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Badly hurt Stryker soldier recovering

Aug-19-2004 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

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MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune

An Army officer from Tacoma is recovering slowly but steadily from wounds he suffered earlier this month in heavy fighting in Mosul.

Lt. Damon Armeni remains in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., but "he's improved dramatically over the last 48 hours," his father, Dan, said in an e-mail Wednesday to The News Tribune.

He said his son would most likely be flown this morning to Madigan Army Medical Center at Fort Lewis. [...]

He and Sgt. Paul Schmitz of the Fort Lewis-based Stryker brigade were critically wounded Aug. 4 in a firefight with Iraqi insurgents. Armeni suffered shrapnel wounds to his upper body when his Stryker vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Schmitz was shot in the back.

Brigade officials said the enemy attacks across the city that day were the heaviest fighting the unit had seen since its arrival in Iraq in November. Fighters dressed in black struck a Mosul police station, a hospital, a power plant and briefly took over a hotel near the northernmost of five bridges that cross the Tigris River.

Armeni and Schmitz's unit was reportedly ambushed on its way through the city. U.S. and Iraqi forces repelled the attack and killed at least a dozen of the attackers, brigade officials said. Fourteen Iraqi civilians were killed and 31 were wounded in the fighting, officials said. [...]


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