Stuff You Won't See in the Main Stream News

[Vulture6]

Marine earns Silver Star for Fallujah rescues
Wounded sergeant dragged 4 buddies to safety

By Michael Hoffman - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Oct 31, 2007 13:14:13 EDT

The snipers could tell the mortar team was close.

Both heard the unnerving sound of an explosive round exiting the mortar tube and immediately ran into the Fallujah, Iraq, street to get the 30 other Marines bogged down with them to scramble for cover.

Two mortars bracketed the leathernecks — one falling behind and another in front — before one mortar exploded a few feet away, blowing Sgt. Chad Cassady through a door and into a courtyard. Cpl. Russell Scott collapsed in the street, peppered with shrapnel in his leg and buttocks, along with a bullet hole in his arm.

Scott desperately tried to crawl into a nearby building, as insurgents’ bullets and mortars rained down on him. Cassady was still lying in the courtyard with shrapnel lodged in his chest and legs, his right lung collapsed, and his liver and kidneys lacerated.

“All of a sudden, [Cassady] came flying out of the smoke and dust and grabbed me,” Scott said of his sniper team leader with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. “He dragged me to the building and then ran back out for the others.”

Almost three years after that November 2004 afternoon during the second Battle of Fallujah, now-2nd Lt. Cassady was awarded the Silver Star — the nation’s third-highest medal for combat bravery — for “repeatedly exposing himself to save the lives of several wounded Marines who were trapped in the open,” according to the award citation.

After Cassady dragged Scott into the building’s kitchen, he limped back out and carried in three more leathernecks. As the sniper tried to carry in a fourth, he passed out from blood loss, and Staff Sgt. