Usually Passover involves opening the door for Elijah the prophet. But Pvt. Andrew Sosnick’s Passover involved the door of his armored vehicle nearly being blown off by a grenade.
The harrowing tale of the Burlingame native and other Bay Area Jewish soldiers spending time in Iraq took first place for Best Feature in the American Jewish Press Association’s Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.
Sosnick’s recollection of his Iraqi ordeal on Passover of 2004 opened the article by j. staff writer Joe Eskenazi:
Whatever thoughts were floating through the young soldier’s head on April 6 were interrupted when a rocket-propelled grenade whistled into the turret of his Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Blood and bits of burned flesh splattered onto Sosnick. “A brilliant white explosion” engulfed the cabin, he wrote.
“I think the lieutenant is dead!” wailed the gunner, who, along with the lieutenant, was perched atop the smoldering turret.
But the officer was not dead. The grenade had cleaved off his right leg before blowing off the gunner’s right forearm.
As bullets whizzed by, Sosnick sprinted across open ground to the nearest vehicle to seek help.
As the ashen-faced soldiers were loaded into rescue helicopters, the grateful gunner latched onto Sosnick with his remaining hand. “Sosnick,” he barked. “Happy Passover!”
Sosnick later visited j.’s offices, where he proudly displayed a photo of himself next to the head of the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein. He said when his Army tour is over, he’d like to go to college and eventually get into politics, teaching or community service — “but I’ve got a lot of time to think about it.”