On the morning of AUGUST 26, 2007, the Soldiers of Charlie Company, 2-505 Parachute Infantry Regiment (from the 82nd Airborne Division) had a mission in Baghdad. They were into the three month extension of their deployment so they had been around a while and and knew what their enemy was capable of. Four men took positions on top of a building to provide cover and watch for insurgent activity along the route that was typically used to ambush patrols as they passed.
Someone in the building saw the Soldiers taking their positions and passed the information along. The result was a firefight that would take two of their lives and leave the other two fighting for their lives.
Within the next hours and days, more information would come to light, both through the interrogation of captured insurgents and through the development of more human intelligence on the situation. According to the available evidence, nearly 40 al Qaeda were directly involved in the assault on Reaper’s position (they believed the team on the roof comprised nearly a dozen American soldiers). During the firefight, which lasted less than ten total minutes, Corriveau and Moser had killed at least ten enemy fighters — possibly as many as fifteen — and had not only kept themselves alive, but, against all odds, had prevented al Qaeda from succeeding in their real goal: to kidnap the soldiers on the rooftop, and to make a public spectacle of their imprisonment and murder, just two weeks before General Petraeus’s internationally viewed testimony on Iraq before the U.S. Congress. The suspicion that kidnapping was the fighters’ intent was confirmed by a final piece of intelligence that Charlie Company received just after the incident: an announcement, crafted by the Islamic State of Iraq (al Qaeda’s Iraqi front), stating that nine U.S. soldiers had been kidnapped in Samarra, and had been beheaded and had their bodies thrown into Thar-Thar lake (to the southwest of the city).
Thanks to the strength, courage, discipline, and unwillingness to give up in the face of seemingly impossible odds of Chris Corriveau and Eric Moser, the ISI had spoken too soon. There would be no trophy, no public relations victory to thrust in the face of those in America and around the world whose attention would in the next few weeks be focused again on Iraq. Instead, there would only be death or capture, as the ISI members responsible were hunted down, one by one, by Captain Ferris and his company of very motivated, and exceptionally lethal, paratroopers who, as Corriveau and Moser had demonstrated during the fight of their lives on the rooftop that fateful morning, would never, ever give up, whatever the odds.