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| Iraq |
| Wrong Turn in Nasiriyah Led to Soldiers’ Capture |
| 2003-04-13 |
| The story of the POW's NUMANIYAH, Iraq, April 13 -- The wrong turn happened just after dawn on a clear Sunday morning, March 23. The convoy from the Army's 507th Maintenance Company wandered by mistake into the riverfront city of Nasiriyah and suddenly it seemed to the soldiers that every Iraqi was trying to kill them. "We got turned around and then lost and we rolled into Nasiriyah before it was secure and when we rolled in there was an ambush waiting for us," recalled Spc. Shoshana N. Johnson, 30, from El Paso, Tex. The bullets and explosions came from all sides. Some of the humvees flipped over. Other drivers hit the gas hoping to outrun the danger, but ran into even heavier fire. In the swirling dust, soldiers' rifles jammed. Pfc. Patrick Wayne Miller, 23, began shoving rounds into his rifle one at a time, firing a single shot at enemies swarming all around. Some Americans died where they fell. Johnson was shot with a single bullet that sliced through both feet. Spc. Edgar Adan Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Tex., was hit in the bicep of his right arm. Spc. Joseph Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, N.M., was shot three times, twice in the ribs and once in the upper left buttocks. Finally, it fell to Sgt. James J. Riley, a 31-year-old bachelor from Pennsauken, N.J., and the senior soldier present, to surrender. "We were like Custer," he recalled today, still sounding shocked. "We were surrounded. We had no working weapons. We couldn't even make a bayonet charge -- we would have been mowed down. We didn't have a choice, sir." The battle lasted about 15 minutes. Nine U.S. soldiers were dead. Those captured by the Iraqis would become the war's best-known soldiers. One, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, 19, would be rescued from a local hospital on April 2. Five others -- Johnson, Hernandez, Hudson, Riley and Miller -- became prisoners of war until this morning, when they were found, along with two captured crew members of an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, by U.S. Marines in a house north of Baghdad. In their first interviews after being freed, the former prisoners described a harrowing journey through the Iraq war -- from their ill-fated missions and capture through an arduous imprisonment where death often seemed around the corner. Speaking to reporters from The Washington Post and Miami Herald aboard a C-130 transport plane evacuating them from Iraq, they alternated between tears and smiles and hollow gazes as they told their stories. The capture of the Americans came within a 24 hour period that was the darkest of the war so far for American commanders. Even as U.S. forces toppled the government of Saddam Hussein and seized Baghdad, the search for the prisoners consumed top U.S. officers. Their fates were a mystery until this morning. (con't see link) |
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