Chris Cuomo On Surviving an IED Attack
Jan. 23, 2007 — -- Earlier today, ABC's Chris Cuomo was out on patrol with American troops training Iraqi forces when his convoy was hit by a roadside bomb. Thankfully, everyone emerged safe from the attack, except for one minor injury. Below is Cuomo's partial account of what happened:
We were out on patrol with the 410th M.P. Company. They're military police. We were going to a place in northwest Baghdad -- the soldiers go there almost every day. The purpose of their mission is to work with the local Iraqi police to establish rule of law to help fundamentally. They're not there to carry out operations but just to assist.
In this place right now, this is a war zone. So when they were out there assisting, we were with Capt. Jason Sama, who was in complete control the entire time.
What happened was that there was a report of a burning vehicle, one of the Iraqi police vehicles. We went out to discover that in a convoy of four armored Humvees. The key there is "armored." If these vehicles were not armored, the situation could have turned out very differently.
When we got there, a small fire was found, and the military went to assess the situation. As we got to the back of the situation, the captain was very much in control in directing his men where to go. Then, while we were looking at it, there were bodies on the side of the road. Those bodies turned out to be booby-trapped. They were an improvised explosive device, a massive one.
It rocked the entire vehicle, blew out the tires on two of the vehicles, destroyed much of the glass, rocked the vehicles in a very, very big way. A piece of shrapnel was almost stopped by this armored door. It came within fractions of an inch of going through the entire vehicle.
Then they exploded the bomb. Now small fire rang out, tracer bullets over the tops. The songs dismounted from the Humvees and got into a very systematic approach towards taking on the enemy fire. The captain jumped out to protect his men without hesitation, and they got control on the ground under this heavy, heavy small arms fire.
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