01x03 - A Battle for Haditha Dam

[bunniefuu]

There is no going back to the person that I was before Haditha Dam.

This was unlike any mission we'd been taught about in Ranger history.

We sent a hundred guys, and they had like a battalion, so we were outnumbered. My chief fear was, am I gonna have the guts to go forward?

Am I gonna have the courage? I was a 19-year-old private. What I was truly getting myself into,

I had no clue.

My name is Matthew Sanders.

I'm 32 and from Kansas City, Missouri.

When 9/11 happened I was 18. I woke up that Tuesday. It's on the news. I'm listening to it on the radio.

I get downtown, and City Hall is blocked off, like for blocks.

Well, once I saw, you know, that Kansas City, Missouri, you know, was on lockdown, it literally hit home, you know, and it was like, I, I knew, like... everything was about to change, and so on 9/11, I was there in the recruiting station.

At that point they told me there was a possibility I was going to become a medic, which is not something I signed up for, so I didn't really know what to make of it.

He was "volun-told" by his squad that he was gonna learn how to be an EMT.

Doc Buma is the company senior medic who trained me as an 11 Bravo medic.

He was my mentor, he was my, my big brother.

I was a new private, and he taught me a lot about, you know, life as a Ranger.

Rangers are the, you know, primary elite fighting force.

It's almost like you hear about how valedictorians go to Harvard, and everybody's a valedictorian, you know.

Go to the Ranger regiment, everybody is the, the baddest guy on the block.

At the time, I had already gone through two tours, and Matt was the only cherry private I had ever had. As a medic you don't deal with privates.

I usually get guys that come trained.

A cherry private is a private who is uninitiated to combat.

And cherry is, it's, it's, it's a... it's... it's a... Jesus.

In the world of the Ranger Regiment, a cherry private is somebody who hasn't done anything yet, who hasn't proven themselves yet.

Matthew Sanders: In this new role as a 11 Bravo medic, my fear was, you know, if someone gets hurt, you know, am I gonna be able to help them?

I didn't tell anybody that I was afraid because I didn't want them to have any doubt in me.

So I just, I kind of tucked it away, and, you know, I told myself that, you know, no matter what, I was gonna give everything that I could.

Iraq continues to have and develop weapons of mass destruction.

The White House wants a vote at the security council Thursday.

What we have done thus far has not been sufficiently persuasive.

Matthew Sanders: No one had told us we were going to Iraq, but we all kind of knew. You know, if you were watching CNN or Fox News in 2003, you know, you knew that we were about to go to w*r. Above all, you know,

I think I was more curious, you know, like what's it gonna be like, you know.

What's w*r gonna feel like?

What's it gonna be like to jump into Iraq?

[Man speaking on radio]

We did a tactical air land. At cruise altitude, they turned off the engines. And then they just kind of do this like tactical descend where it's, it's like a roller coaster ride.

And they turn the engines on at the last moment.

[Radio continues]

I remember kind of expecting to just kind of drive off, and there'd be g*ns blazing, but we arrived to little fanfare.

The invasion and the preinvasion of Iraq was a very surreal time.

Originally we were meant to inv*de Baghdad International Airport in a, in a major raid.

But the conventional forces were seizing these towns so quickly in the "shock and awe" campaign, that we lost our mission and it left Special Operations leaders kind of scrambling to figure out what roles they could serve.

Finally we got this mission, and they told us we were gonna go hit Haditha Dam.

Ryland Taylor: The Haditha Dam was essentially a very important strategic point for the invasion of Iraq. It provided one of the only main highways across the Euphrates. It provided hydroelectric power to the western half of Iraq. The initial fear was that the Iraqi Army might sabotage the dam and actually flood the entire city of Haditha. This would be disastrous to the people there, but it would also be disastrous to the invasion.

Basically we were told there's this huge dam, and we have to go secure it.

Ryland Taylor: The idea was that it would go very quite simply. We would seize this hard point and then hold onto it for about 30 hours. And then, by then, the conventional forces would relieve us.

And so, things just didn't quite go that way.

Doc Buma: There was just something in the air.

We were all prepared to die, and we were prepared to go and do what we needed to do to further the Ranger name and to protect whatever it is that we thought we were protecting at the time.

Ryland Taylor: We drove throughout the night. All this time, you know, you would see on the horizon b*mb flashes from the "shock and awe" campaign.

Doc Buma: As you pull up to the dam, I remember seeing it for the first time, and it was just so huge.

