Kansas City, Mo ? A Kansas soldier who was captured in Iraq with Jessica Lynch says he shot and killed members of an Iraqi mortar team as they were getting ready to launch an attack on his American colleagues.

“They were going to shoot and kill me, or I was going to shoot and kill them,” Pfc. Patrick Miller said in an interview broadcast Tuesday night on Kansas City television station KMBC-TV. “It was no in between, what if this, what if that. It was either me or them. And in my mind, it wasn’t going to be me.”

Miller, 23, of Valley Center, Kan., was with the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company, which had 11 soldiers killed and six captured during an ambush in March. Among the soldiers taken prisoner was Lynch, also a private first class who has been telling her much-publicized story in a book published this week and in national television interviews.

Miller had been in the Army only eight months when he was sent to Iraq, assigned to work as a welder with the maintenance unit.

“I wasn’t really worried about going, because I never thought anything would happen,” Miller said.

But he was driving a truck bound for Baghdad on March 23 when members of his his unit made a wrong turn and ended up under attack from Iraqi soldiers.

His truck shot out, Miller scrambled for cover when he noticed an Iraqi truck that he thought he could take and use to get some of his comrades to safety.

“If I got to the dump truck I was trying to steal, it might’ve been a whole different story,” he said.

But as he approached the truck, he saw the Iraqi mortar team set up beside it.

Army Pfc. and former POW Patrick Miller, right, talks with Vietnam veteran Fred Becker after a Veterans Day memorial at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. Miller attended the ceremony Tuesday. Miller was captured March 23 when his 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed near Nasiriyah in Iraq. His Iraqi captors later released him and other members of his company.

Miller, who said he was at best an average shot during basic training, told KMBC’s Martin Augustine he hid behind a sand dune and started killing the Iraqi mortarmen one by one.

Miller, eventually captured and later released, subsequently was awarded the Silver Star for his actions, but said he was no hero, just a private first class.

“I was doing what I volunteered to do,” he said.

After he and his fellow soldiers were set free, there were stories of Miller pestering the Iraqi guards by constantly singing a pro-American song, and by giving them chewing tobacco that he said was candy in hopes of making them sick.

“It’s small victories that keep your hope up,” Miller said. “You got to have small victories when you’re in a situation like that.”

Miller recalled one of the soldiers who died, Sgt. Don Walters, whose wife and family live in Kansas City, as a man he could go to for advice. He didn’t want to talk about Lynch and the publicity surrounding her, and is not allowed to discuss the conditions during his captivity.

Miller hasn’t decided whether he’ll re-enlist with the Army.

He said he was offered the chance to leave the military after returning home but turned it down, saying he didn’t want to look like a quitter.