Oh yeah….. this is working wonderfully. Let’s send more troops in to work with the Iraqi troops.
Together, alone, trapped in a dark room with the blood of their comrade on the floor, they tried to piece together what had happened. Maybe the sniper saw Leija’s silhouette in the window and fired. Or maybe the shot was accidental, they said, fired from below by Iraqi Army soldiers who had been moving between the buildings.

Woollis cited the available evidence - an entrance wound just below the helmet with an exit wound above. He said the shot must have been fired from the ground.

The Iraqis were not supposed to even be there yet. The plan had been for Leija’s squad to work alongside an Iraqi Army unit all day. But after arriving late at the first building, the Iraqis jumped ahead, leaving the Americans and pushing north without searching dozens of apartments in the area.

BAGHDAD: Hector Leija, a staff sergeant, scanned the kitchen, searching for illegal weapons. One wall away, in an apartment next door, a scared Shiite family huddled around a space heater, cradling an infant.

It was after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, on Haifa Street in central Baghdad, and the crack-crack of machine-gun fire had been rattling since dawn. More than a thousand American and Iraqi troops had come to this warren of high- rises and hovels to disrupt the growing nest of Sunni and Shiite fighters battling for control of the area.

The joint military effort has been billed as the first step toward an Iraqi takeover of security. But in the two dark, third-floor apartments on Haifa Street, that promise seemed distant. What was close, and painfully real, was the cost of an escalating street fight that had trapped American soldiers and Iraqi bystanders between warring sects.

And as with so many days here, a bullet changed everything.

“Help!” came the shout.

“Man down.”

“Sergeant Leija got hit in the head,” yelled Specialist Evan Woollis, 25, his voice carrying into the apartment with the Iraqi family. The soldiers from the sergeant’s platoon, part of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, rushed from one apartment to the other.

In the narrow kitchen, a single bullet hole could be seen in a tinted glass window facing north.

The platoon’s leader, Sergeant First Class Marc Biletski, ordered his men to get down, away from every window, and to pull Leija into the living room.

“O.K., everybody, let’s relax,” Biletski said. But he was shaking from his shoulder to his hand.

Relaxing was just not possible. Four meters, or 15 feet, of floor and a metal doorjamb stood between where Leija fell and the living room, out of the line of fire.

Gunshots popped in bursts, their source obscured by echoes off the concrete buildings.

“Don’t freak out on me, doc,” Biletski shouted to the platoon medic, Private First Class Aaron Barnum, who was frantically yanking at Leija’s flak jacket to take the weight off his chest. “Don’t freak out.”

Read more at the International Herald

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