The structure itself was, I don't know how many stories, but it's in the double digits, I'm sure.

Matthew Sanders: Haditha Dam was about two miles long, about 150 feet tall.

Doc Buma: When we pulled up to the dam, my platoon was tasked with taking a series of buildings on the near side as we approached.

Ryland Taylor: We saw some members of the Iraqi army, which we zip-tied and detained.

And we're preparing to take the rest of the hydroelectric facility.

You know, we were hoping we could do it quietly.

Red alert, red alert.

[g*nf*re]

I didn't even think about the fact that I was sh**ting until after I had fired four or five rounds and, you know, we'd all, you know, stopped sh**ting because their targets weren't standing any longer.

It took probably a good 30 seconds to realize that we had just sh*t somebody. It was one of those things I always thought about it, you know, going into the infantry, engaging, you know, the enemy is something that you're supposed to, to look forward to, something I always wondered if I'd have the ability to do, and, you know, when it happened, it didn't feel like the way I thought it would feel.

It, I didn't really feel anything.

You know, it, it didn't feel real at the time, you know, it didn't feel any different than training.

And, and then it just, you know, before I really had time to let it all sink in, the battle, you know, kind of just erupted.

[g*nf*re]

All of a sudden these RPGs are flying up in the air and airbursting over us.

We began doing g*n runs overhead.

Doc Buma: It must've woke up the village, and everybody knew that we were there.

And this thing became the scariest mission that I had ever been on in my life.

[g*nf*re continues]

Matthew Sanders: The Iraqis had entrenched themselves in the low ground, but they hadn't truly secured the high ground of the dam.

But we were able to take the structure itself relatively easy.

It was a matter of, of us being, you know, in the high ground pushing the enemy back from that point.

[Explosions]

[g*nf*re]

We were taking fire from all directions.

Matthew Sanders: We'd seen a hundred guys, and they had, like, a battalion, so we were outnumbered. They were sh**ting RPGs.

It was crazy, I mean, there was a, a high volume of g*nf*re at this point.

Things are blowing up around me.

In the beginning of the battle, it was basically my job to take a high point of terrain by a bunker at the base of the dam, which we dubbed the Eagles Nest. It was the highest point in the entire valley, and I could see everything going on, which meant I could relay valuable information to the unit.

We had a full field of fire from their position. A full field of fire for a well-trained sn*per essentially means that any enemy infantry that you can see, you can k*ll.

[Muffled g*nsh*t]

I had conducted two deployments in Afghanistan before moving over to sn*per section.

Becoming a Ranger had been something I had been wanting to do since I was around 15.

I'd bounced around most of my life all along the West Coast. Unlike a m*llitary brat, I was a hippie brat, but I think the lifestyle is pretty similar.

Some of my earliest memories were formed when I was three, and my mother took me on the Great Peace March.

Which was a a march across the country in hopes of a nuclear disarmament.

I suppose it's a little obvious and a little cliché that I've become a sn*per Army Ranger, having such a liberal upbringing.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to put in context the mindset behind men in sn*per sections.

About half of sn*per section were these kinds of stereotypical Rangers.

These, these were the guys that on the weekends, they'd go out hunting and, you know, you'd go to see them for morning formation, and they would have a bled hog in the back of their pickup truck.

I mean, these guys are just, like, so country.

And then the other half were guys like me, which were these, like, kind of more heady, more neurotic, and they make a good blend. I never showed hesitancy. And I never was afraid. I was the type of guy that at the end of the day, they all knew, "Oh, yeah, this guy will... He'll be a trigger puller." This idea of crawling through mud, getting eyes on an objective and identifying a target, I mean this is all very sexy stuff.

I mean, at the end of the day, having a suppressed r*fle, I mean, it was all I ever really wanted.

We fired so many rounds at the dam. Literally in a pile of brass, we fired at live targets. We're essentially a sn*per team sitting in a moving target range.

It wasn't until all of the g*nf*re and everything started that you really started seeing the exposure to different types of casualties.

My position was such that I was able to really watch the battle space unfold in front of me. At one point, one vehicle took a wrong turn and drove through Iraqis on both sides.

[g*nf*re]

Then they had to turn around and drive right back through it.

When we watched that vehicle go through that ambush and then drive back through the k*ll zone, I knew that someone got hit. I heard the call for medic.

I remember gunny turning to me and saying, "Sanders, that's you!"

That was like being just let off the leash.

Soldier: Come on, let's go. Sanders!

