Local MPs receive medals from General
Melissa Atkinson
Editor
January 15, 2007
MS Rick Tucker and Cpl Adam Seegmillar in Aghanistan.
Just before Christmas, two specially trained Military Police officers from CFB Esquimalt were personally awarded the General Campaign Star and the South-West Asia Service Medal from the General they spent several months protecting.
MS Rick Tucker and Cpl Adam Seegmillar flew to CFB Edmonton for the medals ceremony, which included Edmonton troop members who served with them in Afghanistan. BGen David Fraser, former Task Force Commander Afganistan, presided over the ceremony.
The two MPs spent nine months in the war-ravaged country on close protection duty protecting senior military officers as they traversed the countryside visiting troops and Afghan government officials.
Last February, when Cpl Seegmillar stepped off the Hercules aircraft onto the hot tarmac at Kandahar airfield for the first time, he was full of youthful bravado and a Hollywood notion of war. Now, he says, “I realized it doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how smart you are, everyone can be killed. I saw that too many times over there. It was a reality check.”
MS Tucker came away with much the same sentiment. Afghanistan was his third deployment into hostile territory; previous deployments were Kosovo and the Middle East.
“Kosovo was nothing compared to this. In Kosovo, you knew who the enemy was,” he says.
The two worked more than 140 missions, either in a multi-vehicle convoy or in an American military helicopter. They protected many Generals, but primarily BGen Fraser as he visited troops stationed throughout the region.
MS Tucker crew commanded a vehicle and was second in charge of the team, while Cpl Seegmillar took up post in the G-Wagen turret as rear gunner security.
“I watched the landscape around the convoy in the turret. Once the General dismounted we surrounded him. If trouble occurred, my job would be to stay behind and firefight,” said Cpl Seegmillar.
Before they left the Kandahar base on a mission, the team would plan the motorcade route, decide the vehicle crews, and go over the procedure if they got attacked. On April 22, 2006, just outside Gumbad that procedure was tested when a lone Taliban rebel set off a remote-controlled roadside bomb, blowing up the team’s armoured G-Wagen.
The General had flown out of Gumbad earlier that morning; the convoy was a backup in case of bad weather.
All four inside the G-Wagen were killed, including two members of BGen Fraser’s Close Protection Team: Military Police officer’s Cpl Randy Payne and Cpl Mathew Dinning, both close friends and teammates of MS Tucker and Cpl Seegmiller.
“I thought we were getting rocketed until I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the door blown off the vehicle behind us. I had to wait a couple of minutes until all the vehicles checked in, then I dismounted.”
He found three military members had been killed instantly, and Cpl Payne alive but unconscious.
As a medic attended to Cpl Payne, the rest of the team established a security cordon around the site until infantry soldiers arrived.
The blast left a three-metre wide, four-metre deep hole and shredded the vehicle, says MS Tucker. Cpl Payne died later that day after undergoing surgery.
“I was always cautious, but reality really set in that I could die,” said MS Tucker.
Cpl Seegmillar found more action in the Petav-e Mizan hills in October, when he was called upon to help American soldiers at a small Forward Operating Base.
“We were asked, if we had extra bodies in the instant they get attacked, could we go to the parameter.”
He spent 30 minutes in a firefight that night.
“It was my first real opportunity to fight back - I had a lot of pent up frustration to release.”
A week later, while BGen Fraser was visiting the Chief of Police in Mizan, Cpl Seegmillar survived a gun battle between the Chief and a man carrying an AK-47.
“The Chief of Police was alerted to someone suspicious in the area and I went with him. He tried to shoot him - it was a Wild West sort of thing - but they captured him.”
The two MPs arrived home mid-November, and after a few days reflection say the experience has changed them.
“I’m more confident in my ability to handle crisis,” says MS Tucker.
“I had a real change in perspective. The big screen TV doesn’t really have any value in the big scheme of thing. The little things don’t concern me anymore. I learned what’s important to me in life, I faced my fears and I know my limitations,” says Cpl Seegmillar.
MS Tucker has since been promoted to Petty Officer Second Class, and, along with Cpl Seegmillar, will move to Ottawa this summer to help start up a new Close Protection Unit, which will provide bodyguard duties for all military and government VIPs.
