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All party, no pity

Oct- 8-2005 » Filed Under: 1/25 SBCT

Sgt. Brent Bretz, who was seriously injured in Mosul last year, makes the trip to Ft. Lewis to welcome his company home.

Link to Full Article
The Arizona Republic

PUYALLUP, Wash. - The boys of Charlie Company are finally home, and they want steak.

In a tiny apartment near Fort Lewis, Wash., they knock back bottles of Rolling Rock and Budweiser, fire up the patio grill and try to outdo each other with pickled one-liners.

These are the simple things you can't afford to do when you're fighting a war half a world away, where it's hotter than hell and you spend most days guessing if the people in the next village are going to greet you or shoot at you.

So on this Wednesday night, just days after getting back from Iraq, these 23- and 24-year-old Army sergeants eat and drink their long overdue fill.

The young sergeant in the wheelchair is Brent Bretz, who flew to Washington from his home in Mesa to see his guys. [...]

Twenty-three-year-old Bretz is cracking the bulk of the jokes tonight, sipping on Rolling Rocks and answering his cellphone, which seems to ring every five minutes.

This is Bretz's homecoming, too.

The last time his boys saw him was December.

Bretz was barely alive, clinging to life after a makeshift bomb blew up his truck and shattered most of his body on a road outside Mosul, Iraq.

The first one in his company of 160 to be seriously injured, Bretz lost most of both legs, shattered his left arm, ruptured his spleen, fractured his face and suffered severe burns.

"You hear about it, but it doesn't really set in until it happens to you or your family," confides Kryder, 23, who helped rush Bretz to the hospital after the explosion. "It makes you take a step back."

These guys are tight. When they were stationed at Fort Lewis, they would drive down to Portland most Wednesday nights to see some rock-and-roll band and almost miss work the next morning.

And when their infantry unit shipped out to Iraq last October, they watched each other's backs.

"It's beyond a friendship," Bretz says. "We're like brothers."


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