Matthew Sanders: My mind was going down everything I was supposed to do, just kind of at once. I was expecting the worst. I was expecting to see, you know, an arterial bleed or a sucking chest wound.

And then I get there and, you know, it's this foot injury.

I kind of yelled out like, "You've been sh*t!"

You know, like, just 'cause I finally saw it.

And he's kind of like, "Well, duh," you know, but I put a quick pressure dressing on it.

He actually refused any sort of pain medication, took it like a champ. It was a good introduction to, to being a medic. Kind of, okay, I can do this.

This is something that, you know, like, you're capable of doing this.

You're trained. You're going to be fine.

You know, fear no fear, like, you can do this.

For the rest of the night it was literally from one position to the next, and just, you know, observing Rangers in action. We'd see this like, looked like lightning strike. A couple of seconds later you feel the thunder, you know, but it wasn't lightning, it wasn't thunder. It was, you know, 2000-pound bombs, you know, courtesy of the red, white, and blue. I was so fired up that there was no sleeping. Everything was so real.

I remember even thinking like, this does not feel like any movie I've ever seen in my entire life.

Ryland Taylor: We had our perimeter.

Then we asked, "Well, what, what are we doing now?"

And so they say, "Well, you know, we might end up being here a lot longer."

Matthew Sanders: We realized that we were gonna be here for a while.

And we also realized that we were, like, running out of food and water, you know, relatively quickly.

You get to a point where you just say, "I gotta sleep at some point."

You hear the rounds coming in, and you go, "Maybe you're...

Maybe I'll survive, maybe I won't. I don't know.

But if I wake up, then I'm gonna fight another day."

Ryland Taylor: It was early in the morning, predawn, and we were taking enemy fire from a mortar. I'm trying to figure out where it was coming from.

So, we're scanning, and then we see there's a guy on a little island at the lake, and he's got a mortar tube, and he's alone, and he's launching mortars at us.

And he's just out of range of anything that we really have, and so we're figuring out what to do, and then just out of nowhere, this...

The anti-t*nk team pulls a Javelin system.

Now, a Javelin is an anti-vehicle w*apon. They're meant to take out Soviet tanks.

[rocket f*ring]

Matthew Sanders: I see this rocket just sh**t up as if we were trying to sh**t down, like, a helicopter or something.

I actually sh*t... Thought that like there was a helicopter in the sky somewhere.

Ryland Taylor: Everybody stopped fighting. we all stopped sh**ting.

We all stopped sh**ting to watch this thing glide through the air.

It goes up, it goes up, it goes up and then it just drops down.

Ryland Taylor: It looks like a Predator m*ssile just blew up this entire island. I mean, it was absurd. It was quite crazy.

We all felt better that we weren't taking mortars after that.

Doc Buma: I was initially at the top of the dam at the casualty collection point. As the medic, I wanted to be with my guys, and that's where I feel most comfortable.

Despite the fact that we were getting a bunch of indirect fire and all this other stuff, my job was to be with them.

Matthew Sanders: At one point, I linked up with Doc Buma, at the casualty collection point, and there was a, a wounded Iraqi.

He'd been sh*t through the face.

Doc Buma: As a medic, you have to work on both sides, you know, it's not... It's very conflicting sometimes.

Matthew Sanders: From Doc Buma it was this, just degree of humanity in, in a very inhumane situation.

Doc Buma: What I learned really early on was that most of us are scared of what we don't know. And so, as long as I know what I'm getting into,

I will have a better insight as to how I can b*at that particular obstacle. That's all I did, was trained, learn how to help people, learn how to take care of people.

I joined when I was 17.

I still had my senior year to do, but I knew that there was no money there for me to go to college, so that was just like a guy trying to make a better life for myself.

And so I chose to be a medic because I thought that that would provide me a way to earn a career, earn a living when I got out of the m*llitary.

My idea was like, if I'm gonna be a medic, I should be surrounded by the best guys possible, right? So, I'll be a medic for them. And so that's what I decided to do, is to become a medic for the Ranger Regiment.

My parents were very much like, live your dream, you know?

They are very supportive.

My dad is a very silent strength kind of guy, but I know he struggled with everything.

In the Ranger Regiment you don't get to talk to your family.

You're gone for six months at a time. Nobody knows.

They just follow CNN, they see the ticker on the bottom, and they hear, "Two Rangers d*ed."

They have no idea who it is.

So, my dad used to know where I was at in the sense that, you know, of what was going on in the news.

