'I knew I was on fire'

SALEM — Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Jeff W. Long thought he was going to Afghanistan to help his unit with the building of schools, roads and bridges.

Five intense firefights changed all that.

Long, 41, a husband and father of three, thought he would remain in the Zabol Province with the 405th Civil Affairs Battalion. But a suicide bomber had other plans for the Orem police officer and his buddies.

It was Nov. 1, about 2:30 p.m. when a fire ball blasted Long's face and even melted the hard plastic components of the machine gun he was manning in the back of a Humvee.

Long, who had been in Afghanistan since April, was in a group that had just left an air base in Kandahar. They were picking up mail and were about 20 minutes into a two-hour drive back to their small compound in Qalat when the bomber struck.

Long, a reservist for 23 years, was scanning for snipers along an asphalt road that was notorious for roadside-bomb attacks. He could still see the craters from past explosions.

But he didn't see — or expect — that a car coming in the opposite direction might be bringing injury his way. The car passed three vehicles in his convoy before it reached Long's Humvee.

"I never saw him coming," Long said during an interview at his home in Salem. "The next thing I know, I just heard the explosion."

In the Humvee, Long was wearing a brand new headset, which allowed him to listen more clearly to other soldiers as they talked during their travels. He figured the headset saved his hearing and his ears from being burned.

"I heard the boom, saw the fire, felt the intense heat," he said. "I knew I was on fire."

Suicide bomber

His first thought was that it wasn't happening, at least not to him. He then told himself, "I'm not going to die. They're not going to get me."

In the following seconds, Long squatted in the back of the vehicle and was about to grab some bottled water from a cooler to extinguish the fire when he quickly realized it was already out. It was a flash fire, meaning the bomber had probably used fuel along with the explosive device.

Long heard a popping sound that made him think they were also being attacked by small arms. He stood up to grab his machine gun in the back of the Humvee.