How an airman won the Silver Star

The Item--South Carolina:

In April 2003, as the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division was storming toward Baghdad, a staff sergeant found himself in the middle of an ambush.

Iraqi soldiers in Soviet tanks emerged from the marshes near Karbala, inserting themselves between Army vehicles. The American and enemy vehicles were too close and intermingled to call down an air strike, so Staff Sgt. Travis Crosby resorted to more traditional means.

“Despite the constant rain of fire around his vehicle, Crosby was able to successfully empty his .50-caliber machine gun on the enemy soft-skin vehicles, killing more than 20 enemy personnel while simultaneously directing a precision strike by a flight of A-10s” against tanks farther down the road, his citation states.

Crosby won a Silver Star that day for gallantry in action. His citation for the award, as well as the Bronze Star Medal with Valor, reads like a screenplay for the story of a Marine or soldier portrayed in a John Wayne movie.

Crosby, though, isn’t a Marine or a soldier. He’s an airman — an airman who lives, trains and fights with soldiers. His job probably isn’t what most people expect when they think of an airman’s duties, and perhaps not even what he expected when he enlisted in January 1997.

“When I was sitting in the recruiter’s office, I thought I’d be turning wrenches,” said Crosby, 28, who’s been promoted to technical sergeant since the war began.

Crosby’s uncle served as a Green Beret in Vietnam, and though his uncle steered him toward the Air Force for quality-of-life issues, those old campfire battle tales “put the bug in the back of my mind,” Crosby said.

When the choice arose during basic training, Crosby became a terminal attack controller, meaning he goes out with the troops on the ground and calls in pilots to provide close air support.

He communicates with any Air Force vehicle nearby — fighters, attack aircraft, unmanned vehicles, even tankers.

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On the day of the battle in which he won the Silver Star, the troops hadn’t met much resistance. The tanks were refueling when an unmanned aerial vehicle spotted Iraqis setting explosives on a six-lane bridge that troops had to cross to get to Baghdad.

The tanks took off toward the bridge, Crosby said, while he started calling for support.

“(I’ve) got two hand mikes and four radios going off in my ear at the same time,” he said. The A-10s killed the enemy soldiers, allowing an Army team to jump into rubber boats to remove the explosives.

The scene, he said, was “surreal, seeing a bunch of Army guys in a boat in the middle of the desert.”

The group crossed the bridge, then came to a T-intersection. The troops Crosby was with turned left toward some flat, marshy canals and set up a defensive point.

But after 10 minutes with not a peep from the enemy, the soldiers began to move.

“As soon as we get strung out in those canals ... they had an ambush set up for us,” Crosby said.

As he was using his machine gun to fight off the enemy, Crosby alerted pilots to look for additional tanks lurking nearby, and the A-10s found and destroyed five tanks, he said.

Within about five minutes, he said, the engagement was done and they were moving forward again.

“It was scary for those five minutes. Organized chaos. Everyone doing what they need to do,” he said.

Later, after lingering too long in one spot, two enemy soldiers sprang from a ditch next to a one-lane road and got within 10 feet of Crosby’s vehicle. When the dust locked up his machine gun, then-Airman 1st Class Nicholas Taylor laid his gun on top of the vehicle and squeezed off nine to 10 rounds before Crosby, according to the citation, “heroically risked life and limb by fully emerging from the protection of his vehicle and fired 15 rounds from his handgun, instantly killing the attacking enemy soldiers.”

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There is more including the friendly welcome in Baghdad.