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    David Wood

    Columnist

    How A Modest Hero Saved His Band of Brothers

    Posted:
    05/25/09
    79 Comments  + 
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    Americans today honor their war dead, a staggering toll of 502,307 men and women who lost their lives in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. This Memorial Day, the honor roll would be even longer but for an unassuming small-town Texan who saved a dozen or more lives on a perilous May morning a year ago in a remote mountain pass in eastern Afghanistan.
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    Combat heroes are often like this: ordinary-seeming people who, by training and temperament, leap to extraordinary heights of what the U.S. Army officially calls "gallantry." It is not so much bravery or fearlessness – heroes are often plenty scared in action – but an impulse to risk everything to protect those you ride into battle with. In military service, "I got your six'' -- meaning I am watching your back and I will protect you no matter what – is an emotional commitment that binds the best fighting units.
    David R. Hutchinson didn't join the Army to be a hero; he joined out of a family tradition of service – and to save money for college. He enlisted in the reserves, and shortly thereafter deployed to eastern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.
    The very first time out of the FOB – the Forward Operating Base, where soldiers from the 420th Engineer Brigade were settling in, – the convoy of four gun-trucks, armored Humvees, got hit. Hutchinson, a 21-year-old private first class, rode behind a Mark-19 grenade launcher in the armored turret of the third gun truck.
    He hadn't been worried about this first patrol. The route was through what was considered "non-hostile'' territory -- just a ride to figure out where things are and how to get around. The road wound through hills and on up into the mountains, and just where it took a hairpin turn to climb over a pass, the insurgents struck in a well-planned ambush.
    The convoy lurched to a halt in the kill zone with rocket-propelled grenade fire whizzing down from the ridgelines and detonating in fireballs against the vehicles; Hutchinson, crouched behind his weapon and the steel armor plates protecting his turret, swung to engage.
    "Apparently, this place was much more hostile than we thought," he told me later. About 20 insurgents were intent on killing the 17 soldiers below.
    It was a deadly ambush. From the ridgelines towering over the American convoy, fire poured down relentlessly. Two RPGs detonated against Hutchinson's truck as he was pumping rounds uphill. Shrapnel and bullets flew, Americans were hit and bled. Insurgents sprang from behind cover and ran, firing, at the stalled convoy. Hutchinson's turret took more than 100 hits as he was firing.
    "I was running off of pure adrenalin," Hutchinson recalled. And on training. Before deploying, his unit practiced this very scenario at Fort McCoy, Wis., honing their ambush-reaction skills.
    The battle lasted forever – about two minutes.
    Hutchinson's rapid fire killed five enemy and destroyed the insurgents' main position, a machine gun emplacement. As the insurgents withdrew, they got off one final shot, an RPG round that struck Hutchinson's gun truck. The blast blew Hutchinson off his feet, and a blizzard of razor-sharp steel shrapnel peppered his legs; his first sergeant also fell, badly wounded.
    "At that point, I couldn't feel anything below my waist, so there was no climbing back up into the turret," said Hutchinson. "The first sergeant, his entire upper body was covered with blood, and I did what I could to control the bleeding, putting as much pressure as I could on his face with the pressure bandage. It took some time for us to get out of the kill zone and back to the medevac point. I was worried about keeping him awake because he kept wanting to doze off.''
    With a medevac chopper en route, soldiers pulled Hutchinson from the heavily damaged vehicle and laid him on a stretcher, but there was only one stretcher and Hutchinson insisted on getting up and getting the first sergeant on it. Hutchinson was half-carried, hobbling, to the chopper. Ahead was emergency treatment at Landstuhl and months at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
    Hutchinson underwent months of surgeries and rehab. Doctors took out what he describes as "a dip-can of shrapnel'' from each leg. He learned to walk again, first with a cane and now, a year later, without even a limp. The first sergeant also recovered from his wounds.
    Today Hutchinson is working in retail sales for AT&T. Promoted to specialist, he is still an Army reservist ("No deployments scheduled at this time,'' he reports). In July, he will marry his fiancée, Jenny. "She wasn't happy with the first deployment," he allows, "not to mention the way it turned out.''
    The Army felt otherwise. On June 6, it will award him the Silver Star medal for valor in combat, citing his "extraordinary courage, loyalty and selfless service under fire.''
    The Army said Hutchinson helped save the other soldiers in his unit. Hutchinson said otherwise.
    "It was the Mark-19, it wasn't me," he insisted. "I think anyone would have done what I did, but without the Mark-19 there it would have been a whole different ending.''



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    David Wood

    David Wood writes about war for Politics Daily. In 30 years of covering conflict, he has filed dispatches from dozens of battlefields... more

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