Campbell GIs receive Soldier’s Medals - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Campbell GIs receive Soldier’s Medals

Smoke and flames did nothing to deter two Fort Campbell, Ky., soldiers from choosing to risk their lives to save someone else’s.

Their bravery on the home front was rewarded Tuesday at a Fort Campbell ceremony where each received a Soldier’s Medal, an award for heroism not involving conflict with an enemy.

The soldiers, Sgt. Jerry Klatt and Sgt. Tom Hayes, are with 159th Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, both veterans of tours in Iraq.

On April 12 around 9:15 a.m., a few months after returning from the brigade’s last deployment, Klatt, who is with 7th Squadron, 17th Cavalry, drove out of the hangar to pick up two other soldiers whose car had broken down outside post on Lafayette Road.

Klatt, 41, joined the Army in August 2001 after 15 years as a mechanic at Toyota. As the unit’s de facto mechanic, he said, he helps everyone with their cars.

“Everyone helps everybody, that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he said.

Returning to post with his stranded comrades, Sgt. Eric Santiago and Spc. Jeremy Brower, Klatt rounded a corner and saw the undercarriage of a car lying on its side with the driver’s door against the ground.

“The accident was right on the border of post. The driver had veered off the road, I guess he lost control, and made a sharp right into the post of this big yellow swing gate,” Klatt said.

The driver, Pfc. Craig Bowers, was alone, unconscious, bleeding, belted into his seat and pinned in by several loose items, including his rucksack, that had landed on him in the crash.

There were flames coming out of the undercarriage, said Klatt, who parked his vehicle and ran toward the 2-door sports car with Santiago and Brower.

While Santiago went to find a fire extinguisher, Brower began kicking the car’s back window and Klatt peered into the passenger window to check on his fellow soldier.

Dangling his body down into the burning car, Klatt tried to reach for his Gerber knife so he could cut the seat belt, but it was too far back on his belt.

So, with his fellow soldiers, including a third female soldier who had come to the scene, holding him by the waist of his pants, Klatt began trying to ease Bowers out.

“I was trying to weave him out of the seatbelt and I could feel the side of my face getting warm. The fire was starting to come through the floor board,” Klatt said.

Just then, Bowers started to come to and everyone encouraged him to wake up and help them get him out.

With Klatt’s help, Bowers wiggled himself free and straighten himself out enough so they could pull him and Klatt out.

They dragged him about 75 yards away from the car and within three minutes, Klatt said, “the car was completely engulfed in flames.”

“When I was in there trying to get him out, that’s when you started feeling like something really has to happen and it has to happen now,” Klatt said.

What surprised him most, however, was not that he had risked his life by going into a burning car.

“What astonished me was the number of people taking pictures,” he said of several soldiers and civilians who had stopped their cars on the two-lane road to photograph the wreck. “I don’t know who they were.”

Since then, he said, he’s told the story of that day “40 or 50 times.”

“The main point is, we got him out alive,” Klatt said.

Twelve days later in another part of town, Sgt. Tom Hayes, 28, was driving back to Fort Campbell after a burrito lunch when he saw a good deal of smoke coming from a house.

“As I was driving by I saw flames coming from the back of the house,” said Hayes, who is with 563rd Aviation Support Battalion.

The situation was developing quickly and there were no fire engines on the scene so Hayes drove to the end of the one-way street and doubled back, unable to driver over the center median in his sports car.

When he got to the house, a neighbor who was calling emergency services on his cell phone didn’t know the name of the street, so Hayes ran to the end of the street and back to get the name.

“I heard a lot of banging and glass breaking so I knew there was someone inside the house,” Hayes recalled.

Within moments, he had decided to walk through the front door where he found two men trying to move the home’s disabled occupant down the front hallway through thick smoke.

“They were trying to drag him, he was an older disabled guy with a scooter,” Hayes said. He estimated the man weighed about 275 pounds.

Once outside the front door, Hayes said, one of the men who was helping ran away gasping for air and he and the second man, plus a third who came to help, dragged the victim to safety.

Returning to work late, Hayes said he told his chain of command what had happened and they took a formal statement from him.

“I think just the fact that I took the time to stop and help out was more than most people would have done,” Hayes said.