"Call me snake!"
Posted on 11/05/2005 6:56:41 AM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
Peter Springer lost an eye to an Iraqi suicide bomber -- and then joined the Army Rangers
On the morning of December 9, 2003, Peter Sprenger was 2 weeks from the end of an eventful tour in Iraq. He'd been at the "tip of the spear," in army parlance, spending the preceding 10 months roaring through the invasion of Iraq, occupying Baghdad, securing other restive towns. As a member of the 101st Airborne Division, he had a clear mission: to probe for trouble and take care of it. But on that particular morning, the trouble found him.
Corporal Sprenger drew radio duty that day in company headquarters in Tal Afar, 60 miles southwest of Mosul. He felt relatively safe in the shadow of a two-story guard tower, behind barbed wire and barricades, sheltered by a 12-foot-high cinder-block wall. The front doors of the building were open to the morning air. Sprenger wore no flak jacket, no helmet.
At 4:40 a.m., he heard gunfire and suspected that it issued from neighboring buildings. But, no, it had come from the guard tower, and the bullets and barricades had failed to halt a suicidal insurgent bent on delivering 1,000 pounds of TNT to the 101st's doorstep. The bomb detonated 10 to 15 yards from where Sprenger was standing.
Knocked down and blinded by the explosion, he crawled back to his position and patted himself down for missing parts. He felt warm blood, punctured flesh, and a confused tangle of facial features. He peeled back a tattered eyelid and saw a spiderweb of lines radiating out from a bloodred center. He remembers thinking, Yes, well, we'd better let a professional deal with that one.
The eye that Corporal Sprenger sacrificed that morning, the seven units of blood he left on the walls and floor, are real costs. "Going through all that changes you," he notes, with typical understatement. For a lot of men, it would embitter or destroy them. But in Sprenger's case, it focused his vision of who he is and what he hopes to gain from his life. "People don't look far enough into the future," he says, "and gauge what's realistic for them to accomplish."
But he has. And that vision drove him to rehab his many wounds, turn down the desk job the army offered, and gear up for the most rigorous training any infantryman can endure: Ranger School.
Sprenger not only passed it, but was also singled out as the epitome of the Ranger creed--"Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to . . . complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor"--and asked to recite that creed at his graduation ceremony last July.
Since the army began keeping records a quarter century ago, he is the first man with his kind of physical disability to earn the Ranger patch. And by the time you read this, he will have returned to Iraq. As he puts it, he needs to finish what he started.
At the home base of the 101st Airborne Division, in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, uniformity is the order of the day. Each Screaming Eagle wears the identical camo, haircut, and conqueror attitude that mark this fighting unit. During one classroom session attended by 200 soldiers, a narrator says, "Someday you may find yourself bursting into a roomful of terrorists . . . " The rest of his sentence is drowned out by the roar.
Still, it's not hard to pick out Sprenger, even in this look-alike crowd; his eye patch speaks volumes, and the hard lessons of Iraq are etched into his skin. He bears two vertical scars on his upper lip and one on the lower, where his skin was rent by the explosion; he spat out six teeth and a chunk of jawbone. Shrapnel gouged a random pattern in his shoulders, back, and forehead. A dental bridge now covers the gap in his smile, and an eye patch blacks out his broken window on the world.
Explaining that away, he states a personal credo: "When you look beyond 50 yards, you only need one eye, anyway."
As he walks through the base, his fellow soldiers notice, too, offering congratulations on Ranger School. They cite him as an example of what the 101st is all about. He's polite in accepting the praise, but he's looking past it now. "I didn't come back here to train," he says, in one sentence dismissing the 61 days of hell known as Ranger School. "I came back to lead my guys into battle."
Hard work is a theme that Sprenger, now 22 years old, returns to again and again. He grew up in Stockton, California, the son of a high-school physics teacher and former army man. He knew from the start he was different from the kids around him. "I've been used to hard work since I was 12," he says, summing up a list of jobs that includes everything from lawn boy to lumberjack. "If you feel tired at the end of the day, you feel good."
He spent his later high-school days running 6 miles a day and experimenting with "computer security," as he slyly puts it. But he heard the bugle call early, entering a Junior ROTC program in high school and filing enlistment papers with an army recruiter after graduation. He attended college for a while, but then came the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
"After 9/11, you heard a lot of people talk, but not act," he says. "I was young and healthy, so why not me?"
Not that he's necessarily buying all the political rhetoric surrounding this war. "I have my own thoughts about committing or removing troops without thinking it through," he says. "But I don't have a policy job, so it doesn't matter what I think. I'm paid to execute."
That desire to get the job done is what motivates him. He repeatedly expresses horror at the notion of "just checking the box"--a concept that takes in most of what his civilian peers are doing: working 8-hour days, coasting through college. No risk of that in his first tour in Iraq. But after he was injured, there were people who wanted to define him by his wounds, rather than his intention to overcome them.
His escape route was Ranger School--roughly comparable to rolling out of a feather bed and into a lava bed. Then again, you could forgive Peter Sprenger for seeing something sinister in "safe" locations.
As he hurtled toward Ranger School, he had to rebuild an athletic body that had been wasted by post-op bed rest. He followed up months of intensive rehab by blowing through a 50-mile section of the Appalachian Trail--in 2 days.
He also had to relearn things the rest of us take for granted. "I was in the mess hall, and I set a glass under the soda fountain and pressed the button," he laughs. "I missed the glass completely. I looked around. . . . ‘Did anybody notice that?' "
The stakes were higher when he tested himself on the catwalk, a 20-foot-high series of slats and gaps that's hard enough for those of us with normal depth perception. Sprenger's training overruled his confused visual cortex: "Doing what you don't want to do is easier than the hell you'll pay for not doing it," he says. "I'd rather have the broken leg." So he forged ahead, and survived. That's one way to compensate.
