<p>Sgt. Chris Garrett shows scars from emergency surgery down the front of his torso and above his right hip.</p>

First of two parts

JOSEPH – Bronze Star recipient Sergeant Christopher Garrett has headed out for what may be the final posting in his approximately five-year career with the U.S. Army – to Fort Polk, La. There his duties would consist mostly of “administrative-type stuff,” Garrett said during a Jan. 12 interview in Joseph.

A little over a week ago, near the conclusion of a leave period that had enabled Sgt. Garrett and his wife, Brittany Garrett, to spend some time with family members in Joseph and in Donnelly, Idaho, the couple packed some clothing and and their 8-month-old English bulldog Gus into their vehicle for the journey south. Chris, a combat hero whose main job during deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan was finding and neutralizing enemies’ remotely controlled explosive devices, said he travels by air only when necessary. “I don’t like to fly,” he explained.

When Chris and Brittany next return to the Northwest, probably no longer than six months from now, Chris will likely have been medically discharged from military service, beginning a whole new stage of married life for the Garretts, who have known only military life thus far.

Chris and Brittany, both 26 and both graduates of Joseph High School, were wed Feb. 16, 2007. Three weeks later Chris entered boot camp, followed by demolition training. He was deployed to Iraq later that year. From that point forward, his life as a soldier took a series of increasingly precarious twists.

It was during the 14-month Iraq deployment that Chris distinguished himself as a person willing to bear some extra risk to help save others’ lives. His first life-changing choice came after a deadly attack on his convoy.

“There was a sergeant [who] got killed on one of our night missions,” Chris said, explaining that the sergeant was the victim of an “explosively formed projectile, a really wicked bomb [that] melts copper plate and throws it through anything in its way.”

No one wanted to take the job the sergeant had been performing – no one but Chris, that is.

“The vehicle that he was driving was the front of the convoy and it was called the Husky,” Chris said. “The Husky, it’s just one man in the vehicle. You’re all alone, and you’re put up there to find bombs, that’s your job, and you either get blown up or you find it. So you pretty much have to be really good at what you do. Nobody wanted to do the job after he died, so I stepped up. … I was a private at the time and I got promoted to PFC.”

Fortunately for Chris and everyone in the vehicles behind him, he excelled in the role. “I ended up finding, I think, six to eight bombs total. Nobody got hurt, nobody got blown up, and they ended up giving me a Bronze Star for that because they thought it was pretty brave for me to do. And that deployment [ended], I made it back, everything was fine,” he concluded.

“And two years later he was deployed to Afghanistan,” Brittany offered, ushering in her husband’s account of newer, weightier events.

Chris said he landed in Afghanistan late in 2010 “at the start of wintertime, so it was pretty quiet.” As the snow began to melt in March 2011, the picture quickly changed. “What happens, the Pakistanis, they come over the mountains into Afghanistan. They bring their camels and they bring all the ammunition and guns with them. And that’s when the fighting starts. As soon as the snow melts, everything kicks off in Afghanistan – like fighting season, you know.”

By this time in his career, Chris was a sergeant, leading a team usually numbering four soldiers, leader included.

The Army sent him home on leave for the first half of March. When he returned to Afghanistan for that month’s latter half, the war’s off-season was already over.

“My first mission back, we had one of our soldiers [wounded],” Chris said. “We were walking down an alleyway, and he walked right up on these two Taliban. An RPG (rifle-propelled grenade) was shot and it blew up right next to us. There was a guy right there and he shot one of my soldiers point-blank. We ended up neutralizing the threat. … and then I had to drag my buddy, one of our soldiers, off the field. He was bleeding pretty bad. … We ended up stopping the bleeding and we got him on the bird.”

That wounded soldier survived, as would another member of Sgt. Garrett’s team who was wounded on a later mission.

Garrett himself would eventually become the subject of the team’s ultimate survival story, however.

That fateful sequence of events began June 29, when Garrett and the others were ordered on a mission to Bagram Air Field, some six to eight hours distant, to trade several military vehicles for newer ones. New orders came in while the soldiers were en route, though.

“We had gotten called out on a mission to a village that we had never been to,” Garrett said, and this new mission was a nighttime affair, increasing its danger.

On foot inside the village, Garrett’s team and another, comprising a two-team squad, proceeded down a lane on opposite sides. Garrett was in front of his team’s line, on the lane’s right.

“I seen some motion up around this corner, so I started walking a little faster, and as soon as I started walking faster, a guy came around the corner from 25 yards away on the left side of the road and he had a heavy machine gun.”

Garrett said the man wielding the machine gun fired about 50 rounds toward him. “Quite a few rounds went by me, and then one of them hit me. … I hit the ground, and I was laying there, I knew I had been shot. I didn’t know how bad it was – I didn’t really want to know.”

At least he had been able to fall the way he had been trained, tucked so that his armored back and the back of his armor helmet faced the shooter. “I knew if he shot me again that he would kill me,” Chris said.

He estimates that more than a full minute elapsed before he heard the shooter’s footsteps retreating from the area at a run. Garrett now called out to the other soldiers in the squad to let them know he had been hit but was alive. They came out from under cover and began working feverishly to control his bleeding. A single, large-caliber round had gone through his right hip and exited through his right buttock.

After about 15 minutes of using first aid coagulant and stuffing countless rolls of gauze into Garrett’s gaping exit wound, the soldiers finally considered him stable enough to move from the spot where he had fallen. They loaded Garrett, who was conscious, into a vehicle. His group was again under fire. “An RPG hit right in front of the truck and blew up on a wall right next to us,” he said. He recalls holding onto his own hip to try to keep the shattered bones together during a period of jarring explosions.

The soldiers reached the village outskirts, where they removed Garrett from the vehicle in preparation for his air evacuation to a field hospital. A helicopter soon touched down nearby, but it immediately took off again without loading the stretchered sergeant.

“I started yelling at them and they’re saying, We’re taking shots!’ And I’m laying here completely oblivious to that,” Garrett recalled. The transfer had been attempted too close to the village, within range of the hostiles’ weapons.

So it was back into the ground vehicle for the bleeding patient. Approximately a mile from the treacherous village, Garrett was transferred to the helicopter.

Around five minutes and 20 air miles later, Garrett was at Forward Operating Base Shank in Loghar Province. Here, for the next seven hours, his life hung in the balance as a medical team struggled to keep him alive while performing multiple surgeries. One surgery involved tying off two main veins in his right thigh area, but another cutting him open from the base of his sternum down to his lower abdomen was needed because, among other reasons, the bullet had gone through his bowel.

“They took all of my intestines and everything out. A lot of my buddies that came in, said [later], When we seen you, you were dead and everything was out of you.'”

His buddies were in the treatment area for good reason – to give him their blood.

“I ran the hospital out of their packaged blood,” Chris said. “Guys were straight-tapped – their arm to my arm.”

According to Chris and Brittany, Chris’ heart stopped three times during his emergency treatment at FOB Shank, necessitating electric shock to restart it each time.

The FOB medical team’s efforts paid off. Garrett could be transported again, this time to Germany, for more extensive surgery. Whether he could survive the next round, however, remained an open question.

Next week: Back to the states, recovery, and hopes for the future.