“There were probably fifty of us squeezed in tight with our rec sacks sitting in our laps,” he said. “We were strapped in like a race car… and then all of the sudden we were going down.”
The pilot was performing a tactical landing in which they raced to a high enough altitude to avoid surface-to-air missiles and then landed as quickly as possible, like a 150,000-pound stone falling from the sky.
His mind spinning, he was put into a convoy that would take him into the small town of Al Owja, where Saddam Hussein had been captured less than a week earlier. Almost immediately, they came under enemy fire.
“I just kind of sat there,” he said. “Someone said, 'Parrish! Shoot back!' I didn't know what I was shooting at, so I just stuck my gun< out and fired.”
It had been a week since he had learned that he was going to Iraq. Before he would return home, he would survive some of the fiercest fighting in the region and, eventually, stand in the middle of Saddam Hussein's palace.
