Excellent reporting – Washington Post
Angry and frustrated over Spregner’s wounding, nine soldiers loaded into another Stryker and vowed revenge. Rushing out the back hatch moments later, the men stormed a three-story building where they suspected the insurgents might be. But the only person they encountered with their rifles raised to eye level was an 8-year-old boy. He asked them for candy….
Moments later, a chest-thumping blast rocked the Stryker’s 19 tons, and black smoke obscured the blue sky above the open hatch. Sgt. Donald Kraft, a 22-year-old from Stockton, Calif., who had been standing in the hatch, dipped into the stuffy Stryker with a slightly blackened face.
“Am I all here?” he asked.
About 20 feet away, an improvised bomb had detonated near the pickup truck carrying the National Guardsmen, leaving it a fireball.
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