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Monday, April 14, 2003

By Peter Baker, The Washington Post

NUMANIYAH, Iraq -- The wrong turn happened just after dawn on a clear Sunday morning, March 23. The convoy from the Army's 507th Maintenance Co. wandered by mistake into the riverfront city of Nasiriyah and suddenly it seemed to the soldiers that every Iraqi was trying to kill them.

(Top) Former POW Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, wounded in both feet, is escorted by U.S. Marines to a waiting C-130 transport plane after being rescued yesterday near Samarra, Iraq. (Bottom) A few hours later, Johnsons' 2-year-old daughter, Janelle, waited impatiently for a chance to talk to mom after Johnson placed a call to her parents' home in El Paso, Texas. Shoshana's mother Eunice answered the call. (Photos by Wally Santana/AP and Victor Calzada/El Paso Times via AP) RELATED STORIES Joy, tears for families, friends of seven rescued POWs Pfc. Lynch, family hail news that seven other POWs are free

"We got turned around and then lost and we rolled into Nasiriyah before it was secure and when we rolled in there was an ambush waiting for us," recalled Spc. Shoshana Johnson, 30, from El Paso, Texas.

The bullets and explosions came from all sides. Some of the Humvees flipped over. Other drivers hit the gas hoping to outrun the danger, but ran into even heavier fire. In the swirling dust, soldiers' rifles jammed. Pfc. Patrick Miller, 23, began shoving rounds into his rifle one at a time, firing a single shot at enemies swarming all around.

Some Americans died where they fell. Johnson was shot with a single bullet that sliced through both feet. Spc. Edgar Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Texas, was hit in the bicep of his right arm. Spc. Joseph Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, N.M., was shot three times, twice in the ribs and once in the upper left buttocks.

Finally, it fell to Sgt. James Riley, a 31-year-old bachelor from Pennsauken, N.J. and the senior soldier present, to surrender. "We were like Custer," he recalled yesterday, still sounding shocked. "We were surrounded. We had no working weapons. We couldn't even make a bayonet charge -- we would have been mowed down. We didn't have a choice, sir."

The battle lasted about 15 minutes. Nine U.S. soldiers were dead. Those captured by the Iraqis would become the war's best-known soldiers. One, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, would be rescued from a local hospital April 2. Five others -- Johnson, Hernandez, Hudson, Riley, and Miller -- became prisoners of war until yesterday morning, when they were found, along with two captured crew members of an Apache attack helicopter, by U.S. Marines in a house north of Baghdad.

In their first interviews after being freed, the former prisoners described a harrowing journey through the Iraq war -- from their ill-fated missions and capture through an arduous imprisonment where death often seemed around the corner. Speaking to reporters from The Washington Post and Miami Herald aboard a C-130 transport plane evacuating them from Iraq, they alternated between tears and smiles and hollow gazes as they told their stories.

Mysterious wrong turn

The cooks and supply clerks and mechanics of the 507th Maintenance Company were unlikely early casualties of the war. Their overnight trip into Iraq was supposed to be a support mission to help troops who were doing the actual fighting.

The 507th convoy snaked its way from Kuwait across the southern edge of Iraq and up the road toward Baghdad three days after the Marines had stormed across the border. The young war seemed to be going better than expected and few thought the trip through the desert could turn into such a high-risk venture.

Members of the convoy still can't understand how they ventured by mistake into Nasiriyah, but when they did, the brunt of the city's defense was directed at them.

"It wasn't a small ambush," Riley said yesterday. "It was a whole city. And we were getting shot from all different directions as we were going down the road -- front, rear, left, right."

At one point, Riley called out to a wounded comrade but got no reply and could not help as bullets rained past. "There was nowhere to go," he said.

"It was like something you'd see in a movie," said Miller, the private first class who tried to place bullets one by one into the chamber of his rifle after it jammed. c160 Engagingbeautifulstrippedfemalepows Ko 2008 Tag Hotel Properties Engaging Beautiful Stripped Female Pows Freed POWs recount story of wrong turn, bloody fight, sudden rescue x Female a160 Engagingbeautifulstrippedfemalepows Ko 2008 Tag Hotel Properties Engaging Beautiful Stripped Female Pows Freed POWs recount story of wrong turn, bloody fight, sudden rescue n e Pows Beautiful