My dad was a prison guard. He used to wear long johns every day in the summertime, underneath his uniform.

And, and they'd say, "Well, why do you do that?"

And he says, "Well my son's, my son is, is hot right now, so I don't want him to be hot by... alone."

So, that's the type of dad... He wasn't really the type that was always there to give you a big hug.

That was my mom. If I wanted to prove that I could do something, it was through my dad. I live, breathe, being a Ranger medic.

In the barracks I'd stitch people up at night after bar fights.

I'd do whatever I needed to do to take care of my guys because at the end of the day, when we're overseas, mommy's not there, nobody is there, they come to doc, and for a long time, that was me.

Matthew Sanders: I believe it was the third night. A vehicle had stopped at one of our checkpoints.

[radio chatter]

A pregnant woman had gotten out of the vehicle and asked for, for water.

[expl*si*n]

I, I don't think, I don't think I'll ever get over the fact that, you know... they k*lled, you know, three of our guys using a pregnant woman.

Doc Buma: That was a, you know, a real kick in the balls when it came to morale.

This is when I realized like, you know, guys can get hurt, guys can get k*lled.

This is for keeps, you know.

Like, this isn't, this isn't a training mission.

This is w*r.

Things dramatically changed.

You know, we kind of had to, had to prepare for a whole new battle.

Male Reporter: Northwest of Baghdad, near the Haditha Dam. An apparent su1c1de bombing att*ck by a pregnant woman at a checkpoint leaves at least three US service members dead.

Matthew Sanders: We just lost guys supporting our mission.

It solidified all of our resolve to stay there and to win.

Ryland Taylor: Day four, we start taking insane incoming fire.

Some of these 155 rounds would hit at the front of the hill that I was hiding on, and you could feel the force move through the mountain and move through your body.

They would rain hot shrapnel down upon us.

I didn't know that shrapnel would be hot.

A piece... a piece rang up from one of the rounds and kind of clink-clinked down the hill and stuck on this SAW gunner's neck.

And, you know, he had to grab a, a leatherman tool to peel it off his neck.

And to be that close, to have that tangible experience of shrap metal, and you saw that, no, you know, life really is very fragile, and you could easily be one of these people that the shrap metal was cutting through.

[Explosions continue]

After two or three days of indirect fire over and over and over, 200 rounds a day, it was just... it was taxing on everybody.

Ryland Taylor: I had been in the same pair of socks the whole time, so my feet were kinda slipping off a little bit, like started losing the skin on them.

It was very disgusting. We were in desert MOPP suits.

Matthew Sanders: We have these chemical suits on that don't provide the same level of ventilation as normal clothes do, so already, you know, we're sweating more than we normally would. We had to ration water pretty closely, you know. We were pretty much out of food by that point.

Rangers are known for being able to operate without food, without sleep, but you need water, you know.

Everybody needs water. The toughest guy in the world needs water.

Everybody got used to eating a little bit of food.

Everybody got used to running out of chewing tobacco.

Tobacco is a big deal, you know.

I remember running across the dam to get a dip of Copenhagen when, you know... fully knowing that I could die for that, but, you know, that's just kind of one of those things, you know.

You learn, you get accustomed to certain things, you know.

This is where I met this kid, Matt Sanders, who fortuitously brought a carton of Marlboro reds.

Specialist Taylor found out that I had a carton of cigarettes, and, you know, he had run out of Copenhagen.

And so, you know, every, you know, hour or two he would come up and, you know, ask me for a cigarette.

Here I am, this cherry private and like this tabbed, Tab Spec 4, you know, sn*per, you know, who was like a god to me, was, like, asking me for cigarettes.

I was like... Dude, just happier than I could possibly be just to give him cigarettes.

You know, of course he was probably a little bit nicer to me than he probably would've been in any other circumstances because I had those cigarettes.

Doc Buma: After four or five days, you know, your brain starts not being able to process. Your body doesn't process the stress very well.

Everybody's getting really tired.

I'd have to get them away from the battle for a little bit. "Can you get 30 minutes to break, and I'll warm you up some meal, heat you up, and worry like mommy used to."

I guess, and, and we'd have to nurture each other back to strength.

Ryland Taylor: The things that nobody thinks about are the practicalities of w*r.

What happens to a city that gets abandoned?

There'd be these packs of, like, Labradors and house pets roaming around, kind of wandering.

Their owners had abandoned them, and they kind of wandered the plains wondering what to do.

And over that week they became wild.

