Comcam hero

Army Communicator, Wntr, 2009 by Sean Everette

You've just been inserted with the Special Forces team to which you are assigned. You're in a wadi, a dry river bed in Afghanistan, looking up a sheer cliff face you have to climb to reach mission objective. The cliff face is terraced, so you won't have to climb straight up the whole way, but it still won't be easy to reach the top. You and your team start the climb, and make it to a ledge about 60 feet up, before the enemy reveal themselves. Shots ring out. The kak-kak-kak of automatic weapon fire seems to be coming from every direction. Rocket propelled grenades are exploding nearby. It's an ambush and you are caught in the middle of it.

What do you do?

This is the situation in which SPC Michael Carter found himself one day in early April. Carter, a 25V Combat Documentation and Production specialist with the 55th Signal Company (Combat Camera), was attached to a Special Forces detachment to document their mission via photo and video supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. During this situation, however, Carter performed as one of the Special Forces Soldiers he was on mission with, and his actions have earned him a nomination to receive the prestigious Silver Star. This makes him the first Combat Cameraman, since Viet Nam, to receive this honor.

Carter was a part of the command-and-control node along with the detachment commander, an interpreter, communications specialist, and other team members. As the ambush began, Carter was with the detachment commander.

"We started taking fire from almost every direction. It seemed like 360," Carter said. "And that's when rounds started impacting ... everybody just started contact, started firing."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The two of them began to lay suppressive fire while taking cover in a nook in the cliff face. With them was the detachment's interpreter, who immediately on reaching the nook was shot and killed just two feet from where Carter was taking cover. Carter provided suppressive fire for the detachment commander while the interpreter's body was recovered and the two scrambled to find better cover.

The C2 node was pinned down by enemy fire. The communications specialist with the node was about 15 feet away from Carter and the detachment commander when he was shot in the arm and leg. Another Soldier made his way to the wounded communications specialist and had just begun to perform first aid when he was also shot. Under the protection of suppressive fire laid down by the commander, Carter rushed to the fallen Soldiers, and, avoiding enemy fire, recovered the communications specialist, dragging him back to cover 15 feet away. He then laid suppressive fire while the detachment commander recovered the other Soldier.

Carter again exposed himself to withering enemy fire to recover the communications equipment he was forced to leave behind when he rescued the communications specialist.

"We needed the commo guy's radio, which was still in his bag. When we dragged him back, we didn't get his bag. The captain and the JTAC (the Joint Air Force communications specialist with the team) started laying suppressive fire. I ran out and grabbed the radio and brought it back.

Once he got the equipment back to the detachment commander, Carter assisted in getting communications with higher headquarters reestablished, allowing the detachment to call in Close Air Support strikes.

Carter then moved to giving life-saving first aid to the two wounded Soldiers he and the detachment commander had rescued. This allowed the detachment medic to see to ten wounded Afghan commandos from the Afghan detachment working with the Special Forces team.

At this point, the team had determined there were between 100 and 200 insurgents making up the enemy force. As the fire fight drug on through the day, there was a nearly continuous back-and-forth of gun fire. At one point, the enemy had closed to within 40 feet of the position Carter occupied with the detachment commander and was advancing, threatening to overrun their position. Carter again exposed himself to enemy fire and laid down suppressive fire, breaking the enemy advance and preventing them from overrunning his position.

When, towards the end of the six-and-a-half hour ambush, the team could finally begin a retreat, a new way down the cliff face had to be found. To go back the way they came would have resulted in heavy casualties.

"More people would have died ... or gotten wounded," Carter explained.

Carter joined with the team engineer to find a new path down, but it wasn't an easy walk.

"We had to Spiderman down the cliff to find ways. There were 20-foot drops. It was just a bad place to be."

Bad place or not, it was the only way down. Carter helped get the wounded members of his team down the cliff face while shielding them from falling debris.

"I took one (of the wounded Soldiers) down, the one who was able to walk. He wasn't as bad off. He was still conscious," Carter remembered. "I'd climb down first, and there were parts where he couldn't hold [on to the cliff face], so I'd let him drop on me so I could catch him and continue taking him down."