AD DAWR, Iraq --
Donning body armor, adhering to proper military tactics and techniques, and maintaining situational awareness can help a Soldier come home in one piece, but sometimes a little something else comes into play.
In March, 1st Lt. Adam Rivette, platoon leader, Troop A, 2nd Battalion, 9th Cavalry Regiment, attached to the 101st Airborne Division, and his troops were chasing down a suspicious vehicle. The pursuit did not pan out-- it did however lead to the event which Rivette refers to as “a blessing from God.”
As the Soldiers were releasing the driver of a vehicle, a group of locals reported an IED to the Iraqi Army troops with Rivette’s team. The team was told the IED was at a nearby location on the road, so they went to check it out. As the team moved into position near the location, they took precautionary measures, trying to discover the explosives from a distance. When it was clear that no one could see any signs of an IED, they “circled the wagons,” moving their humvees into a perimeter around the site.
They still could not see the IED. At that point, Rivette, accompanied by Staff Sgt. Kenneth Poss, walked towards a small pile of dirt in the center of the road. “[The dirt pile] didn’t look possible that it was anything serious, but it was the only thing that, we thought, looked out of place,” Rivette said. As the two Soldiers walked towards the mound -- Poss about five feet to its left and Rivette about 15 feet in front of it -- the explosives were detonated.
Both men recall the mushroom cloud of fire, smoke and dust. Rivette said all he had time to do was cover his face. Poss fell and rolled to one side. “I started walking back to the truck in a cloud of dust… in a daze, like --wow, what just happened?” Rivette said. “I saw the medic running at me, screaming my name. Poss comes rolling out of the dust cloud with his thumbs in the air yelling, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine!’”
Both men were checked for wounds, only to discover that not only were they uninjured -- they weren’t even dirty. The medic, then back at the truck, was knocked to the ground. A couple of the trucks were hit with shrapnel and the gunners reported hearing metal and dirt whizzing by their heads. The force of the shrapnel and percussion of the blast were so intense, they shattered windows in the surrounding homes.
When the Soldiers returned to the blast site, they saw Rivette’s boot-prints and shards of shrapnel all around them. Where Poss had lain on the ground was more shrapnel. The Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was called to the site. From information gathered, a 155mm artillery round, with a 40 to 50-meter kill radius, was used with a remote-controlled detonator.
“I grabbed Sgt. Poss and said, ‘Dude, there’s no reason for us to be alive,’” Rivette said. Rivette considers himself a spiritual man and reads Psalms 91 before going on patrol every day. “God is definitely the only one that can be given the glory for this incident,” said Rivette, a West Point graduate from Augusta, Ga. “It’s really uplifting to us and lets us know God is watching over us.”
This is not Rivette’s first encounter with a close call. Two days prior to the IED blast, a rocket-propelled grenade hit 100 meters from his truck and the area around his humvee was riddled with small-arms fire. “For some reason, no one was hit,” Rivette said. “There were 30 bullet holes surrounding the truck, but not one person was hit. Not a single one of my guys have been hit since we’ve been here. It is amazing -- God has been taking care of us.”
Even though his men face adversity on a daily basis, they go out the next day with a smile on their face, renewing their hunt for the bad guys. Rivette realizes not all Soldiers are as fortunate as his troops. “I feel like our squadron has been blessed,” Rivette said. “It’s rough to think about those guys who haven’t made it, but for some reason, God hasn’t wanted me to die yet -- maybe tomorrow, but not yet.”
