Regional Command Southwest
AFGHANISTAN, Sept. 27, 2012 – “There was
blood down my leg after I got shot,” recalled Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Ethan
Burk, who was present during the Sept. 14 insurgent night attack on Camp
Bastion here in Helmand province.
Burk, a hazardous materials management
coordinator with Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 16, 3rd Marine Aircraft
Wing (Forward), was on his way to work when he heard the first rocket-propelled
grenade explode behind him.
Avoiding the giant fireball from the
explosion, he had driven straight into an ambush of heavily armed insurgents
firing at his four-wheeled tractor, which had no armor to stop the barrage of
bullets striking all around him.
“I could see the muzzle flashes from the
corner of the compound,” said Burk, a Milford, Texas native. “That’s when I
realized they were all aiming at me. I felt something hit my arm, but I thought
I had just banged it on something. Then I rolled out of the [tractor] and
ducked. When I reached for my rifle they started shooting at me again, and
that’s when I realized they had a lot more firepower than I did because they
were firing too fast for just regular AK-47s.”
Maneuvering behind a barrier, Burk could
only see and judge the insurgents’ movements in the darkness by their muzzle
flashes. So he pressed on, trying to use the flight line’s light to see where
the insurgents had holed up so he could get the drop on them.
After moving to a covered position, one
of his friends and the only other Marine in the area, Lance Cpl. Kevin Sommers,
a cryogenics technician, jumped over a barrier and almost landed on top of
Burk. The two Marines waited for the insurgents to try and flank them. When
they didn’t, the pair climbed over concrete barriers to get better firing
points at the enemy.
“Once we realized they weren’t coming
after us, we jumped over the T-walls and cleared out the area behind the
barriers. At that point the British [quick reaction force] showed up, and the
[helicopters] were shooting from their main guns at the insurgents fighting
position right overhead,” Burk said. “We flagged the soldiers down with a light
and yelled ‘Marines, Marines, Marines’ to let them know the situation. The guy
in charge of the British QRF told us to go get my arm checked out because he
saw the blood on my uniform.”
After Burk and Sommers checked in for
accountability, Burk went to a corpsman and found out he had been shot in the
elbow by one of the insurgent’s machine gun rounds.
“After I had it X-rayed, they found two
pieces of the bullet still lodged in my arm and they had to surgically remove
it,” Burk explained. “After the whole ordeal, they asked if I wanted to go home
because I was injured, and I told them I just got here, why would I want to go
home?”
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