Ethan McCord: Yes I do. My son was born May 31, 2007, so just before this incident in July. I hadn't gotten to see him yet because I was over in Iraq. I saw pictures of him. And then I had a daughter who was 5 years old.
Cindy Sheehan: Right.
Ethan McCord: Now, that day, we were supposed to go out on what was called a Ranger dominance, which is a mission of walking from one end of town to the other and doing what's called knocking searches, where you knock on the door and ask to search the home. We weren't finding anything that day. It was pretty, pretty boring I would say. We were kind of joking around and stuff because nothing was going on. Towards the end of the day, we started to kind of funnel into an alleyway to start our march back to the FOB when a couple of guys on rooftops started firing AK-47s at us.
Cindy Sheehan: Right.
Ethan McCord: So we were involved in our own little incident there when we could hear that another platoon was being engaged as well. And then we heard the 30-mm cannons from the Apache just a couple of blocks away from us. And, you know, it--
Cindy Sheehan: A massive? That's the Apache that was firing on the journalists?
Ethan McCord: Right. Yeah. The 30-mm round from an Apache is very distinctive. It's very loud, almost like just cuts the sky open when you hear it going. It's almost like thunder. And we were told to move to that position where the fire was coming from, which was about four blocks from where we were. I was dismount that day, and I was one of the first six soldiers to actually walk up onto the scene in that courtyard. And when I got there, it was pretty grotesque and gruesome. I had never seen anybody destroyed in that manner before. One of the guys, the top of his head was completely off. Their entrails were everywhere. Coagulated blood everywhere. It was just--it was a mess. And, you know, to me at the time, it almost didn't seem real. Kind of like, I may have been trying to separate myself from looking at it.
Cindy Sheehan: Yeah. I know how--I know what you're talking about.
Ethan McCord: Yeah, the first thing I thought of was, like, oh this doesn't even look real. It looks like something out of a bad horror movie, you know? But the smells were very real. But, within a couple of minutes of me getting onto the scene, I could hear a small child crying. And I remember the cries very distinctly because they were cries of, like, just horror, terror, coming from a small child. And I could tell that they were coming from the minivan that was backed up against the wall there.
So, me and another soldier, who was a 20-year-old private who was pretty good friends with me, went over to the van and looked in the passenger door, and the private that I was with couldn't handle it and he turned around and started puking and ran away.
So what I saw was, there was a 4-year-old girl sitting on the bench seat on the passenger side of the van with a severe belly wound and glass in her hair and in her eyes. And next to her was a boy who was about 7 years old who had a severe wound to the right side of his head. He was laying kind of half on the floorboard with his head resting on the bench seat. I immediately thought he was dead because of the wound to his head. And next to him in the driver's seat was who I pretty much assumed was the father by the way he was kind of hunched over protectively over the children. He had taken a couple of those 30-mm rounds to the chest and was just annihilated.
So I grabbed the girl and I yelled for a medic. We went into a building behind where the van had crashed. There was a guy hiding, a local Iraqi hiding in his kitchen there when I asked him to help me. And me the medic cleaned the girl off and did as much as we could. I was sitting there pulling glass out of her eyes so that she could blink. The whole time I'm thinking, you know, thinking of my own children back at home. Again, my daughter was just barely older than this little girl. You know, it was heartbreaking. So the medic called in that there was nothing else that he could do there. She needed to be evacuated immediately because we didn't know exactly how severe the belly wound was.
So I went back outside while the medic ran the girl to the waiting Bradley vehicle, and I walked back up to the van again, and I don't even know why I walked back up to the van, but I did, and that's when I saw the boy kind of take like a labored breath movement. And I started screaming out that the boy's alive. "He's alive!" That's when I grabbed him and cradled him in my arms and was telling him, "Don't die, don't die, I got you," and started running him toward the Bradley, and I'm hoping that the Bradley wasn't leaving yet. And that's when the boy opened his eyes and looked at me, just for pretty much a split second, and his eyes rolled back into his head, and I squeezed him a little bit tighter, just kept telling him I have him, he's going to be okay, and don't die, and then I placed him in the Bradley vehicle, where I got yelled at by my platoon leader, who's a lieutenant, for not pulling security but rather wasting my time on these MFing kids.
Cindy Sheehan: Wow.
Ethan McCord: Yeah. You know and at the time you know there's so much going on, you're just like, "Roger, sir, I'm going to pull security." So I went up to a rooftop and was pulling security. And you know there was still a lot going on. I mean, there were three Hellfire missiles that were fired into a building shortly after that.
Cindy Sheehan: Wow.
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