Soldier's life immersed in pain

Soldier's life immersed in pain
By NICHOLAS SPANGLER
nspangler@MiamiHerald.com
Staff Sgt. Victor Dominguez sat topside in the cramped turret of the Bradley, his men below bathed in the weak green glow of the instrument panel, the outside dead black, like most of Iraq at night.

His vehicle and the one behind drove slowly on this bad stretch of road in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad. They were trying to draw enemy fire. In theory, the tanklike Bradleys' armor would absorb the hits, and the shooter, having revealed his position, would find himself on the receiving end of 400 high-explosive rounds a minute.

There was another reason they kept it slow: Any faster and they'd miss the seemingly random pile of litter that might conceal an improvised explosive device.

What Dominguez, a gifted soldier from Homestead, couldn't know was that just such a device lay a few hundred yards ahead, buried inches below the road.

It consisted of a battery, two barely separated wires for a trigger, and three antitank mines nestled in four monster artillery rounds, each about six inches wide and three feet long.

It was not yet midnight, July 13, 2006, and Dominguez was headed for hell at 25 miles per hour.

It had been a bad month: car bombs, small-arms fire, improvised explosive devices. ''It was just nonstop fighting, nonstop people getting hurt,'' said Gary Mette, who was commanding the Bradley behind Dominguez's.

But this mission was going well. The Bradleys had just inserted an eight-man hunter-killer team, already vanished into the darkness; soon they'd head back to base.

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linked from ICasualties.org