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Marine Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch
Driving a tank in Fallujah, Iraq, Marine Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch didn’t like what he saw ahead of him.
It was late afternoon April 6, 2004, two days into a Marine offensive to retake the city and avenge the four U.S. contractors whose burned corpses had been hung from a train trestle. Popaditch commanded a pair of tanks sent to relieve an infantry unit deep in Fallujah.
In front of him, insurgents had strung a spider’s nest of electrical wires across the entrance to a courtyard. A tanker truck, probably booby-trapped, was blocking an alley – his only escape route.
Popaditch knew he was moving into the kill zone of an ambush. He couldn’t turn back and abandon the grunts who needed him, but to bull forward meant suicide.
Then Popaditch discovered that the AC-130 airplane could help out, so he called for an airstrike. The AC-130 blew up the tanker truck, the power lines and an insurgents’ post packed with weapons.
With those obstacles cleared, Popaditch received permission to continue his offensive with the gunship overhead – an untested tactic at the time.
His tanks and the gunship made a fearsome combination. They cleared block after block of insurgents and relieved pressure on the embattled infantry platoon.
“(We were) just inflicting a devastating number of casualties on the enemy, and we did it in a way that no one had ever done before,“ said Popaditch, now 40 and living in San Diego.
The thrill of victory soon gave way to a painful injury. The next morning, as Popaditch stood in the turret of his tank, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded next to his head.
“(I saw) a really bright light, like a flash, and then nothing,” Popaditch said. “It was like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer.”
Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch’s prosthetic eye is etched with the Marine Corps’ eagle-globe-and-anchor emblem.
The physicians couldn’t save his right eye, and they barely salvaged the left. He has slowly regained about 8 percent of the vision in his good eye.
For his innovative combat tactics and leadership even when wounded, Popaditch received the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest award for valor.
Popaditch and his family live in San Diego where he is a student at San Diego State Univ. to be a High School Teacher
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