Someone You Should Know: Staff Sergeant Matthew Zedwick
Last night Bruce McQuain from QandO.net joined us for another edition of Someone You Should Know. Bruce told us about Silver Star recipient Staff Sergeant Matthew Zedwick.
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July 10th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Ambush
Ian never even heard the explosion. That fact really unnerved him. He didn’t even hear it. It was scary to realize that a person’s existence could be ended without that person even being cognizant of that fact. A flame on the end of the candle is blown out. One second you’re alive, breathing, thinking, the next second you’re not.
He remembered being placed on the hood of the broken humvee and trying to get his bearings about him.
“Sergeant Avi, Sergeant Avi, are you okay?” Sergeant Zedwick screamed over the machine gun fire.
Ian couldn’t keep his eyes from rolling around on their own. He managed to get control of them and focus on Zedwick. He looked as shaken as Ian was. “Where’s Eric?” Ian asked.
“He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s fucking dead!” The pitch of his voice gave away his mental condition.
Ian heard the rounds coming from behind them. Zedwick had pulled Ian out of the fiery humvee but he had placed them on the wrong side. Ian yelled at Zedwick to put the humvee between them and the incoming rounds. The two men could hear the bullets whizzing by their heads, hitting the road and their humvee. It was a miracle that they weren’t hit.
As Ian moved to the other side of the humvee he noticed that his body wasn’t responding correctly. It seemed that he had to drag his right side. Blood had soaked through his uniform from his injuries, but he couldn’t feel them. All he felt was confusion and chaos. He looked over the hood to see two different muzzle flashes. They were AK 47s from the trigger men. Then he saw a third. They jumped back down behind the burning wreckage when a few rounds hit the hood. They both popped back up to return fire. Ian noticed in a dream-like state that he was using his left hand to fire back. This was odd since he was right handed. He mechanically stopped firing and examined his right hand. It was hanging dead. The radius had been broken and was sticking out of the wound; a small yellow piece of jagged bone. Some of the muscle from his forearm had been scooped out. He looked down at his leg to see the blood stain in his pants grow.
The other two vehicles of the patrol had turned around and pulled up. Their machine guns started firing. There wasn’t a more beautiful sound in the world. Ian was still trying to sort through all the events of the past couple minutes.
What happened?
There was an explosion, an IED. They were hit and Ian saw he was hurt. The fire fight was raging. He could hear Dow and Spike yell to the lieutenant that they each got one. Then he thought again about Eric. Ian’s eyes went to the back of the humvee where Eric was riding. There was his friend, hunched over like he was simply taking a break. He sat there as the flames consumed the humvee. Ian moved to get a better vantage point and saw an image that he would never forget. His friend wasn’t recognizable any longer. Ian was filled with a rage he couldn’t deal with. It escaped from his chest through a scream, a scream that drowned out the machine guns for a few seconds. It left Ian on all fours, a string of saliva pouring out of his mouth. He started to gag uncontrollably.
He looked up to see Corporal Ward running from his humvee with a medic bag. He was running over to help Ian. He got fifteen feet before a secondary blast went off. There was another bomb hidden in a sewage drain in the road. The explosion sent Ward flying through the air. Ian couldn’t see where he landed because Zedwick had jumped on him to shield him from the blast. Zedwick’s back was peppered with shrapnel. His flackvest took most of it but the back of his arms were hit as well. There was more machine gun fire. The lieutenant was screaming both at the gunners and over the hand mike.
Then the mortars started to hit all around them. The barely audible whistling of the rounds flying at them grew louder and louder until they hit. That fucking whistling was the worst part, knowing it was coming and not knowing if it was going to land on you or on a friend. It was the sound of impending death.
Ian was over stimulated with raw and intense emotions. He didn’t have anything left in him. He stood up and walked on his broken leg to the middle of the road. The bullets were flying around him, ricocheting off the road. The mortars landing and exploding, fifty meters away, a hundred meters away, fifty meters away. An absurd thought flashed through his head, he thought that they had somehow taken a wrong turn and drove into hell.
As the chaos played all around him he shut it out. The men shooting at them with the AK 47s were gone, one of them were cut in half with more than thirty rounds to the stomach from Dow’s M249 machine gun. The only thing left for Ian to do was to hope that a mortar didn’t kill him, but even this was too much. He couldn’t find the will to do anything else. He dropped his rifle, unbuckled his chin strap and dropped his helmet next to it. Then he collapsed and sat there in the middle of the road with his head down trying to get a hold of any piece of reality. There was nothing solid to grab, everything was surreal. He could hear the lieutenant scream over the radio, “If you don’t land the goddamn helicopter in the middle of this road we will fucking shoot you down ourselves. We have one dead and two critically injured!”
Ian laid down in the road now. All of his injuries started to hurt at once. It was a level of pain most people never experience. No matter how much he tried to shut it out he couldn’t ignore it. The pain was a tyrant that controlled his every thought until nothing else existed. He gritted his teeth and blinked his eyes. Each time he blinked a tear would roll down his cheek. He cradled his right hand to his chest, he prayed to god that he wasn’t going to lose it, but it seemed it was injured beyond repair. His leg was broken in at least two places, his ribs were cracked, his back was burned, and there was a constant loud ringing in his head.
He looked up at the sky like locking eyes with someone. The people scurrying around him were all in his peripheral. He noticed that the mortars stopped, but he really didn’t care for some reason. Sergeant Eldred, the platoon forward observer, was trying hard to stick him with an IV.
“Sergeant Avi, Sergeant Avi, are you with us?” He asked.
Ian heard him but for some reason it seemed that answering would be ridiculous. He kept staring into the sky. The clouds seemed so interesting. He couldn’t take his eyes off of them.
“What’s his status?” He heard the lieutenant’s voice.
“Unresponsive sir, he’s hurt bad.”
He heard them all shout and scurry and it was all so futile. He laughed to himself. What was any of this about? If he asked one person out there what they were fighting for no one could give a good answer. His mind was drifting, thinking how useless all of this was. This war didn’t make any sense. He had told himself over and over that they were doing something worth while. He joined up in order to make a difference in the world, but nothing anyone did made any difference there. Nothing mattered.
He could hear the helicopters landing and felt the rotor wash flood over him.
He was in a stretcher now. He couldn’t remember being put in one. There were four men carrying him. They were running toward the helicopter. He turned his head to the side and saw four more men carrying another stretcher. Ward was moving around. He was half naked and bandaged up pretty good.
His attention was usurped by his right forearm. He could feel the splintered bone and ripped muscle. ‘Block it out, block it out, block it out’, he kept repeating to himself. Two minutes later he and Ward were loaded into the medivac helicopter and it was lifting off. Ian looked out as they flew south to Baghdad. He saw the miles of farm land and palm trees. He looked down at the small villages made of garbage and mud. He felt like he was floating above it all. Irrigation ditches, dust, dirt, adobe houses sparsely peppered the landscape as far as he could see, for miles and miles.
“This is eternity. This feeling here.” He told himself. Ian could see the hopelessness of time going on forever. He was a raindrop in the ocean. He had been so naïve, everyone was so naïve. Reality had a new definition for him from that point on. He promised to god and himself that if he lived he would never take another second of his life for granted. He wasn’t a religious man but he talked to god then because he figured he would never be this close to him again. He didn’t ask for anything. Instead he simply said thank you. It might have sounded absurd if anyone had heard him, but Ian obviously wasn’t thanking god for being hurt or even letting him survive the assault. In fact Ian wasn’t even sure he was going to survive, Ian said thank you because he had finally realized how beautiful life was. He thanked god for letting him live it.