Blackhawk Belts
4 February 2007
After approximately 1 hour of being on the objective, Smith* and his spotter came under fire from numerous individuals behind a blue
container on the rooftop of a Baghdad Location.
Smith continued to take enemy fire from the parking lot and the main entrance of a building adjacent to the parking lot while he returned fire and eliminated each threat as it appeared. The spotter, having no threats in his
sector that he could detect, repositioned next to Smith to help identify additional threats.
After roughly 13 minutes of being under a high volume of gunfire, Smith was eventually hit in the stomach with a high caliber round that punched through the 2 foot concrete wall he was using for cover while engaging the threats. The large round went into Smith and hit his BlackHawk CQB Rigger belt buckle, missing his hard armor plates
by 2 inches. Smith, not realizing initially he had been shot, used his non-firing hand to do an initial self-body blood check to see if he was bleeding. Smith looked at his hand and it
was clean. He did another self-body check and his spotter immediately saw Smith was bleeding. The spotter then pulled him away from the wall and began to administer first aid to control
the bleeding from his stomach. It was relayed that they were having trouble stopping Smith's bleeding and requested additional support by Air Medical Evacuation.
Smith did not want to leave his position on the rooftop until the engagement was over, but his profuse bleeding was a huge concern to his teammates.
When the helicopter landed, Smith was loaded onto the Little Bird and transported to a field hospital. Smith was in surgery for over three hours for his gun shot wound. The bullet that hit Smith ruptured his appendix, destroyed two feet of his small intestine, collapsed his right lung & destroyed half of his colon. The bullet finally stopped in the pelvis socket on
his right hip side where it caused sever sciatic nerve damage. Smith was taken to Germany the next night and then sent back home for additional surgeries. He has a long road until he
recovers from the wound he suffered in Iraq. According to the physician who performed the surgery, if it were not for his BlackHawk CQB Rigger Belt
deflecting the bullet, the operator would not be alive today.
*The name has been changed.