They became feral, and they formed packs. They fought one another, and eventually I watched as they would eat the dead... in haunting ways.

For these sorts of brave enemy soldiers that we fought, to see them go out that way, that really bothered me.

[Dog barking]

Matthew Sanders: It felt almost overwhelming at that point because their fire got so accurate.

Doc Buma: One of our Rangers looked to peek over his position, and at that point was hit by a large piece of shrapnel.

Matthew Sanders: Immediately, the call for medic came. As we were running, you know, I remember rounds continuing to come in. We'd run, you would hear the round come in, and we'd have to hit the dirt.

We would get back up, start running again. When I got there, they had him leaning up against the wall.

You know, I never...

I, I had, had kind of been expecting something manageable.

You know, [stuttering] I wasn't expecting, you know, a penetrating head trauma.

You know, I felt like I froze.

All of a sudden it was, it, the, the reality, you know, was, was...

[sighs] I was scared, you know.

Like, it was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my entire life.

Matthew Sanders: I remember my platoon sergeant saying, you know, "You guys got this."

I mean, it probably wasn't but five or ten seconds, you know, if that, that I was frozen.

It felt like an eternity. You know, I never wanted to work on one of my buddies, you know.

Ryland Taylor: A guy named Jeremy Feldbusch.

I knew him all right, you know, I knew him pretty well, I think.

We partied together a couple of times.

He was a mortarman.

And, you know, like I said, those rounds are effective and got him right in the forehead.

Matthew Sanders: We just immediately went to work. Feldbusch is unresponsive, and he wasn't breathing. But he had a very strong radial pulse in his wrist, and that indicated to me that, you know, he was very much still alive.

I listened for breathing, and I could hear gurgling, which indicated to me that he had an obstructed airway. And so the platoon medic was prepared to do a tracheotomy.

Nobody wants to do that kind of procedure, you know, in such an unsterile and chaotic environment.

Luckily, we didn't need to do that. I stuck the suction in his mouth. It was, you know, essentially dried blood and, and flesh in the back of his throat, and when I was able to clear that, that blood and flesh out of his throat, you know, he was able to resume breathing on his own.

And so, we start to load him up, and Jeremy is a big boy.

I had him at the shoulders, and a couple of other guys have him at the legs and the hips and they'd passed him to other guys on the other side of the wall.

Things were happening so quickly, and they pulled him from, from my grasp. I think everyone was at that point, you know, in fear for Jeremy's life, and, you know, the a*tillery is still coming in.

Ryland Taylor: We really started taking heavy a*tillery rounds. It, it was like Volkswagen bugs crashing in front of you.

It sounds like if, if you went to an airport, and you listen to these 747s land.

Sometimes the acoustics will resonate in a weird way where it's like [whooshing] kind of sound.

And that's what these carried. It's just huge.

Matthew Sanders: We drove to the center of the dam. I had his head sitting in my lap.

I didn't want his head to touch the ground again, it's just this like, you know, almost fear of mine, so I, you know, put his head in my lap.

So, I had to wait for someone to, you know, replace me.

Doc Buma: They brought him in the back of a Humvee that they had converted into a makeshift litter, and they had brought him to the center of the control point. It was a lot to take in.

I just remember that look when Matt looked at me, you know, and he was, you know, his MOPP suit was covered in blood and, you know, I just remember him handing him over and saying, you know, "I know that you guys will do what needs to happen, you know."

In the Ranger Regiment there's this sense that the medics can save just about anybody. If you're still alive and ticking when you get to us, we'll take care of you. And we'll do whatever we need to do. Whether it be fly a plane, fly a bird down to come pick you up, we'll make sure that you are treated right, whether dead or alive.

And that's something that we all lived by.

And so, yeah, we, we worked on Feldbusch, and it, it looked bleak.

Matthew Sanders: You know, at this point, you know, I was, you know, covered in blood, you know. I had never... You know, I don't think I'd ever seen so much blood, you know, especially on me before in my life.

And, like I, I didn't have a choice.

I couldn't take off my clothes and put on new clothes.

You know, and, at the same time, though, I really didn't want to.

You know, there comes a point where you gotta wash your hands, you know, and it's like I didn't want to wash my hands.

You know, I didn't want to, like, you know, it felt wrong to want to wash my hands.

Like, I just didn't, like, I...

I just didn't want to, like...

I just didn't want to rinse him off me.

I felt like it would be like a, like a disservice to him.

I never really thought about why I didn't want to wash off.

