Harbin searched the video, and pinpointed the insurgents, about 100 yards away. He yelled for the Marine captain and pointed to the enemy mortar position on the screen. The captain called in a strike. The Predator fired a Hellfire missile at the insurgents, killing them.
Harbin and two Marines were injured, one fatally. He would later learn that shrapnel from the grenade had destroyed the hearing in his left ear.
His actions in the fight earned him a Bronze Star Medal for valor, but they ended his days as an Air Force pilot. Harbin and his superiors say the Rover system saved his life and those of many of the Marines on the patrol.
"For sure," he said, "I would be dead without this technology."
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Harbin was born and raised in the mining and lumber town of Parrish, Ala., in the Appalachian foothills. His parents divorced when he was 7. For most of his childhood, he lived in a trailer with his mother on a small patch of woods.
As a child, Harbin read the World Book encyclopedia obsessively, and inspired by what he read, he led his friends and his brother, Eric, into adventures. One time they built a wooden "submarine" from wooden crates and milk jugs in a pool by an abandoned grist mill. It was not any sort of technological breakthrough, his mother said.
"I went down and watched the submarine go under," Janice Harbin recalled. "The problem was getting it back up."
His youthful creativity grew into serious study in high school.
"There were not a lot of highly educated people in Parrish who dreamed big dreams, I guess you could say, but Greg was a big dreamer," said Stan Randolph, Harbin's history teacher and football coach. "He had visions for what he wanted to do."
In Randolph's class, Harbin took a deep interest in the military history of World War II. Harbin decided to apply to the military academies, and in 1983, he entered the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.
He spent the first year on academic probation but his last two years on the dean's list. After graduation in 1987, he became a pilot and eventually an instructor who flew air shows over NASCAR races on the weekends. It was a typical Air Force pilot's career, with stints at bases near Oklahoma City; Ellsworth, S.D.; San Antonio and other cities.
Until he met the Rover.
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