Word: ahmelman
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...road to clear away the remains of a car damaged by a bomb. Civilian vehicles between the convoy and the roadblock turned off to find alternative routes. The security men, wearing white Arab robes, sat quietly in the line of traffic. Then team leader Johnson climbed out of Ahmelman's car and began firing in the air to warn other vehicles to stay clear - an act which clearly identified the convoy as contractors. "They rang the dinner bell for the bad guys,'' says ERSM staffer Scott Traudt, who was in the company's Baghdad headquarters at the time...
...blacked-out windows sped along a slip road, made a U turn, and stopped about 200 m away, facing the convoy. From its passenger window, a belt-fed machinegun opened fire. The first bullets announced themselves with a puff of dust beside Yeager's vehicle, then a burst hit Ahmelman in the thigh. The videotape from the dashboard camera recorded the sound of bullets hitting the car, Ahmelman crying out, then a chaos of yells, revving cars and machinegun fire...
...across the trunk of the BMW. Surette continued firing until he passed out from loss of blood, while Yeager, unable to see the attackers, blasted away pointlessly at a barricade before running to take cover in a ditch on the opposite side of the road. In the rear car, Ahmelman was slumped against the window. Hunt, bleeding to death from a wound to his femoral artery, lay on the ground beside the vehicle while Johnson tried to treat him. Harris, in the armored Mercedes, tried to drive closer to help Surette, but the vehicle sputtered to a halt after about...
...thing," says Crane, who served as a British Army officer from 1988 to 2003. The men in the convoy applied "exactly the correct fire solutions," he says. "And when the incident was over, they dealt with their comrades and moved on." The existence of the video was kept from Ahmelman's family to spare them further distress, Crane explains. "Sometimes decisions are correct, sometimes incorrect," he says of what happened that day. "I've heard somebody suggest they should have immediately crossed the median strip and headed back to the (fortified) Green Zone. A personal security detail that did that...
...Apollo team knew their job was risky. When the survivors returned to their Baghdad house after the firefight, they found laid out on Jay Hunt's bed a farewell letter and gifts for his family. Ahmelman too "knew it could happen," says Cridland, who discussed the dangers with his friend a few days before he left Australia. Ahmelman had prepared for his new job by taking refresher courses in shooting and unarmed combat. "He was a warrior," says Cridland. In war, wrote the Chinese sage Sun Tzu, "he will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared...