A Marine’s one-finger Salute

Monday, February 27th, 2006 9:34 am by Neal

From the blog PC540 comes this great picture and story of a Marine who, after being targeted by an IED, gives the enemy a one-finger salute while being treated by medics. An excerpt:

Leading the fight is Gunnery Sgt Michael Burghardt, known as “Iron Mike” or just “Gunny”. He is on his third tour in Iraq. He had become a legend in the bomb disposal world after winning the Bronze Star for disabling 64 IEDs and destroying 1,548 pieces of ordnance during his second tour. Then, on September 19, he got blown up. He had arrived at a chaotic scene after a bomb had killed four US soldiers. He chose not to wear the bulky bomb protection suit. “You can’t react to any sniper fire and you get tunnel-vision,” he explains. So, protected by just a helmet and standard-issue flak jacket, he began what bomb disposal officers term “the longest walk”, stepping gingerly into a 5ft deep and 8ft wide crater. The earth shifted slightly and he saw a Senao base station with a wire leading from it. He cut the wire and used his 7in knife to probe the ground. “I found a piece of red detonating cord between my legs,” he says. “That’s when I knew I was screwed.”

Read on for the rest of the story. It is just one of many, inspiring tales of heroism by our unbelieveable fighting men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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