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Odessan returns from Mosul

Jan-21-2006 » Filed Under: 172nd SBCT

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By Jennifer Edwards, Odessa American

It was a routine day and a routine duty for 22-year-old Army Cpl. Earnie Terrell — randomly checking vehicles at a checkpoint in Mosul, Iraq.
But the vehicle driven by the short-haired, heavy-set man with a broad nose was not an ordinary one.
“I looked down and saw a switch or toggle,” Terrell said Friday.
What had aroused his interest, he recounted, was that the switch “definitely looked like an add-on.”
What, he asked the man, was the switch for?
“He reached for it,” Terrell said.
Quickly, Terrell and officers from the fledgling Iraqi Army pinned the man.
“We didn’t hit him or shoot him,” he said.
“It could have been his radio or his gas tank. We found out later it was a car bomb.”

Terrell, who returned to Odessa on leave Saturday, said that he had similar close calls in the six months he’s been serving in Iraq.
“The first (brush) was in mid-September,” he recounted. “We were parked at an intersection and letting the Iraqi Army take care (of a possible insurgency).
“All of a sudden, we got heavy fire.”
The shots, he said, “weren’t very feeble” and many of the Iraqi officers were hit by the fire.
Luckily, he said, no one in his company was hurt.
Since then, he said, insurgents have fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), mortars and bullets at his platoon.
But, he said, “I haven’t been bombed yet.”
Meanwhile, wife Nichole, 23, routinely tried to avoid the television news, newspapers — anything that would stir the fear she was trying to control. [... ]


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