Everything you need to know about state Rep. Allen Vaught is on his Web site; the representative from Lakewood Heights (District 107) even has a picture of his baby son and dog Scout. But Vaught, the managing attorney of the Dallas office of personal-injury law firm Franklin, Cardwell & Jones, is especially proud of his time in the military: He was a reserve captain assigned to the Army Special Operations Command in Iraq from April 2003 to March 2004, where he served as "de facto mayor of Fallujah" (as evidenced by this 2006 clip from Nightline ), and was involved in "the rebuilding and pacification of Sadr City" in Baghdad. It was there his back was fractured after his Humvee was shattered by an improvised explosive device.
A year after his ABC appearance, Vaught was featured extensively this weekend in CNN's documentary Battlefield Breakdown, in which it was revealed that insurgents' IEDs are shredding Humvees, and the damaged vehicles are then hidden from sight beneath tarps lest the media and American public get a good look at the mayhem. In the doc, Vaught talks about his time in Iraq, including riding around the country in vehicles without any doors at all and about how the military's failure to secure the weapons lying around Iraq in 2003 "has led to a lot of the IEDS being used on our troops now, because the Iraqis went in and looted that equipment." His interview, in which he talks about that attack on his Humvee, can be seen its entirety here. --Robert Wilonsky