Ranger School consists of three phases: First, at Fort Benning, Georgia, soldiers are broken down with sleep deprivation and lack of food while they complete brutal rounds of physical exercise---Sprenger will never forget the correct way to do a pushup. They are drowned, run ragged, pummeled with fists and sticks, jackhammered with tests on military procedure. If they make it through that, it's on to the mountain phase, conducted in Camp Merrill, Georgia, where it all happens again, going uphill and off cliff. Survive that, and the nightmare recurs during maneuvers in Florida swamps.
Of the 411 hardened military men who began training in his class, only 141 made it through. And all the other guys were looking at it through two eyes.
Captain Rodney Dycus, a physician assistant in Sprenger's unit, followed him from wounding to rehab to Ranger School: "Eighty percent of guys with that injury would move on from the army. But the other 20 percent--it changes their attitude the other way. None of us ever doubted him."
It's late in the afternoon in the soldiers' barracks, and Sprenger is rummaging around his room looking for computer parts. If he can meld the components into a functioning computer, he'll run through a set of images that show exactly what he went through during the car bombing.
While rebuilding the system, he talks about his decision to redeploy. "When you first go over there, everybody's writing you letters and asking how you're doing." His voice is drained of its usual exuberance. "Then the letters slow down. You realize that they're moving on with their lives, into their own things. Some of their concerns just don't seem that important."
He had to choose what was most important to him. "I want to be here, to finish the job I signed up to do," he says. "And because of my Ranger training, I can do more now. I have that drive. It's who I am."
Suddenly, the computer screen springs to life, and he searches his photo files. Images flash: Camouflaged faces during a training exercise. A picture of Sprenger with a buddy, featuring what he calls, with nostalgia, "my nice two eyes." Two soldiers flipping off a portrait of Saddam in Baghdad.
As he clicks through the next set of images, Sprenger's voice grows quiet, clipped, as if he's concentrating while tearing out stitches. There's a picture of the street the suicide bomber drove down, the crater he left, his remains draping like Spanish moss on the headquarters' rooftop.
"I was lucky those doors were open," Sprenger says, pointing to the front of company headquarters. If the doors had been closed, they would have been reduced to so many flying razor blades hurtling in his direction. "Mostly, the shrapnel missed."
Coolly, he narrates an image that belies his assertion: a wall and floor spattered with his own blood. "You can see where I sat down on the ammo box, and those handprints are from when I was reaching around trying to find the radio transmitter. The fine spray on the wall must have been from an artery that was pumping when I stood up."
It's hard to look at the next image, of Sprenger after the blast. In a bloodred field where a face ought to be, there are two battered and distended eyelids, the smear of a nose, a mouth that looks like a crushed rose.
"I haven't looked at these photos for 5 months," he says. Maybe he'd rather have let that memory dim. But they're on the hard drive. They're part of him now.
Corporal Sprenger shrugs off fears that something just as bad, or worse, might befall him upon his return to Iraq: "Hell, it's dangerous here," he says, sweeping a hand across the landscape.
There is one deep-seated fear he can't shake: that he'll end up wasting his time. But maybe that's common among men who've had nothing more than an open door between themselves and death.
So he has a plan. "If you want to get things done, sometimes you have to redefine your workday," he told me. "The 32-hour workday. The 48-hour workday. It's amazing what you can get done if you're willing to work like that."
Driving around Fort Campbell, he points out a lineup of 40 cargo containers sitting in an empty lot. "Those weren't there a week ago," he notes. "They're for our deployment." At first, they seem an ominous sign of troop movements to come. But to Peter Sprenger, they look like a personal promise about to be fulfilled.
Over an iced tea at a local joint, Sprenger unfolds a napkin to draw a detailed hierarchical plan of the army, from the commander-in-chief on down. It takes a lot of ink and arrows to reach the guys who actually burst into that roomful of insurgents. And Sprenger will be the first one through that door--the point man in a heavily armed wedge of five infantrymen who truly are the tip of the spear. He knows he belongs there.
Peter Sprenger doesn't want to be thought of as the guy who lost an eye, or even the guy who lost an eye and went back for more. The loss is the least of it. The issue is, can he live up to his own goals for his life? Does his vision reach beyond 50 yards, as far as he can make it go?
One of yours?
Great story!
Just doing it for the team *wink*
New standard for toughness and new standard for manhood.
God bless him.
A grateful nation salutes him.
BTTT!!!!!
"Call me snake!"
Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of Al Qaeda blood
WOW! is right!
HooAh!
GO 101st !!!!!!!!
This should get a second bite of the apple...
"Our New Daniel Boone!
Hollywood take note! If all goes well you have a blockbuster. Oh, that's right Hollywood only makes movies about whiny victims. Boring!
Good luck to him and the rest of the Screaming Eagles."
'A TRUE Freedom Fighter' ping.
The leftists call the terrorists 'Freedom Fighters of the Middle East'. OUR boys are the true freedom fighters.
Darn right! Wish we had men like this in the Senate.
I was just thinking: Hope he runs for political office someday. vote the cowards and traitors out of congress. Great story.
Speechless... Damn what a hero!
He then managed to get into Ranger School and finish it. He is still rated as 30% disabled.
He later commanded a LRRP detachment on his second tour.
*Awestruck*
Bless you, Warrior Sprenger. And thank you.
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