Anybody with a better memory than mine:
There was another hero that took out several Iraqis with his gun before he was captured along with the rest of the group. He kept singing a song and it irritated the hell out of his guards. I remember he was a blond kid that looked no older than 20.
I remember the total fear that this girl had on her face as she was taken captive and filmed.
I would never think that I could judge her. She did her job and did it honorably. To me, she deserves a hell of a lot of respect and support.
Anyone hear about this guy?
“It was Miller, a 23-year-old Army welder from Kansas, who single-handedly took on several Iraqis, manually slamming rounds into his assault rifle and firing as they prepared to lob mortar rounds at Lynch and other soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company.
“He’s one of my heroes,” said Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, who was wounded and leaning against her truck as Miller dashed past her up a dusty road toward the Iraqi mortar pit. “His actions may have saved my life.”
Miller was the sole member of the unit to receive the Silver Star, one of the military’s highest awards for valor. Nearly 130,000 Army troops served in the Iraq war and its aftermath, but only 86 Silver Stars had been awarded through mid-September, according to the Army Personnel Command. Lynch and other members of the 507th received Bronze Stars, a notch below the Silver Star.
“Shoshana yelled at him, ‘Get down, Miller! Get down! You’re going to get hit!’” said another soldier, Spc. Edgar Hernandez, describing how Miller charged toward the Iraqis. Hernandez recalled hearing automatic fire from Iraqi AK-47s and the single shots of Miller’s M-16 rifle.
As a prisoner of war, Miller badgered his interrogators for three weeks, singing an off-key rendition of country singer Toby Keith’s anti-terrorist song, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” And he fooled them.
The Iraqis pressed him to explain a series of numbers and code words scratched on a piece of paper inside his helmet. Prices for power-steering pumps, he told them. The soldiers tossed the paper into a small campfire, unaware that they had destroyed information vital to an enemy: radio frequencies for an invading unit.
“He’s a Pfc. in the Army and he exposed himself without hesitation to the enemy to save his comrades,” said Col. Heidi V. Brown, who commanded the Army task force in Iraq that included Miller’s unit and who wrote his medal ciTation, based on interviews with U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. “It doesn’t get more heroic than that.”
All the witnesses corroborated the tale of Miller’s charging toward a mortar pit and shooting at the enemy, said Brown in a telephone interview, though no one could agree on a precise number of enemy dead. An Army investigative report said it could have been as many as nine. “Absolutely, he killed some Iraqis,” Brown said.”