"If this thing goes off, I'd rather go off with it"

For soldiers in Iraq, three letters translate into terror: IED, shorthand for improvised explosive device, the homemade bombs that have taken hundreds of American lives.

During an intense firefight in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt faced this fear. Touched it. Straddled it, in fact.

The encounter took place on a section of blacktop leading to an apartment building occupied by U.S. forces called Camp Outpost Tampa.

On Dec. 29 last year, with their video cameras rolling, about 50 insurgents hit the outpost with automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and the biggest suicide truck bomb ever seen by soldiers from the 1st Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, a Fort Lewis-based combat team.

The insurgents' goal, say Army unit commanders, was to overrun the position and videotape the celebration, airing the images across the Middle East as a symbol of U.S. defeat.

To keep reinforcements from the beleaguered fort, the enemy spread IEDs — artillery shells connected by detonation cord — across a major roadway.

Holt, 28, was told to clear the road by putting plastic explosives on each live round, by hand, under fire, and then blowing them up.

If you've shopped at the Sears at the Tacoma Mall this Christmas season, there's a chance you might have met Holt. He was awarded the Silver Star for his actions that day.

He is working in merchandise pickup while on leave, for $8.40 an hour.

Huge blast signals attack

Holt, who grew up in Shingle Springs, Calif., joined the Army when he was 17, after getting permission from his parents. He's been stationed at Fort Lewis for 10 years.

His son was born two months before he left for Iraq in September 2004.

Mosul was a restive place when Holt's brigade arrived, and the local Iraqi police force soon collapsed, leading to months of fighting.

Holt was a member of a reconnaissance platoon that drove around the city in eight-wheeled Stryker vehicles. On the day of last year's attack, his convoy of six Strykers made its way down a major road to their base near the Mosul airport after stopping at Camp Outpost Tampa, a four-story building surrounded by concrete barriers and barbed wire.

At 3:22 p.m., Holt and the others heard a huge explosion and saw a mushroom cloud over the outpost.

A truck with more than 50 artillery shells, propane tanks and fuel had crashed the barriers and blown up, killing a soldier standing on the roof. All radio communications with the fort were lost.

The Strykers in Holt's convoy turned around and raced to help defend the outpost. As the lead Stryker approached a small creek that crossed the road, the squad leader radioed that they had just driven into a ring of artillery shells.

The message was direct, remembered Holt: "Hold the [expletive] vehicles, we're sitting in a [expletive] IED field!"

Each artillery round contained 15 pounds of explosives, enough to kill everyone riding in a military jeep.

The convoy stopped, and one of the idling Strykers was immediately hit by a passenger car filled with explosives. The blast popped all eight tires on the Stryker, and fuel from the car sent a fireball through the armored vehicle, singeing the hair and eyebrows of the soldiers inside. The driver of the car died instantly.

"This rocked the world of all the guys," said Capt. John Bourque, 25, of Portland, who was riding in the rear hatch of the targeted Stryker.

The soldiers got out of their vehicles and immediately took automatic-weapons fire from surrounding buildings. The gunmen looked like typical guys around Mosul, wearing plaid shirts, head wraps and black jeans. But there was something different about how they engaged the U.S. troops.

"This time, they were not running away," Bourque said. "They were staying and fighting."

The enemy's intent was to take over Camp Outpost Tampa by hitting the Americans in several places at once, to create numerous casualties and "try and stretch us to our limits," Bourque said.

And the attack was precisely timed. The convoy had passed that stretch of road less than five minutes earlier, just before the truck bomb hit the outpost and the firefight began.

The first Stryker pushed through the IED field, followed by a second vehicle. But the others decided it was too dangerous, and the road needed to be cleared.

Holt wasn't surprised to hear his name over the radio as a commander told him and his assistant, Sgt. Joe Martin of Newark Valley, N.Y., to go out in the road and blow up the IEDs while the others returned fire.

It wasn't a direct order, Holt said. The pair could have refused and deflected the mission to the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, which has special equipment and earns extra pay. But that would have taken too long, and Camp Outpost Tampa was under attack.

Holt and Martin readied their gear and got to work.

The go-to explosives guy

Holt loves things that blow up.

As a kid, he disassembled model-rocket engines to build his own bombs. In the Army, he took explosives classes and became the go-to guy in Mosul when patrols needed to take out an abandoned car or something suspicious along the road.

The artillery shells that awaited Holt and Martin were as long as a man's shin and thick as a thigh.

Insurgent gunfire chipped off the pavement and made tiny puffs in the dirt as the two soldiers ran down the road to lay down about 100 yards of detonation cord.

Holt and Martin then took turns attaching blocks of C-4 plastic explosives with blasting caps to each artillery shell. C-4, or Composition Four, has the consistency of Play-Doh, and is safe to handle. Only a blasting cap — a detonator shaped like a pen — can trigger the device.

