J's Cafe Nette

A suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden vehicle into a bridge south of Baghdad Sunday, wounding several U.S. soldiers guarding the bridge.

There was no immediate U.S. Army confirmation on the number and severity of the casualties. An Iraqi civilian also was injured, said Donald Campbell, of the private security Armor Group International, who helped in the rescue.

Campbell, a 40-year-old from Inverness, Scotland, was among those in a passing Armor Group convoy who worked with a U.S. Army quick reaction force for some 45 minutes to pull trapped men from the rubble, scrambling over the fallen concrete.

U.S. armored vehicles provided cover fire from their cannons after the bombing, which occurred in the area dubbed the “triangle of death” for its frequent Sunni insurgent attacks.

The blast dropped one of two sections of the “Checkpoint 20″ bridge crossing over the north-south expressway, six miles east of Mahmoudiya.

It appeared that a northbound suicide driver stopped and detonated his vehicle beside a support pillar, said Lt. Col. Garry Bush, an Army munitions officer who was in the convoy, which also carried an Associated Press reporter and photographer and arrived two minutes after the blast.

A U.S. Army checkpoint and a tent structure, apparently a rest area, fell into the shattered concrete. The crossing was believed to have been closed to all but military traffic at the time.

Armor Group security guards, all ex-military, and others in the convoy rushed to the ruins. They found a scene of confusion.

“When that size blast went off, everyone was in shock,” said one of the first atop the rubble, Jackie Smith, 53, of Olathe, Kan., a former lieutenant colonel now working as a civilian Army munitions expert.

He said he saw what he believed was the engine block of a truck – apparently what remained of the suicide vehicle.

Soon the outpost sergeant in charge was organizing a search for his missing men, Smith said. The Armor Group team climbed up with first-aid kits, stretchers and other aid.

With the Army’s quick reaction force, they struggled to lift concrete shards off the men, pinned along the slope of what was once a roadway. At one point, a Bradley armored vehicle with a tow chain pulled a slab off a pinned victim to free him.

Then a shout went up, “Morphine! Morphine!” and a black T-shirt-clad Briton administered painkiller to the freed man.

“Another poor fellow looked crushed beneath a concrete slab,” said Campbell of Armor Group.

I imagine we’ll hear more on this story later today.

To those who criticize using the Washington Times for a story, I had seen this story on an AP headline on my homepage, but thought if I linked to it, it would be gone by the time anyone tried to read it.

Photo taken from the Fox News.com site, where the same AP story is reported.

Written by Jeanette

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