Posted on 12/01/2005 2:49:35 PM PST by neverdem
Capt. Christopher Ieva comes from a military family. His grandfather won a Bronze Star in World War II and his father served during Vietnam. Throughout his boyhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., and then North Jersey, Ieva wanted to be a Marine.
On May 8, Ieva found himself leading a Marine assault in western Iraq. U.S. forces were in the midst of Operation Matador, an effort to clean out the insurgent safe havens in the towns along the Iraqi-Syrian border.
Ieva and his men were to help bridge the Euphrates River and attack insurgent strongholds to the north. But as they got to the river, they began taking mortar fire from the town of Ubaydi, about three-quarters of a mile away. Ieva’s superiors decided they wouldn’t cross the river that day; they would take Ubaydi.
Ieva crawled up to a hillside and as he told me, surveyed the town “Civil War style.” Ubaydi is a densely packed grid of concrete townhouses in the middle of the desert.
Ieva decided to take two armored vehicles and as a feint, make a flamboyant charge across the desert on the southwest corner of the town. Two platoons would flank around to the left and launch the main attack. Others would go off to the right to prevent the insurgents from escaping. It was a maneuver Ieva and his men had practiced each Friday after hikes.
Ieva’s armored vehicle took off across the desert, and he saw a blaze of muzzle flashes from the walls of the town ahead. The machine gun bullets made a constant “ding-ding-ding” as they hit his vehicle, and the rocket-propelled grenades made loud cracking noises.
As he approached the town, Ieva was looking into the backyards of the first row of duplexes. The two platoons on the left were coming in...
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
Thank you David Brookes for penning this article. And Thank you Neverdem for posting it.
The Chris Ieva's of this world are heros. And the nitwit democrats are spitting on him.
It's maddening. The loonies who hate Bush so much are blind to the heroism of our troops.
Thanks for the great article.
Tis a shame one has to search high and low for articles about these heroes, and the cut 'n run bunch get all the MSM coverage.
November 27, 2005
Heroes Abroad, Unknown at Home
By DAVID BROOKS
This is a culture that knows how to honor the casualties and the dead, but not the strength and prowess of its warriors.
© 2005 The New York Times
Americans are tough and strong and the weenies came from Mars.
Thats because the MSM only wants you to know about their heroes. You know Kerry, Murtha and their ilk. It's a disgrace.
Our armed forces are the best in the world
They make America proud!
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