Senior Airman Jason D. Cunningham
Cunningham, based at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Ga., was one of eight soldiers from three services killed during an assault on an 11,000-foot-high mountain redoubt near the town of Gardez in eastern Afghanistan.
Maj. Vincent Savino, commander of the Air Force's 38th Rescue Squadron that Cunningham was attached to, gave new details of the engagement that became America's bloodiest battle to date in Afghanistan.
Cunningham was part of a quick-reaction force sent to rescue a group of soldiers pinned down by heavy machine-gun and rocket fire on a mountain slope. One helicopter had already been shot down when Cunningham's unit flew in aboard another.
"They went in under heavy machine-gun fire. The helicopter was hit by a rocket and crash-landed," Savino told the hushed church. "The pilot and co-pilot were wounded. Some of the Rangers on board had been shot."
Cunningham, a paramedic, opened his rucksack and began treating the wounded. But the flames and smoke from the burning MH-47 helicopter forced him and another rescuer to move the wounded soldiers outside. As they maneuvered over the rocky terrain, gunfire and mortar shells rained down from entrenched Al Qaeda and Taliban positions above.
"Jason said they had to get these guys out of there. He ran across a direct line of fire to move the wounded men to another location," Savino said.
He helped move the wounded three times to shield them from enemy fire.
"Jason was going back and forth treating his wounded comrades when he was shot," Savino said. "He was shot but he continued to treat 10 wounded patients. They owe him their lives. The only reason they came home was because of Jason Cunningham. It doesn't make it easier saying he died doing what he loved or that he was a hero, but that's what he was."
Another Californian, U.S. Navy SEAL Neil Roberts of Woodland, also died in the fight.
Before the battle of March 4 and 5, Cunningham had helped rescue eight crew members aboard a C-130 transport plane that had crashed in Afghanistan. He wrote his wife the letter she had earlier read after that experience.
"He'd seen the dangers of what happened there and he was afraid," she said.
A month before his deployment in Afghanistan, Cunningham and his wife saw the film "Black Hawk Down" about a fierce battle between U.S. Army Rangers and Somali gunmen in Mogadishu.
She asked him why it was necessary for 10 men to go back to save one or retrieve a dead comrade.
"He said, 'Wouldn't you want someone to come after me? Those Rangers and pilots can do their jobs because they know someone is coming after them,'" she recalled.