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Dover NCO among those honored at NFL game

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Kevin Wallace
  • 436th AW Public Affairs
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. --  A Team Dover Airman was recognized during a halftime ceremony at the Nov. 11 Washington Redskins game at FedEx Field in Landover, Md.

Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne ceremoniously pinned the Purple Heart on Staff Sgt. Huey Harris III for injuries the sergeant incurred in an explosion while driving a Humvee in Afghanistan last November.

Sergeant Harris, 436th Services Squadron, was driving a convoy mission from Kandahar to Qalat, when a suicide bomber swerved a minibus full of explosives into the driver's side door of his Humvee.

According to Sergeant Harris, an Elkton, Md. native, at that point he remembers bright orange light and smoke. Then, everything went black.

"I woke up, strapped down to a stretcher in a helicopter with medics asking me if I was okay," he said.

Sergeant Harris said the first thing he did when he opened his eyes was to make sure he still had all his body parts, and he struggled to look down at his legs.

"I didn't know what was going on until I was in the hospital," said the 30-year-old sergeant. "I thought to myself, 'Am I going to live?'"

Luckily, despite the severity of the explosion, he was fortunate to have survived the suicide bombing. Still, he suffered a head wound, multiple contusions and burns during the attack and spent a month recovering in Germany and had to undergo several surgeries.

For Sergeant Harris, the possibility of a road-side bomb was never far from his mind, he said. There was always a possibility his convoy could be attacked.

After deploying to support the Global War on Terror twice and suffering injuries in a roadside attack, he said it's difficult to see incidents like his own aired on the news.

Now, the sergeant has a new way of looking at his life.

"It helped me realize how good I have it here, and how I took a lot of things for granted, such as my own life," said Sergeant Harris. "Being in that kind of environment has changed my whole outlook on the Air Force."

(Airman Shen-Chia Chu contributed to this article)