South, somehow, had been thrown from the destroyed vehicle. The explosion that killed the four men had rocketed him over a stone wall.
"It's all kind of foggy," he said. "I'm pretty sure I remember driving down Smugglers Road. The next thing I remember is coming to. I didn't know where I was."
South awoke hearing Sgt. Sean Snell calling his name.
"Over here," South said.
He didn't yet know what had happened. But he could see an orange glow. It was from the burning humvee.
Snell, then of Philadelphia's East Falls section, had been delivering pizzas when he was called up for Iraq. In Alpha Company, he was a squad leader.
He leaped over the wall and found South sitting up in shock, with no helmet, no armor vest, no rifle. Other than his uniform, all he had on were knee pads.
Snell checked South all over. Satisfied that he was medically stable, he told South he had to go check on the others. But first he drew a 9mm Glock pistol from his holster and gave it to South.
"If you see anything," Snell told South, "shoot it."
Back at FOB Summerall, other Alpha soldiers were leaning over the radio at their tactical operations center to catch snatches of the action miles away.
Martinez had been in his hut, winding down for the night, when another soldier ran in and said the patrol had been hit - no one yet knew how bad. Martinez leaped up and ran to the operations center.
He remembers that it was hard to make heads or tails of the radio chatter. They heard that one man had been killed in action. Then they heard two. Or was it three? More? For security reasons, no names were used over the air.
Sgt. Jeremiah Boring, then of Harleysville, recalled: "Everyone from our platoon was running around getting our combat gear ready. . . . We were all planning on going out."
Boring, who had just turned 23, had joined the Guard three years earlier to earn money for college after his father lost his job at a Ford Motor Co. supplier. Boring had received a Bronze Star in June for pulling wounded men from a burning vehicle.
When Alpha men learned that battalion leaders were sending a different unit to help the men on Smugglers Road, they felt betrayed. They slammed their helmets and cursed at being held back.
"But after a while," Boring said, "we started to take the measure of what we lost, and there were a whole lot of tears."
