By: E&P Staff A remarkable video of a recent ambush in Iraq appears on The Washington Post's Web site today, supplied by reporter Nelson Hernandez.
It accompanies a front-page print story by Hernandez today.
The video, and article, cover the delivery of water trucks on a 400-mile journey across Iraq. The first few minutes pass uneventfully, when the convoy is suddenly attacked by insurgents.
About three minutes of heavy fire ensue, with Hernandez shooting video out the windows of a truck, before the convoy speeds off.
His article describes it this way:
A rocket-propelled grenade streaked in from the north, exploding nearby with a deep crump. After a half-second of frozen inactivity, one of the guards screamed, "Get in the truck!" Seconds later, a group of seven to 15 men opened fire with assault rifles from buildings overlooking the compound about 100 yards away.
The usual order of things would have been to drive to the nearest American base, but the iron gate to the compound was closed, too thick to ram through, and the men were under fire. They had to stand and fight.
The trucks' machine guns returned fire, spraying the buildings with bullets, as Jones and two teammates took aimed shots from cover. The shooting from the other side died down.
Jones, waving his hands, shouted at his excited gunners to stop firing. He whipped out his phone and paced around behind his truck, calling for military support. All the Iraqi truck drivers from the convoy had vanished, as had the employees of the water directorate. An Iraqi guard who had been shooting at the attackers got into Hart's pickup truck, breathing heavily and shaking.
As he closed the door, gunfire broke out again -- first the pop, pop, pop of rifles, then the rapid thumping of the machine guns atop the pickup trucks. Once again, Jones and the men outside shot back.
"Jay, get in your wagon! Get in your wagon, Jay, we're moving!" Hart yelled at his teammate James Stevens, who then ran out to the gate to open it so the trucks could escape.
As the team laid down a few more shots, the pickup trucks raced out of the compound, turning right on the road and getting onto the main highway east, toward the U.S. base at Abu Ghraib. Across the road, the insurgents took a few parting shots at the convoy. A man with an RPG scrambled for cover as the gunners in the trucks fired at him.
The reports came in over the radio as they reached safety: They had killed two insurgents. The convoy had scattered to the winds; three or four of the Iraqi truck drivers were kidnapped before they could make it back to Umm Qasr. Everybody in the security team was alive, nobody hurt. And a water truck had made it to Baghdad.
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