Sergeants earn Soldier's Medals after Baghdad UN Building bombed

Two Soldiers assigned to V Corps' 159th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), 421st Medical Evacuation Battalion, received the Soldier’s Medal in a ceremony at Kirkuk Air Base, Iraq, Oct. 5.

Staff Sgt. Eric Hartman and Sgt. Douglas Holm received the medals for their actions Aug. 19, 2003, when they helped evacuate victims of the bombing of the United Nations building in Baghdad.

“If anyone epitomizes what Soldiers are supposed to be like, it’s these two NCOs right here,” said Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, V Corps deputy commanding general, during the ceremony at the Flyers Theater.

Both Soldiers readied their crews and arrived on the scene within minutes. Upon arrival, both began treating casualties and readying victims for transport and then were told of a victim trapped within the rubble inside the building.

“Noise, confusion, fear, terror and the smell of chaos is an environment no normal human being would go into, and we had two who led the way going into that building while it was falling apart,” Wojdakowski said during the ceremony.

“Somebody said there was a person trapped in rubble, and I spent the next three-and-a-half hours working on that,” said Hartman during an interview last September.

Both Hartman and Holm spent hours inside the collapsing building. With debris and concrete falling on and around them, the two continued digging to reach trapped victims.

“The sad thing is that it didn’t matter what we did. We couldn’t get to them,” said Holm.

The two later found out one of the victims they extracted was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the chief of the U.N. mission in Iraq. Although they were able to pull him out alive, he was later pronounced dead following his arrival to Landstuhl (Germany) Regional Medical Center.

“We would have done the same for anybody,” said Holm.