Courage in the heat of battle, another amazing Soldier – Lt. Col. Tray Ardese.

‘It was “game on” when you walked out’ – Travis J. Tritten, Stars and Stripes

“It was going to be a reconnaissance patrol. We thought we would sneak out and see what was going on,” he said. “Somebody was watching the base and caught us leaving.”

It was just before midnight when Ardese got an uneasy feeling, a kind of sixth-sense tingle.

The attack opened with the detonation of a homemade bomb — artillery shells buried in an embankment. The blast shot shrapnel through the air and seemed to slow down time, Ardese said.

The unit’s corpsman and communication specialists were hit, and a piece of metal tore into Ardese’s shoulder, breaking it before lodging in his shoulder blade.

“I came back to my senses, and there was a lot of gunfire and people fighting,” said Ardese, who was knocked off his feet.

There was an indescribable ringing in his ears, and his nose was bleeding.

Attackers bore down with small-arms fire, while a member of the unit tried to suppress the fire with an M-240 medium machine gun, he recounted.

Ardese called to his dazed radio operator to get ready. He requested a fire-support mission from an artillery battery, followed by close air support from F-16 jets.

Meanwhile, he and the rest of his unit kept up the fight.

“My arm just wouldn’t work very well. It was kind of stuck to my side,” he said. “I had an M-4, so it wasn’t really heavy, and I could prop it with my other arm.”

Ardese said the firefight against about a platoon of insurgents lasted about 40 minutes. It is unknown how many of the attackers were killed, he said.

“It was going back and forth. We were gaining fire superiority with machine guns,” he said. “We didn’t stay behind. At the end, we had to get out of there.”

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Lt. Col Tray “Tonto” Ardese, 2006 Anbar Province, Iraq