Sgt. 1st Class Walter Taylor before he was injured in Afghanistan.
Sgt. 1st Class Walter Taylor’s life collapsed in four interminable seconds in a dusty field in central Afghanistan.
His convoy was reeling from a roadside bomb, his fellow soldiers were engaged in combat with insurgents — and a mysterious black car had just screeched to a stop in the middle of the firefight.
Second 1: A figure dressed in dark, bulky clothing emerges from the back seat.
Second 2: The figure begins walking toward the trunk.
Second 3: Taylor, with five wounded comrades behind him, sees a thin trigger wire seeming to snake directly toward the black car. Could there be a second bomb in the trunk?
Second 4: Taylor squeezes the trigger on his M-4 carbine. The figure crumples to the dirt.
The figure was not an insurgent, but Dr. Aqilah Hikmat, a 49-year-old mother of four who headed the obstetrics department at the nearby Ghazni provincial hospital. Also dead inside the car were Hikmat’s 18-year-old son and her 16-year-old niece. Hikmat’s husband, in the front seat, was wounded.
Army prosecutors say Hikmat’s killing in July 2011 was not just a casualty of combat, but a crime. Charged with negligent homicide and dereliction of duty, Taylor will face a hearing June 19 before a U.S. military judge in Germany to determine whether the case goes to a full court-martial, with the possibility of three years in prison.
Ten days after the explosion and firefight, Taylor got what he is convinced was a dose of Afghan street justice: His vehicle was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, which blew off his nose, shattered his cheeks, ripped open his lips, drove his teeth back toward his throat, blinded him in one eye — in short, left him without a face as he had known it.
The 30-year-old sergeant, who had served three previous combat deployments, accepted a Purple Heart in August 2011 and a criminal charge sheet shortly thereafter.
“I feel to this day that this makes no sense. It’s just wrong,” Taylor said recently, sitting at a table in the kitchen of his small apartment near Bamberg, Germany, with his German wife, Nina, and their two young children. “I mean, can people please look at everything I did, and why I did what I did?”
Taylor was a well-regarded field leader whose split-second decision came as the Army was trying to minimize allied-caused civilian casualties.
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Via comment by jjones44
Facebook page appeared yesterday, seems to be official. Lots of pics and info. Check it out: https://www.facebook.com/pages/In-Support-of-SFC-Walter-Taylor/407113582661313
ReplyDeleteThanks and I'll post this.
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