That's why Army regulations dictate that soldiers should never carry C-4 with blasting caps already attached, a protocol Holt and Martin disregarded in an effort to shave a couple of seconds from the moments they spent over each artillery shell, under fire.

They made sure to place the C-4 where the shell tapered into a point, precisely over the explosive charge, and connect the blasting caps to the main detonation cord.

The pair could hear the crackle of automatic weapons as they worked, uncertain whether a hidden insurgent was waiting for the perfect moment to blow them to bits.

Still, Holt leaned over each shell to check the connections. If he approached the task gingerly, he might be left maimed but alive if the shell exploded. But Holt didn't want a life of prosthetic devices and hospital beds.

"If this thing goes off, I'd rather go off with it, so I might as well put it on right," Holt remembered.

Martin said: "At first I was like, I hope it doesn't go off. But I'm standing right over it. There was nothing I could do."

After wiring all the shells they could, Holt and Martin ran to a Stryker and moved down the road. They lit a fuse and destroyed the IEDs, except for one they couldn't reach.

So they went back out a second time and finished the job.

With the road clear, Holt turned and saw eight to 10 Stryker vehicles waiting for him, ready to bring fresh soldiers to Camp Outpost Tampa and evacuate the wounded.

The entire mission took the pair less than 10 minutes.

Four U.S. jets strafed and dropped bombs on the insurgent positions around Camp Outpost Tampa before the fighting finally subsided.

Twenty-five enemy fighters were killed and 20 U.S. soldiers were injured in the battle. One American died, the soldier on the outpost roof when the initial truck bomb struck. Two Strykers had to be towed to base.

That night, Holt and the other soldiers gathered around bonfires of wooden pallets, smoked cigars and talked. There was too much adrenaline to sleep and only nonalcoholic beer on base. The next day, a new platoon of 40 soldiers took over at Camp Outpost Tampa, which was pockmarked and cratered, every window and gate smashed.

Unlike Vietnam, where villages and firebases were taken and then relinquished, commanders wanted the city to know U.S. soldiers weren't going to leave after a fight.

"It was a moral high ground, for them to wake up the next day and see we've moved more sandbags in," said Bourque, the captain in the Stryker hit by the suicide bomber. "It shoved it in their face a little bit."

The insurgents knew there was no way they could hold the outpost if they took it, he said. But even a brief victory over U.S. troops would have resonated far beyond a single neighborhood in Mosul.

"I think it would have weakened the Iraqi people's faith in us and been a blow to the American mind-set," Bourque said. "They failed in their plan. In the end, the fight was ours to win."

On subsequent raids around Mosul, U.S. patrols found videos of the attack. From the camera angle, soldiers figured out where the images were taken, and then interrogated the homeowners, sometimes destroying houses.

For the remainder of their tour, which ended in September, the Fort Lewis soldiers never saw another orchestrated attack like the one mounted that day.

"Gallantry in action"

In his Lakewood living room, wearing a baseball cap with the skull insignia of his combat unit, Holt remained unsure why the IEDs along that road didn't detonate.

The bombs could have been controlled by the suicide driver, who blew himself up too early. Maybe the enemy was trying desperately to ignite the blast while he and Martin stooped over the artillery shells. Maybe he got scared and ran away.

Holt was first nominated for a Bronze Star, but his superior officers put in for a higher honor — the Silver Star, established by Congress in 1918 for "gallantry in action." Since the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Defense Department has awarded only 174 Silver Stars, two of them to Holt and Martin.

According to a narrative written by officers: "Neither member of the demo team knew if the IEDs would explode resulting in certain injury or death as they approached to disable and then destroy the IEDs."

In the military, soldiers don't brag of such things. Medals just make you a bigger target for ribbing.

As for working at Sears during the holidays, Holt said he doesn't need the money. It's just something to do on his 45-day leave, the first nonmilitary job he's ever held.

"He gets really bored," explained his wife, Steffanee, 23.

Without his Sears job, added Holt: "I'd be sitting here doing nothing, probably getting yelled at for not getting the house clean."

Holt wants to fly helicopters and be a career soldier. Martin also wants to stay in the military and attend sniper school.

The medal might help with his aviation-school application, Holt said, but it doesn't come with money or a promotion.

Displayed on a shelf in his living room, the Silver Star rests in a clear plastic case. Few of his Lakewood neighbors know about the award, and Holt wouldn't mind changing that.

He inquired whether the state Department of Licensing offers special plates for Silver Star recipients as it does for those who received a Purple Heart. It doesn't.

"You don't want to take it overboard," Holt said. "But it'd be nice to have a license plate."

Alex Fryer: 206-464-8124 or afryer@seattletimes.com