Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Pvt. Kodey Briggs, 18

BAGHDAD — Pvt. Kodey Briggs slid out from behind the wheel of the Humvee. He looked at what was left of his driver’s-side window — the spider web of cracked armored glass, the layer that didn’t break.

His thin chest heaved. His pale hands trembled. Why didn’t it break? He lit a cigarette. Then another. He took off his flak vest and helmet, sat down on the ground and leaned against a pile of sandbags. He seemed so fragile in that position: 18 years old, 152 pounds, a fuzz of short blond hair on his head. The other soldiers in his unit approached him deferentially, with pity and wonder.

“Most people don’t live through one of those things,” remarked Cpl. Richard Smith. “Briggs has lived through two.”

When soldiers die here it tends to happen randomly: A single shot from an unseen gunman and someone falls to the ground. A bomb placed by an unknown hand takes out one Humvee from a line of four or five. There are no front lines, no armies to fight, just moments of chaos. Wrong places, wrong times.

So luck is something to worry about, to entreat and to supplicate. But it is not always easy to classify. Is Briggs lucky or unlucky, charmed or marked?

The Army has given this high school dropout a promising new life. A life in which he’s almost died twice.

June 14, late afternoon, along a canal in southwestern Baghdad. Briggs sat in the machine-gun turret of the lead Humvee, providing security for the commander of the 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division. A blast rang out.

The explosion propelled hot copper slugs over the murky water, piercing the driver’s side of the armored truck. This type of bomb, known as an explosively formed projectile, is one of the deadliest weapons U.S. troops face in Iraq. If aimed and fired correctly, it can render any American vehicle defenseless.

A piece of speeding shrapnel stabbed into Briggs’s thigh. The chest plate of his flak vest was ripped off his body. The Humvee swerved off the road, crashed down into the canal and landed at a cant, partially submerged in chest-deep water.

Bullets and grenades volleyed overhead. Briggs looked down at the driver and the blood-darkened water.

“I saw his head bobbing in the water. His legs were gone,” Briggs recalled. “I pulled him out of there. He just looked at me and said, ‘My legs are gone.’ ”

The driver survived, left Iraq. For the next 24 days, Briggs recovered, first at the Green Zone hospital and then on his base in southern Baghdad. He endured the pain of physical therapy on his wounded leg and sore back, but his real discomfort was mental. He felt useless, restless. While his unit kept fighting, he lay on his bunk waiting.

He had felt this way before, after leaving school in the ninth grade, wondering what to do besides work at his aunt and uncle’s sports bar in Grand Rapids, Mich. “I wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “The Army sounded like a good solution.”

Solution. When he said it, it sounded like he meant salvation. He enlisted at 17, finished basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia, earned the equivalent of a high school diploma, flew off to the war.

It’s changed me. I think for my whole, like, person. It’s been a good thing for me. Made me a better person, I guess,” he said. “The way I act, the way I talk, the way I feel. It improved my whole quality of life.”

July 9, late afternoon, next to an empty school on a dusty road in southwestern Baghdad. It was Briggs’s first day back. This time he sat in the driver’s seat of the last of four Humvees. A blast rang out. Again a copper slug shot across the road and slammed into the driver’s side of the armored vehicle. The shocking thing was not the sound but the speed.

The first thing Briggs did was look down at his legs. He still had them. Then he started to curse.

In the Humvee in front of Briggs, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Patrick Frank, thought the blast sounded like a rocket-propelled grenade. “RPG! Turn around! RPG! RPG!” he shouted.

Dust poured in through the turrets and doors of the vehicles. It was impossible to see. Urgent, agitated voices came over the radio.

“Our vehicle has been hit by an IED,” someone said, using the military’s abbreviation for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb.

“Keep moving forward. We want to get out of here.”

“Are there any casualties at this time, over?”

As the convoy turned a corner, a rocket-propelled grenade skidded along the ground behind Briggs’s vehicle, hit a curb, bounced into the air and came down about 30 yards behind them. It didn’t explode. Pfc. Colin Spangenberg, 21, swiveled his machine gun in the turret and fired several bursts in response.

“Negative, we’re good. No, no casualties.”

Briggs’s Humvee had a flat front left tire, copper shrapnel embedded along one flank and a broken window.

“Let’s limp that thing” back to base, said Frank, the commander.

At Combat Outpost Attack, Briggs pushed open the heavy door and got out.

“Just like last time,” he said.

He smoked his cigarettes. He looked miserable. He sat on the ground and wiggled his toes in his boots. “I’m going to lose my mind, man. Lose my mind,” he told another soldier. “I should still be in high school.”

“I might as well give up. Something’s going to happen,” he said. Several minutes later, Sgt. Ed Herring, 28, approached Briggs.

“Did the doc look at you?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” Briggs said.

“That’s not what I asked. Have you been looked at?”

Herring held a finger in front of Briggs’s eyes and traced it right and left, up and down, looking for signs of concussion. He shaded Briggs’s pupils and waited for them to widen.

“We know that wherever bad things happen, Briggs will be there,” Herring said.

By the next morning Briggs had a different perspective.

“If it’s your time it’s your time, I guess,” he said. “Somebody’s been looking out for me, though. I’ve been lucky.”

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