I just know that, you know, the times that's happened, I just, it's the hardest thing in the world to do is to, to wash your hands of your buddy's blood.

Like it's... it's not easy.

Ryland Taylor: One of the reasons why we were at the dam was because we were afraid of the city getting flooded. The city getting flooded would mean that the conventional forces couldn't move on and seize the rest of Iraq. The flooding the city would mean that all of these republican guard soldiers would lose their homes.

I had heard later that S*ddam had told this unit in particular that if the Americans seize this dam, they would blow it, and you would lose your homes.

And so, both sides were fighting to make sure that city didn't get flooded.

We were fighting for the same cause, maybe.

Either way, there's a... You know, deep sense of irony that they were fighting so hard to save their homes, and we were fighting them so hard to save their homes.

Matthew Sanders: We get word over the radio that there is like, a convoy of Iraqi tanks moving in our direction.

That word quickly spread throughout the platoon, that, you know, hey, we got tanks, you know, moving in our position.

We were all pretty tired by this point, and it wasn't a morale k*ller, but it was also very, very sobering and very, you know, it was almost like, okay, I guess here we go, you know, I guess we're gonna do this now.

We were preparing for the worst, to say the least.

At some point, an air strike was called in and, you know, quickly, you know, neutralized that as a thr*at.

It kind of calmed down a little bit like, towards day five or something like that.

I mean, when I say calmed down, we weren't getting 200 rounds each day.

We were getting, you know, sporadic things blowing up around us.

I believe it was day six when the conventional army finally does come.

And you see these big Abrams tanks rolling down this highway, and guys are actually cheering.

Doc Buma: I just remember all these tanks come rolling through here, right, and you start realizing, "Well, nobody's made it to Baghdad yet." I didn't know they were coming, but somebody knew enough to make a sign that said, "Happy Motoring, this dam secured by 3rd Ranger Battalion."

You know, we have this big kind of congratulatory moment, and then we, we go over to the dam, and some Black Hawks are coming to relieve us, and... It really, really was, once again, the cinematic moment of sitting on the edge of a Black Hawk as it pans off, and you see this, like, wild carnage everywhere. Where you almost hear that sentimental violin music in your head as you're, as you're taking off and just kind of trying to put yourself in perspective of something that you will never be able to put in perspective.

Matthew Sanders: I was so exhausted by the time, you know, we got picked up. The guys that I'd been fighting alongside were even more tired than I was. At the same time, I think we were all pretty excited getting pulled off the dam, you know.

We all knew, we all knew what we did was big, and we all knew it was significant.

Doc Buma: At the end of that day, everybody was covered in blood. And we'd been out for six, seven days, and this is the first moment where you feel safe again.

We started talking, and we're like, "You know what, let's all just be happy that we're alive."

And, you know, it's, it's in those times that you see like, how fleeting everything is in life, you know, and it's just kind of, it's in those times that you realize what matters and what doesn't.

Haditha was actually my last mission that I ever did. My parents begged me to come home because they had been waiting to see when, you know, somebody was gonna knock on their door or maybe their son's not there.

I felt like I owed it to them to go home, to now, I'm a lot of guys, and, you know, I'm on a journey to try to make sense and to find inner peace with all the things that have happened.

I turned 20 a week after we got back from Haditha Dam.

That week in my life, I really feel like I changed as a person forever.

Doc Buma: For him to be one of the first guys there to, to save Feldbusch's life on his first combat mission ever, I mean... you can't rise to the occasion better than that.

He did a good job treating Feldbusch.

And, you know, Feldbusch is alive, and there's a lot to say for that.

Matthew Sanders: Feldbusch did recover and did quite successfully. He was the first spokesman for the Wounded Warrior Project.

[people cheering]

I don't think that I would've developed into, you know, the Ranger that I did if it had not been for, you know, Doc Buma's influence.

In a sense it was like a dad going, "Man, I helped that guy become what he is," you know.

I was proud of him. I'm still proud of him.

I'll always be proud of him.

Matthew Sanders: Haditha Dam very much was my coming of age.

It taught me that courage is not being fearless, but courage is, is moving forward, in spite of the fear.

Fear is, is something that's "overcomable."

Spokesperson: Our coalition Special Operations Forces also seized the Haditha Dam. That has been seized as of two days ago, and we prevented its destruction. There have been significant regime losses in the vicinity of the dam.

Man: This Haditha Dam, if it had been blown, it would've been a significant problem causing flooding in the passageway where U.S. armor intended to pass through. Instead, that didn't happen.