippee, and was patched up and on his feet.

After talking to the medics, “I let him make the decision, and he decided to come back,” Wolford said.

Rippee had been hurt worse, and lost a lot of blood, but was begging to return anyway.

“The medics said, ‘If he dies, it’s on your head’,” Wolford said. “That was the most asinine thing I’d ever heard. He’s my soldier. If he dies, it will be my fault no matter what.”

Rippee came back just in time to be present when the Humvee got hit for the second time with an RPG.

This one went underneath the vehicle and destroyed the right rear tire, adding to the “Flintstones” motif.

But it kept running. So did Wolford and his men, fighting the enemy on both sides of the Euphrates River.

“Being awarded the Silver Star is an incredible honor,” said Wolford, 30, who has just finished Officer Candidate School and is “in the pipeline to be an infantry officer.”

“But having my men receive awards for their valor is what made my accomplishments honorable.”