From CENTCOM
Checking e-mail was never supposed to be this dangerous. On March 27, 2006, Staff Sgt. Richburg was talking to his wife on his cell phone outside an Internet café on a base in Iraq. As he sat there, he noticed a man approaching the café with a blue bag. Something about the situation seemed slightly off. Earlier that day, Richburg recalled, a suicide bomber had killed several civilians near the base’s gate. Richburg watched the man place the bag on top of the café’s air conditioner. Then the man turned and ran, but not fast enough to escape Richburg, who jumped out of his truck, chased the man down, and quickly learned that the bag held a bomb. Richburg managed to clear the building just before the bomb destroyed the entire café. Richburg’s actions saved the lives of 12 soldiers and five Iraqi civilians. In March 2006, he was awarded the Army Commendation Medal with a “V” and has been nominated for a Bronze Star.
From Stars and Stripes
It was around 9 p.m. on March 27, and Richburg was sitting behind the wheel of his “bongo” flatbed truck in the parking lot, talking to his wife on a cell phone.
“I saw this guy duckin’ and peepin’ outside the Internet [cafe],” said the 44-year-old Baltimore, native. “I said, ‘Let me keep an eye on this guy.’ ”
Unknown to Richburg at the time, the man was an insurgent who had managed to get a job at the camp’s Iraqi army noncommissioned officer academy. Part of a cell that had planned a series of attacks, the insurgent had constructed a bomb within the camp after smuggling components in piece by piece....
“I’m really watching the guy at this point, I’m watching his every move,” Richburg said. “I’m sitting right there and the guy never even saw me.”
The package looked like something bulky wrapped in a blue plastic shopping bag. Richburg’s suspicion grew to alarm when the man stepped onto the chair, placed the bag on top of the window’s air conditioning unit and then took off running.
Throwing down his cell phone — his wife was still on the line — Richburg dashed after the man and brought him down with a swift kick to the back of his legs. By this time, Richburg had drawn his 9 mm pistol and, holding the man down, called for another Iraqi he knew to translate.
“I asked him if he knew who this guy was and he said, ‘No,’” Richburg said. “I told him I saw him put a package on the air conditioner and asked him to find out what was in it. Then I charged my weapon to scare him.”
The man answered back quickly. He said he had placed a bomb on the air conditioner. Richburg asked how much time they had before it exploded. “Five minutes,” the man said.
Dragging the insurgent in one hand and waving his pistol in the other, the burly mechanic rushed to the cafe entrance and began shouting at everyone to get out.
Shocked by the sight of Richburg waving a pistol and swearing at the top of his lungs, a dozen soldiers and five civilians piled out of the cafe. The mechanic yelled at them to take cover behind a line of concrete blast barriers.
The soldiers braced themselves. After roughly 15 minutes, the package exploded with the noise of an artillery shell. The windshield of Richburg’s truck “crystallized” by the blast, and a Porta-John was flung into a nearby meadow. The window of the Internet cafe was destroyed, driving glass and shrapnel deep into the walls and computer booths.
Since the cafe had been cleared, nobody was injured.
“The bomb definitely would have killed some people,” said Maj. John Stark, a liaison officer to the Iraqi army. “It definitely would have killed the guy sitting next to the air conditioner.”
Nice job, Sergeant
