"The attack started as a barrage of mortar rounds blowing up just off the road to our left. Then hundreds of RPGs screamed past, a couple skipping off the road ahead..."

We were stationed 30 miles south of the Rumailah oil fields in Kuwait and crossed into Iraq nine hours before the other coalition forces because word came down that the Iraqis were going to blow up the gas oil separation plants there. We secured the plants in the first 15 hours and then moved north in a convoy of 100 vehicles in a straight line up the road.

From that first night to March 25th, we didn't have any enemy contact. And when the ambush happened, I was in the lead vehicle just behind the four M1A1 tanks. I was in the front passenger seat with Cpl. McCormick driving, Franklin manning the gun, and with an extra gunner - Kerman - we'd picked up. Korte, the radio operator, sat in back. Normally Kerman rode in the vehicle behind us, but 15 minutes before the attack, I'd put him with us.

The attack started as a barrage of mortar rounds blowing up just off the road to our left. Then hundreds of RPGs screamed past, a couple skipping off the road ahead, some flying over us, and one hitting the vehicle right behind where Kerman was sitting minutes before. Small arms fire let loose.

What happened next was instantaneous. I was doing five things at once, yelling on the radio to get those tanks out of the way, yelling at Korte to call back to battalion, and readying my equipment.

There were coincidences that worked out for us that day besides Kerman being in our vehicle. Franklin was normally the driver, and he's the second best driver in the platoon, but he's an even better machine gunner, a damn good machine gunner. And McCormick is a crazier driver than him. He'll drive anywhere, you just point the direction, and he goes. So I told McCormick to turn toward the enemy, 50 meters away, and Franklin was trying to free gun it while we drove. He was bouncing around up there on some rocky terrain, trying to hit a target no bigger than a hatchback. But he cleared the nest out. McCormick drove the car into the trench. I hopped out, and Kerman hopped off the top to join me before the thing had even stopped.

There were a few enemy soldiers not 15 feet away, and I yelled at Franklin to shoot them, and he did. The enemy didn't know what they were doing. Once we started killing them, they started running. We were running up the trench, shooting, and more of them were coming back over the berm of the trench. These were people who'd been shooting at the battalion with AKs and RPGs, but the battalion had driven them back. So they were right on top of us before they even knew we were there.

I shot a magazine from my pistol, two magazines from my M16, and then grabbed another magazine from Kerman, but it jammed. Then I grabbed his gun and kept shooting. Then I picked up an AK when I was through with that. Then McCormick handed me an RPG.

"Some of these guys are still alive," he said, "If you don't shoot the RPG, they're going to shoot it at us." We were surrounded by wounded Iraqis, and we didn't have time to clear out their weapons. So I shot the RPG at another group of enemy soldiers.

We made our way back and shot at couple of guys still trying to come in the trenches. Then we had to work a medevac real fast. We lost a guy that day. One of the men in the vehicle behind us died instantly from the RPG hit. Also, the turret gunner there got his gut ripped out from the explosion, but he pulled through.

For the rest of the day and into the night there were more firefights. So it wasn't until two days after, when we had downtime, that I really got a chance to think about what had happened.

But I didn't have too much downtime because we were still in the middle of combat, and there was always another mission coming up, another job to do.

From an interview with Capt. Brian R. Chontosh, USMC