Thread: Nassiriyah...what REALLY happened

Courtesy Military.com

By Ed Offley

By all accounts, he was not Ranger material: A scrawny, 23-year-old Army soldier from Kansas who shot a mediocre 26 on the M-16 qualification range, worked as a welder in a rear-area maintenance unit, and in his own words, had authority problems with officers.

That was until the morning of March 23, 2003, on the banks of the Euphrates River outside Nasiriyah, Iraq, where Pfc. Patrick Miller became an icon of heroism and true grit.

Miller was driving a five-ton wrecker towing a water trailer when the rest of his unit from the 507th Maintenance Co. took a wrong turn and drove straight into the city. The horrific ambush that followed, where Iraqis killed 11 soldiers (including two from another unit), wounded nine and took six prisoner, has been widely documented in recent months because of the media feeding frenzy over Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

It is a sad and cynical commentary on our times that reporters, Hollywood screenplay writers and other members of the chattering class were so blinded by the politically-correct stereotypes fueled by the (inaccurate) accounts of Lynch's heroism that they were blinded to the astounding story of what Miller did during the ambush at Nasariyah.

Reporter Tom Bowman of The Baltimore Sun did much to correct journalism's sorry record when his blow-by-blow account of Pfc. Patrick Miller appeared in the newspaper last Sunday. (We have created a link to Bowman's article, "The Unknown Hero of the 507th," here at SFTT.org.)

Miller and a second soldier and the other 507th soldiers were trapped by a fast-moving mobile ambush staged by Iraqi Fedayeen Saddam fighters in trucks and other vehicles, who riddled the cumbersome vehicles with AK-47 fire and RPG grenades. At one point, they slowed to pick up two other soldiers in a disabled vehicle, retrieving one while the other vanished and was killed several hundred yards away. Minutes later an Iraqi bullet shattered the windshield, instantly killing Pvt. Brandon U. Sloan.

[B] Miller was desperately trying to reach friendly troops on the other side of the Euphrates River when the truck's transmission began giving out. He and the other survivor, Sgt. James Riley, jumped from the truck and ran forward until they came upon a grisly sight: an Army Humvee that had smashed into a disabled truck. All five soldiers inside were either dead or seriously injured, and only one, Lynch, would survive.

It is clear that Miller and the other soldiers were unprepared for the vicious firefight that was escalating around them. As the official Army investigation into the ambush later concluded, practically all of the soldiers' M-16 rifles had already jammed due to insufficient maintenance and cleaning. Miller himself, Bowman writes, had not even fired his M-16 since visiting a training range seven months earlier, in August 2002. Bowman's narrative continues:

"Miller reached an earthen berm just across the road from the Iraqi truck. Then he noticed a group of Iraqis in front of the dump truck, some 50 feet away, setting up a mortar tube. A rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the far side of the berm, and Miller rolled out the other side. When he crawled back inside and peered over the top, he could see an Iraqi ready to drop a mortar round into the tube.

The Iraqis, apparently untrained Fedayeen fighters, sprayed Miller's berm with inaccurate fire. Meanwhile, the young welder discovered he could only fire his rifle in single-shot mode. Bowman continues:

"But Miller's rifle was jammed. A spent round would eject, but the new round would only go halfway into the chamber. Miller slammed his palm into a lever on the side of the gun, and the bullet slid into place. He raised his rifle and fired. The Iraqi collapsed in a heap before he could fire the mortar round. … "One by one, Miller, by his count, shot seven Iraqis as each popped up and tried to work the mortar. After it was over, a large bruise spread over Miller's palm from the constant slapping against the rifle."

Suddenly, several dozen armed Iraqis swarmed the site and Miller and the others threw down their weapons. Miller and four other soldiers were hustled off into captivity while their captors took gravely injured Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa (who died shortly thereafter) and Lynch to a hospital.

In captivity, his co-prisoners described Miller as defiant, singing Toby Keith's anti-terrorist song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." He even managed to fool the Iraqis into believing that a sheet of radio callsigns and frequencies in his pocket was a list of machine parts and their order numbers. Several weeks later, a Marine patrol rescued them.



Through no fault of her own, Jessica Lynch became the poster girl of women in combat, stoked by Pentagon officials with an axe to grind and reporters unable (or unwilling) to look beyond their own most cherished illusions.

Interviewed by reporter Bowman, Patrick Miller declined to express resentment or anger over Lynch's book deal, movie contract and network TV interviews. One of his fellow prisoners in Iraq, Spc. Shoshana Johnson, said it best, telling Bowman: "Jessica's a wonderful girl, and we're happy she's OK. But it was Patrick; it wasn't Jessica. His weapon was working. He was doing everything possible. Patrick deserves so much, and he's not getting the recognition. He's still a private first class. He hasn't even been promoted."

The Army did award him the Silver Star for valor - he was the only member of the 507th to receive it - as well as the Purple Heart and POW medal for his actions. He is currently assigned at Fort Carson, Colo., where he works in the motor pool and lives in a modest home with his wife and two children.

Col. Heidi V. Brown, who commanded the Army task force in Iraq that included Miller's company, personally wrote the citations for his awards. Brown has compiled a detailed account of Miller's actions at Nasiriyah and briefs her subordinate officers on the soldier's performance. She concludes, asking a question of her audience: "Would you do the things he did? … Could you?"

Thanks to reporter Bowman, the entire nation finally has gotten the real story about that tragic morning in Iraq. Each of us can ask ourselves the same question: "Would I do the things he did? … Could I?"

Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. ©2003 DefenseWatch. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.