Father to son, a gift to get him home from war

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- As a boy, Dave Dedo heard stories about Vietnam from his old man, Wendell, a veteran of the 101st Airborne Division. Now it was the son, a sergeant in the same famous division, who was stepping off a chopper into his first combat. Nothing he heard at home could have fully prepared him.

Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 187th Infantry, was landing in dawn's light on the first day of Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan's wintry Shah-e-Kot Mountains, and their initial objective was square in front of them -- a mud-walled compound, normally home to a dozen Afghan families.

His gear included a telescopic sight -- a stay-safe present from his father.

"I took the point," Sgt. Dedo, 26, of Custer Park, Ill., recounted at his base here. "It was 100 meters away. We headed out."

Dedo and his team spotted a man with a donkey moving away from the compound. They held their fire. "We didn't want to shoot innocent people."

He then crossed a creek bed and reached a wooden door in the tall mud wall. "Rather than hell-bent-for-leather, I just peeked around." Inside the compound, he saw a surprising sight -- what looked like a U.S. Army tent. "But it didn't confuse me. You're expecting anything," he said.

The squad's seven men slipped through the door -- "going left, then right, left, right" -- and one lifted up the tent: Nothing. They moved on, with Dedo again on the point. At a main house, he took another careful look through a doorway. "I saw what looked like an American rucksack. 'These guys have got American equipment,' I'm thinking" -- probably supplied to Afghans in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s.

The GIs poured into the empty house. It had just been abandoned. "A stove was on. They were eating goat. They had left in such a hurry."

Machine-gun and semiautomatic fire shattered the morning calm. Beyond the mud walls, the 1st Platoon's main body had spotted weapons on the man with the donkey and another who joined him, and opened fire. Dedo's squad quickly redeployed outside and heard the clatter of AK-47s firing back, from up a slope behind the compound.

Coming under fire

A rocket grenade streaked down and narrowly missed Dedo's 1st Platoon buddies.

He turned his M-16 on the source of fire, a bunker, zeroed in with his four-power scope, and blasted away. He got one -- or at least kept him down. Then an Apache attack helicopter roared in, answering a call, and fired a Hellfire missile into the bunker. The hostile fire stopped. Four dead, the chopper crew reported.

It was just one episode among many on March 2 as hundreds of young American soldiers, in a strange land, got their first bloody taste of combat.

In this one, David Dedo felt lucky, with his training and his telescopic sight, a gift from a man who had fought an age ago and was wounded in another strange land, and who knew how to prepare his boy for war and get him home so the son someday could tell stories to the father.