THAT NEW YEAR'S EVE RESTAURANT BOMBING

Our guys respond.

Eight Iraqis dead...35 wounded. No US Forces even touched.

This is not "resistance". This is terror. This is evil.

What Ratledge would see over the next few hours appalled him. But he knew he’d need to keep calm, stay focused, and let his training take over.

Sections of wall and ceiling had caved in. A steel beam hung exposed. Dining tables and chairs lay upturned. A wall clock hung aslant, its hands motionless at 9:18.

“We started digging,” said Ratledge.

One of the victims was just inside the break in the wall on the blast side of the building. It was an Iraqi woman in a Muslim head scarf, buried chest high in rubble.

A few feet over, a man sat slumped and lifeless like a broken department store mannequin, a gash across the top of his head.

“He was gone,” Ratledge said.

“I checked her,” he said of the Iraqi woman. “She had a pulse.”

Troops and Iraqi rescue workers started pulling away chunks of masonry and other debris.

“I kept my head together,” said Ratledge. “Let them know she was still alive – so they could keep digging.

“But you take into consideration that the rubble is on top of her and that’s what’s keeping her alive,” said Ratledge. “They take the rest of it off her and that’s when her pulse started weakening.”

The woman died, but the rescuers in that corner of the restaurant kept digging, looking for victims.