The News Tribune (Lite) - Purple heart, bronze star go to Fort Lewis soldier

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Section: Stryker Brigade

Purple heart, bronze star go to Fort Lewis soldier

MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune
After Staff Sgt. Chess Johnson was wounded in Iraq, he was flown to Germany and then to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He spent about a month recovering from a gunshot wound to the head before being shipped home to Fort Lewis.

His departure was probably a relief to Walter Reed nurses. He admits he was not a model patient.

Despite devastating injuries – a bullet tore through the right side of his face, destroying his eye and his cheekbone – Johnson was a handful. He removed those little sticky monitors, and one time he took out a catheter because he insisted on standing up and going to the bathroom. He’d sneak himself up and into the shower.

“I was lying in my bed one day and I was like, ‘How’m I going to get better, Doc?’” Johnson recalled in an interview this week. “He said, ‘You need to start acting normal, you need to start getting back into your daily routines.’

“‘All right, when can I do this?’”

“‘Two months.’”

The doctor might as well have said two light-years.

“No. I’m not going to lay here on my back for two months,” Johnson remembered thinking. “So I got in trouble.”

His wife, Amanda, says her 26-year-old husband has a stubborn streak.

He dug in his heels about one other thing: his Purple Heart, the medal that dates back to George Washington, given to service members wounded in combat.

A commander from Fort Lewis went to see him at Walter Reed and told him the president himself was going to pin it on.

Johnson, a native of Dove Creek, Colo., said no – not out of disrespect, but because he didn’t want it until he could get back to Iraq and receive it with his men. At this point it had been only a few weeks since the Dec. 3 shooting in Mosul.

He declined again when Secret Service agents came by his room the next day.

“A couple days later, President Bush walks into my room,” Johnson said. “We had a great conversation. I talked to him for about 20 minutes.”

The commander in chief presented the soldier with a commemorative coin. But no medal.

“I respect the president 100 percent, but he hasn’t gone to war with me, wasn’t in the conflict with me, doesn’t know me as an individual,” Johnson said. “That is something that my company commander should give me.”

Four months later, Johnson finally has his Purple Heart – and a Bronze Star for valor to go with it.

Capt. James Harbridge, the company commander who was with him in Mosul the day he got shot, was there to present the award in a ceremony Monday.

The Fort Lewis deputy commanding general, Brig. Gen. William Troy, awarded the Bronze Star. It comes fourth after the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star on the Army’s list of awards for combat heroism.

Still, it remains relatively rare: of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have been deployed to Iraq, through mid-April the Army had awarded 1,329.

‘he hit me, and i fell’

Harbridge credits Johnson with saving their patrol from more serious harm that day in December.

Harbridge was leading a three-Stryker patrol to help another platoon that had come under fire. On the way, they were ambushed. Rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire opened up from both sides of the street, then from a mosque down the street.

It was their last patrol in Mosul before their unit was to head south to Baghdad.

“This was way more than normal, more than anything that my patrol had ever encountered,” Harbridge said.

Johnson, commanding the second Stryker, put it in position to cover Harbridge and the medics as they turned their trucks around. Under fire from three directions, Johnson and his men scanned the rooftops and fired back.

Standing with his head out of the hatch, Johnson said he saw the man who shot him.

“I see a flicker, so I kind of came down low, I’m looking, I’m looking,” he said. “Then I see a flicker again, and I see a silhouette of a man lying down on the roof, so I shot three rounds and at the same time he shot one round. He hit me, and I fell.”

When he came to, his guys were holding him from climbing back up in the hatch.

“One of my soldiers got me down and turned me around and grabbed me by my shoulders and said, ‘Sergeant J, you don’t understand the catastrophicness of this event!’ …

“I was like, ‘Well, what’s the deal?’”

He continued to direct his men’s fire and then they got out of there. At an Iraqi police station nearby, he walked out of his Stryker to a medical vehicle. They raced the three or four miles to the combat support hospital.

‘and then i just felt sick’

Back home, a few days before her husband was shot, Amanda Johnson had been offered a full-time teaching job in the Tumwater School District. It was her dream – she graduated from Tumwater High School – but as she thought it over, a voice inside her told her to hold off.

Then she got the call from the Army.

“At first I was like, ‘Is this a joke?’ This can’t be true,” she recalled.

“And then I just felt sick,” she said. “I thought, there’s just no way, not my husband. Other people get shot, not him.”

The Army flew her to Walter Reed and she’s been taking care of him since. Their first anniversary is next month.

He’s had reconstructive surgery, a hole drilled into his skull to relieve swelling, and procedures to stop leaking brain and spinal fluid. He has a titanium cheekbone.

As far as he’s concerned, he’s good to go – as in back to Iraq.

Johnson is not the first soldier to suffer catastrophic injury and then force his way through recovery to remain on active duty. In his own brigade – the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division – there are others who have lost an eye or a huge chunk of their intestines and are back on duty.

Col. George Giacoppe, the deputy commander for clinical services at Madigan Army Medical Center, said the trend is testament to two things: aggressive emergency medical care far forward on the battlefield, and the willpower of motivated volunteers.

“The willpower piece can’t be underestimated,” he said. “These are people whose hearts are really in it, and their hearts are with their fellow soldiers, their hearts are with their units.”

‘it’s time for me to go back’

Johnson still has to convince the Army that he can be a one-eyed infantryman. Amanda Johnson said he was recently cleared for any brain injuries, and Harbridge said his commanders in Iraq want him to wait until they get home so they can go to bat for him before the medical boards.

Waiting is not easy for Johnson.

“My soldiers are writing me notes, ‘Hey, I’m scared of going outside the wire now. If you can get hit, I can get hit. It’s not the same without you,’” he said.

“It’s time for me to go back, just for the morale of the soldiers, for them to have some confidence to go out and do their jobs however many more months they are going to be there.

“I have no desire in my entire life to do anything else,” Johnson said. “I want to raise a family and everything, but career-wise, I want to be an infantryman. I want to lead soldiers.”