OLYMPIA — Three times the enemy bombs and bullets found Army Sgt. Greg Rayho.
Three times the combat medics did their work.
Three times at home in Olympia, his wife, Sue Rayho, felt the sick feeling of her adrenaline pumping as she received the news, willing herself, and him, to stay strong.
Rayho, 30, an infantryman with the 3rd Stryker Brigade who led a team of four to five soldiers in Iraq, is a rare recipient of three Purple Hearts, the revered military decoration for those wounded or killed in military action.
Nearly three months after fulfilling his desire to return home with his men and the 3rd Stryker Brigade after their nearly 16-month deployment to Iraq, Rayho has spent a good deal of his leave undergoing surgery to repair teeth sheared from the bomb blast that delivered his first wound in October 2006. Another surgery is scheduled to remove the 7.62 mm bullet from an enemy AK-47 still lodged in his wrist from the second wound suffered, in May.
“It gets cold,” Rayho says half in jest about the bullet still in his wrist.
“Each one was so close,” Sue Rayho says of the three times her husband was wounded. “If it had gone a little one way or the other, he wouldn’t be here.”
“When you are the target, you don’t hear the sound,” her husband adds, “just the cracking of the sound barrier near you. If you can hear it, you felt OK.”
Sue, 43, works for Thurston County District Court, and brought her two children to the marriage, a teenage son and grown daughter.
At home in the community, “people thank me for my service, and I like to thank them in return for paying taxes,” her husband says.
Their Olympia home has a cozy, warm fireside feel to it. It’s a far cry from last Christmas, when he was in Iraq. The Rayhos, who courted for about a year, had been married only eight months before the brigade deployed for what was to have been a year. It grew to more than 15 months after President Bush ordered the surge of troops last spring to quell increasing violence.
When her husband was deployed, Sue Rayho dreaded picking up the phone at times — that dread exceeded only by the fear of seeing two somber-faced soldiers at their door. The first might mean something bad had happened; the second would mean the worst.
Sue received three phone calls, each from her husband telling her he had been wounded.
The first was in October 2006 from Mosul. A bomb hung from a tree exploded as a Stryker vehicle, with Rayho standing in a hatch atop, drove underneath.
“I took the explosion mainly to my face and lost teeth. It was a huge concussion. The teeth were the first to go,” he says.
He didn’t realize how many nerves the mouth had, he said, until they were torn and throbbed.
“Luckily, no shrapnel hit me,” Rayho said.
Sue Rayho was driving her son to school when she received the call from her husband, who was at a medical station. Rayho insisted he was OK, but told his dad, an Air Force colonel, the full story. Sue Rayho, however, got wind of it. She got her husband on the phone and wanted him to put his commander on the line to tell her what had happened. After that, she made Rayho’s commander confirm all injuries.
Satisfied he was OK, she relaxed. Rayho underwent surgery and received temporary teeth and fillings. He was out three days.
“I don’t think he stayed out as long as he could,” Sue Rayho says, rolling her eyes.
“I wanted to get back on the horse so I didn’t get gun-shy,” her husband explains.
Rayho was wounded the second time in May near Sadr City, when his patrol was ambushed. A vehicle behind his was hit first, followed by a coordinated attack by snipers with improvised bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Rayho, in the hatch, dropped down with his battle buddy to reload. He recalls seeing his buddy’s face spattered with blood, then feeling his right arm go numb and realizing the blood was his.
“I was super-pumped from a really big firefight,” Rayho recalls. He stayed in the fight and afterward was taken to Taji. X-rays revealed a large nerve in his wrist was damaged. He had no feeling in his pinky and ring finger and up his forearm. He was out 10 days.
Today, feeling has returned and he has built his forearm strength “to about 60 percent,” Rayho says.
Again he returned to the front. “I didn’t want anything to happen to my team,” he explains. “I don’t know what I’d do if one of them got hurt.”
The final wound took him out of the fight in July in Rashid while he was conducting patrols to lock down battles between Shiite and Sunni insurgents.
“Gangs, really,” Rayho says. “It was like a civil war with us in the middle.”
While he was pulling concertina wire off the back of their Stryker vehicle, a deeply buried 50-pound bomb went off. Rayho and his buddy were knocked out. The vehicle commander’s leg was blown off.
“The concussion broke ribs and shifted my internals,” Rayho says. “When I regained consciousness, we saw we were in the kill zone. Usually there is an attack with small-arms fire, but this time there wasn’t. We didn’t know. My buddy and I were deaf, so we communicated immediately with hand signals” to check the area.
As their hearing returned, the first sound they heard was the screams of the injured vehicle commander, already being attended by a medic.
Learning of the latest injury at home, Sue Rayho “was a little more worried” yet felt “a huge pressure lifted.” Usually with three Purple Hearts, soldiers can leave the battle and go home. At work, her boss told her she looked relaxed for the first time in months.
Her husband, however, requested to remain in Iraq to be near his men. But he was taken out of combat. He was grateful for his life and the medics who saved it.
“The best armor a soldier has is not body armor or vehicle armor, it is combat medics,” he says.
“They are the toughest people out there. They carry rifles and fight and heavy packs on their backs like infantrymen, but medics carry all that and their medical equipment, and would fight through hell to get to us.”
Rayho, 30, a Collinsville, Ill., native, says he has heard of one other soldier who has four Purple Hearts, “a combat engineer. They look for the bombs; we look for the bomb makers.”
Many multiple recipients suffer crippling injuries or later leave the service. Rayho wants to continue serving, feeling fortunate his body is intact.
At home, Sue Rayho and other families were learning from Army officials how 15 months apart can change both husband and wife and to look for signs of physical and mental injuries when their soldiers returned, such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
She told her son to refrain from his playful habit of tousling his stepdad’s head from behind. She said she notices that her husband watches people’s hands more, as he conditioned himself to do while scanning crowds in Iraq.
Rayho said he hasn’t experienced emotional problems since returning.
“I took other men’s lives multiple times,” Rayho said. “I do not feel guilty. My job is to get close with an enemy and kill them. I won’t disassociate myself from that. I won’t do that here in America because Americans are not the enemy.”
Rayho joined the Army five years ago and served a previous deployment to Iraq with the brigade from 2003 to 2004. In his second deployment, he says, he saw courage all around him. “People talk about courage, but I got some very good lessons in it.”
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