Posted on 09/23/2003 5:27:00 PM PDT by Dubya
Two North Texas soldiers and a third from San Antonio have been recommended to receive Bronze Star medals for valor for their actions during a July 14 ambush in Iraq.
They are: Spc. Jacqueline Hunt, 19, of Fort Worth; Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Kelly, 22, of Abilene, a native of Mesquite; and Spc. Omar Zayas of San Antonio, military officials said.
The soldiers, members of the Army Reserve's Abilene-based 490th Civil Affairs Battalion, were working as a team to build and maintain relationships with military units and civil authorities.
Kelly's right leg was blown off below the knee and Zayas was wounded in the head. Hunt, shaken by the blast, fired some 200 rounds at the attackers with her Squad Automatic Weapon, known as a SAW. She may have hit some of them. Blood trails were found near the ambush site, and some armed Iraqis were taken prisoner by a Marine unit arriving shortly after the action, military officials said.
Kelly's team was in a two-vehicle column driving east from Ramadi to Baghdad when the world went black.
"They set off a camouflaged chain of explosives on the shoulder of the road as we passed," Kelly said from Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.
"The blast was so loud, everything went black," Kelly said. "Shrapnel shredded my leg about four inches below the knee. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hunt thrown to the floor by the blast. She could have stayed down there and been safe, but she scrambled up and began firing her SAW at the enemy, just like she'd been trained."
"Zayas was bleeding from a head wound, but he put the pedal to the metal and got us out of the kill zone, although the tires on the right side of the vehicle were shredded. He was firing his rifle at the ambushers as he drove," Kelly said.
"I am really, really proud of my team."
Kelly and his fiancee, Spc. Lindsey Gunter, married by proxy after he arrived at Walter Reed. She had been serving with Kelly in Iraq but was transferred to a Civil Affairs unit in Maryland and visits him daily.
Hunt's friends and family marvel at her firing a machine gun in battle, according to her grandmother, Betty Martin of Fort Worth.
"When she told me about it, she told me to 'tell granddaddy [a World War II Marine combat veteran] that I shot those guys!'"
Martin said that Hunt graduated early from Fossil Hills High School in Keller and enlisted to "get money for college." She was accepted at Abilene Christian University, but then was called into the military, Martin said.
"I was surprised she joined the Army because she hated getting dirty," Martin said.
Hunt played oboe in the high school band and was on the student newspaper staff, according to Ginny Modisett, of Keller, her fifth grade teacher.
"She is a tiny, beautiful girl who loves poetry," Modisett said. "I sent in one of her poems to a student poetry book and it was published. You form deep bonds with some children when you teach, and I bonded with Jackie."
Hunt's second-grade teacher was Modisett's daughter, Michelle Bowles.
"She blossomed when we began studying poetry and she really blossomed when she wrote her own," Bowles said.
Bowles' second-grade class is sending Hunt letters and poems. One sent a bag of candy for a 10-year-old Iraqi boy Hunt had befriended, Bowles said.
"I am no hero," Hunt told her grandmother. "I did what I was trained to do and any member of my team would do the same."
Kelly is the "special soldier" for Girl Scout Troop 528 in Lewisville, according to Troop Leader Amanda Beauchamp.
Judy Hauenstine heard of the ambush from Kelly's father, retired Army Col. Ed Kelly, and passed the story along to Beauchamp, her granddaughter. After shedding a few tears, Hauenstine said the pre-teen scouts began sending Kelly drawings, letters and gifts.
"One little girl sent him some mint-flavored chewing gun with a note reading, 'In case you find a pretty nurse you want to kiss,'" she said.
Frank Perkins' Military Notes column appears Tuesdays. tanker16@sbcglobal.net
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