Word: perez
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...Donia called to announce the birth of their son. "He looks just like you," she said. "He's very beautiful." The hospital promised to post a picture of baby Ramiro, named after his grandfather, on its website. Luckily, Perez had been deployed along with the 5th Special Forces Group from Fort Campbell, Ky., a high-tech outfit with a laptop linked to the Internet by satellite--a laptop reserved last Christmas Eve solely for the use of one Randel Perez. He hunted and pecked until the screen filled with a digital image of Ramiro. Perez stared at the picture...
Barely two months later, following the mortar blast in the Shah-i-Kot, Perez found himself in charge of his platoon. With nine of his 26 men wounded, his immediate concern was getting them to safety without making a bad situation worse. "I'm the quarterback now," Perez thought. "Whatever I decide, I'm going to have to live with it, right or wrong." His wounded comrades knew they had to move. "We just needed to get the hell away from where we were," Maroyka says. "Even those of us with leg injuries had a simple choice...
...Perez stifled the urge to rush to the aid of the downed men; he knew he would be mowed down if he tried. Instead he stood and began blazing away with his M-4 rifle. That forced the al-Qaeda fighters to take cover in the rocks several hun-dred yards away--and stop firing--as the wounded Americans limped to a safer spot. "He showed almost no concern for his body," says Sergeant Jeffrey Grothause, one of Perez's soldiers. "He's up there, and rounds are flying all around him, in between his legs, and he doesn...
...known they were there," says Grippe, the top enlisted man in the 1st Battalion of the 87th Infantry Regiment, "we would have landed someplace else." The U.S. troops didn't have the men or firepower to scale the rocks and wipe out the enemy fighters. But Perez and the others in command remembered the 1993 Somali fire fight--a panicky retreat in which 18 Americans were killed--and they decided to dig in. "We didn't run from the fight," says Grippe. "It wasn't a Mogadishu...
...Perez couldn't worry about the lousy intelligence that had got them into this mess. His job was to keep his men focused on their mission and to avoid using up all their ammunition. Mortar shells and machine-gun rounds were running short, but the roar of air strikes and the concussions of 2,000-lb. bombs in the mountains were good for morale. B-52 bombers, F-16 and F-18 fighter-bombers, and AC-130 and AH-64 gunships were pulverizing caves and crags. Perez's men set their M-4s to fire single shots instead of three...