During his November 2004 to November 2005 deployment to Iraq, Staff Sergeant Timothy F. Nein served as the leader of 2nd Squad, 4th Platoon, 617th Military Police Company - a Kentucky National Guard unit - and, in this interview, gives a complete (often harrowing) account of a complex 20 March 2005 enemy ambush southeast of Baghdad that resulted in his squad killing or capturing 34 insurgents and losing not a single US soldier. Describing his MPs as basically "infantry on wheels," Nein - the recipient of a Silver Star Medal for his actions that day - describes in great detail why it was "one of the best overall pictures of when everything goes right." Tasked with shadowing a convoy of transportation vehicles when they came under attack by insurgents heavily armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, Nein said that "every plan we put into place and everything we practiced went exactly the way it's supposed to; and it wasn't because we were a bunch of superheroes or people who had been doing this for years. Four months earlier,” he explained, “the whole squad had never worked together; but every day we worked to figure out how we could have better load plans in our vehicles, how we could set up our actions on contact, who was going to do evasive fires if one thing happened, who was going to maneuver towards the enemy element if it went this way or that way. We constantly tried to learn from every experience we had.” Nein also recounts the heroics of Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester, the first female soldier since World War II to receive the Silver Star, and tells of an especially grim moment when he actually contemplated destroying his vehicle’s Blue Force Tracker because he thought “we were all going to die.”

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited