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Friday, March 28, 2003

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

LANDSTUHL, Germany -- Under sudden fire from disguised Iraqi soldiers, U.S. Army Sgt. Charles Horgan could only watch as a missile zoomed toward him.

As he tried to warn his crew, the missile slammed into Horgan's Humvee, blasting him onto the top of the vehicle and knocking his commanding officer out the side.

For the next 10 minutes, their unit was engulfed in a shootout with enemy troops -- a whirl of gunfire, shouts and smoke outside the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah.

Horgan, part of his right heel blown off, crawled to safety. His commanding officer, Staff Sgt. Jamie Villafane, ignored the shrapnel in his arm and captured four Iraqis, who wore military uniforms underneath their civilian robes.

Yesterday, five days after the ambush, the two injured Americans expressed relief to have survived.

Villafane and Horgan offered the first accounts of the war through the eyes of American combat casualties, giving witness to the difficulty that coalition forces have run into while trying to secure captured territory.

A third injured man confirmed suggestions that some U.S. soldiers have been caught unprepared for the fight put up by Iraqi forces.

"We were very surprised," said Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Menard, 21, of Houston. "We were told as we were going through Nasiriyah that there would be little to no resistance."

He and other members of his battalion had been led to expect scenes of mass Iraqi surrenders like those from the first Persian Gulf War. Instead, "when we got in, it was a whole different ballgame," Menard recalled. "They weren't rolling over like we thought they would."

It was the first combat any of the three wounded men had seen.

Villafane and Horgan, members of the 1st Battalion of the 30th Infantry Regiment out of Fort Benning, Ga., came under attack Saturday afternoon after being sent to disperse what they thought were civilians grouped near a bridge south of Nasiriyah.

Their truck, backed by two other Humvees, an Abrams tank and a Bradley assault vehicle, had just crossed the span when Horgan, who was manning the machine-gun turret, noticed something suspicious about the knot of people in front of him.

"They seemed kind of edgy, jumpy," as though formulating a plan, said Horgan, 21, from Helena, Mont.

The crowd started to run away. Moments later, a wire-guided missile bore down on the Americans, hitting the lead Humvee. The explosion threw Villafane out of the truck. Dazed by the blast, he began groping for his M-4 rifle.

When he found it, Villafane, 31, of Long Island, N.Y., opened fire, oblivious to the shrapnel that had ripped through his left hand and arm. A second missile flew by his head.

That rocket struck the second Humvee, trapped on the bridge behind the lead vehicle.

As bullets whistled overhead, Villafane scuttled to the side of the span. Below him flowed a tributary of the Euphrates River, and on its banks were makeshift mud huts presumably built by the Iraqis, with caches of weapons close at hand.

Villafane, still wearing clunky chemical-protection gear, jumped down -- and found himself staring at the back of an armed Iraqi. He shouted at the man to drop his AK-47, then held him at gunpoint.

As he tried to bandage his wounded hand, three more Iraqi soldiers arrived, dressed in the flowing robes of Bedouin herders. They, too, dropped their weapons in surprise in front of the wounded American.

With his prisoners in tow, Villafane went back to find Horgan. As the shootout raged around him, Horgan slid off the top of his disabled Humvee and onto the ground.

He started to crawl toward the truck behind him. Horgan's uninjured driver provided gun cover while the pair crawled together to safety, talking the whole time to calm and encourage themselves. Horgan even tried to crack a few jokes.