Sgt. Clifton Sweet remembered the moments leading up to the blast. They had just “dismounted,” or climbed out of their Stryker to patrol the Palestine district on foot. He led the push down the street. Behind him followed Romero, Guerin and platoon commander Lt. T.J. Cerullo. The street was a busy marketplace, with little trinket shops attached to homes. People were beginning to scatter to beat the approaching 8 p.m. curfew. And it was getting dark, but not dark enough to stop him from seeing it all unfold.
“I just happened to look,” Sweet said. “I saw a kid chuck something.” He watched the grenade fly through the air and heard the “tink, tink” of it bouncing off the pavement before it momentarily rested on a pile of garbage in the gutter. “When you hear that metal sound, that’s a bad sound.”
Heads turned in the direction, and the explosion caught Guerin in mid-sentence. All he was able to get out was “What the…,” he said this afternoon, grinning behind his dark sunglasses.
At first, the men didn’t know the extent of their shrapnel wounds, some not even realizing until the adrenaline passed that they had been hit at all. Romero took bits of hot metal in the front of his calves and his upper left thigh. Guerin was hit in both knees and Cerullo in his upper thigh -- a wound that two days later is still seeping blood, leaving a dark brownish stain on his uniform.
Sweet was hit from behind, lodging bits in the backs of his legs and left buttock. He felt the moisture running down the back of his leg and touched it, praying it was only sweat. The quickly falling darkness cut his vision and it was only when he brought his palm to his face that he saw it was blood. “It’s so small,” he said of the shrapnel. “But it feels like a sledgehammer when it hits you.”
And he remembers with a chuckle –- with Guerin’s help –- what he said as he was being led to the Stryker for evacuation: “My wife’s going to be pissed.”
My mother works with his wife and passes along:
