- (Note - Why do so many US guns jam in times of heavy
combat?? -ed)
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- NEW YORK -- Hardly
a person in America has not heard of Private Jessica Lynch. But if it weren't
for the heroic efforts of a much less known soldier, Lynch would have been
a statistic -- killed in action -- instead of the subject of headlines,
a movie and a book. Mike Wallace has the story of this unsung hero...
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- On the fourth day of the war in Iraq, a huge American
convoy headed from Kuwait to Baghdad. A dozen heavy trucks and other maintenance
vehicles fell behind the rest and got lost.
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- At sunrise, Iraqi troops ambushed the lost soldiers,
firing from both sides of the highway. The Americans sped up to escape
the attack, but the Humvee that Pfc. Jessica Lynch was riding in smashed
into the back of a jack-knifed American tractor-trailer. Less than a mile
behind Lynch, Pfc. Patrick Miller was driving the last truck in the convoy.
During the attack, he floored the accelerator, trying to steer and duck
bullets at the same time.
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- Miller says he had not used his weapon at that point.
"I used my truck on one of 'em," he says. "An Iraqi jumped
out in the middle of the street, and I ran him over."
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- Iraqi bullets pounded Miller's truck, which also carried
Sgt. James Riley and Pfc. Brandon Sloan.
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- "I knew that we were taking a lot of incoming just
from the sounds that were coming around us," Miller says. "It
was bouncing off the trucks, bouncin' off the hood. I went to stick my
hand out the window to adjust the mirror so I could see 'em comin' from
behind. And as I got my hand right to to the window, the mirror just shattered."
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- At that moment a bullet hit Sloan in his forehead, killing
him instantly. "He just tensed up and slumped over. Didn't make a
sound or nothing," Miller recalls. He kept driving. "You had
to. You couldn't stop and try to take care of him."
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- He says, "It just felt like a real bad war movie.
You were actually seeing people die in front of you."
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- Bullets then ripped into his truck's transmission, and
it lost power. Miller and Riley jumped out and ran forward to where Lynch's
Humvee had slammed into the tractor-trailer. Lynch was unconscious and
appeared to be dead. All four others inside were killed.
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- "And it was just like a mangled mess of equipment
and everything," MIller says. "I figured there was no way that
anybody could survive something like that."
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- Army specialists Shoshana Johnson and Edgar Hernandez
also believed everyone in the Humvee had been killed. They were in the
tractor-trailer that Lynch's Humvee had smashed into. All the American
vehicles had broken down, but Miller thought they might still escape the
ambush in an Iraqi dump truck parked 50 yards up the road.
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- If there were no keys in the ignition, he says, he would
have hot-wired it. Is that something he knows how to do? "I'd have
learned really fast," he says.
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- Johnson and Hernandez were taking cover in their tractor-trailer.
Their weapons had jammed and they were pinned down. But Miller ran on toward
the dump truck.
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- "She [Johnson] yells 'Miller! Get down here. You're
gonna get hit,'" Miller says. "And I said 'I gotta go.' And I
just kept going."
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- Johnson recalls, "I thought it was going to be the
end for all of us."
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- Johnson was shot in the ankles; Miller took a bullet
in his arm. He says there were "a whole bunch" of Iraqis firing
on them. "All I could see was the bullets that were hitting the dirt
around my feet."
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- Just when it seemed the situation couldn't get any worse,
it did. Miller saw a group of Iraqis setting up a mortar position in front
of the dump truck. He says it could have wiped them all out.
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- To prevent them from firing, Miller dove behind a horseshoe-shaped
mount of dirt called a berm, across the highway from the Iraqis. But it
was seven Iraqis against one American -- seven Iraqis who were in that
mortar pit just 25 yards away.
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- Miller hadn't fired a weapon for seven months, and he
admits he wasn't the best marksman. He was an Army mechanic, and when he'd
taken his first marksmanship test, he'd failed it.
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- So what did he do? "One guy, like, jumped up to
where I could see him, and he had a mortar round in his hand, getting ready
to drop it in the tube," he says. "And as he jumped up, I just
raised my rifle up and shot, and he fell over."
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- It was the first shot he fired in the incident. The lousy
marksman hit home.
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- But after that first shot, his rifle jammed. He had to
pound on it with the palm of his hand, after every shot, to get the next
bullet loaded into the chamber. He kept on re-loading and shooting. "I
was kind of getting a rhythm down, count like seconds and then look up,"
he explains. "And you could see somebody else trying to load it. So,
I was starting to count, and when I'd get to the number, I'd look up. And
somebody else would be trying to load it, and I'd shoot. I did that probably
seven times total. I counted the last time, and when I looked up, there
wasn't nobody there."
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- Everybody knows about Jessica Lynch, but nobody knows
about Patrick.
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- "And he did an amazing thing," Johnson says.
"He saved our lives. If that mortar had hit that vehicle we were underneath,
we'd be gone. And so would Jessica, because it would have been a chain
reaction. It had all that fuel, we'd be dead."
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- Iraqi gunmen surrounded the group and took them prisoner.
They went into captivity still believing that Lynch had been killed back
in the Humvee. When U.S. Marines came to their rescue 21 days later, they
were astonished to learn that their friend had also survived -- but surprised
that she'd become a national hero.
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- Lynch apparently agrees with Johnson and Hernandez that
Miller was the hero of the whole operation. Does her $1 million book deal
and television movie bother Miller? "Mmm, somewhat," he answers.
"But I don't want to get all into that." Would he turn down a
$1 million book deal? "Oh no, I'd have to think about it," he
laughs.
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- For now, Miller has been working anonymously in the motor-pool
at Fort Carson in Colorado. Three months after the crash, The Washington
Post referred to him thusly in an article about Jessica Lynch: "One
soldier whose name could not be learned, took cover behind a berm. Iraqi
soldiers were on the other side in a mortar pit. He killed a half dozen
of them, a defense official said. Soon though, he was surrounded by a couple
of dozen armed Iraqis and is believed to have been killed on the spot.
'He didn't have a chance,' said the official."
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- Miller says he saw the article. "I went to work
the next day and said that I wasn't doing nothing at work because the paper
said I was dead," he laughs.
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- Only a month ago, Baltimore Sun reporter Tom Bowman revealed
the name of the unsung hero. Bowman had learned that out of the 150,000
U.S. soldiers sent to Iraq, Miller was one of only 90 to receive the Silver
Star for valor.
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- Col. Heidi Brown explains why, out of 2,000 soldiers
under her command, Miller was the only one she recommended for one of the
Army's highest awards. She says, "Private First Class Miller did things
during war that no other soldier underneath my command did. And he risked
his life to save his comrades and he absolutely did."
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- Brown also has an idea why the Pentagon had first mistakenly
described Lynch as a fierce warrior who'd been shot and stabbed fighting
off Iraqis. The Americans there had heard an Iraqi radio transmission describing
a blond American fighting to her last breath before she was shot and stabbed
to death.
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- Now Brown believes they may have confused Lynch with
another blond soldier in her unit, Sgt. Donald Walters, whose body was
later found shot and stabbed to death. "The Iraqi reports had, whether
it was the actual Iraqi, the language, or the translation, used, 'she'
instead of 'he' and that is my understanding of why there was confusion
in this," she says.
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- Miller may be the only person who doesn't think he's
a hero.
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- "It's good to know that you actually did something
to save other people's lives," he says. "But for me, as far as
people saying that I'm a hero, I don't feel that I'm a hero. Because I
feel that I was doing my job as a soldier."
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- November 6, 2003
- © MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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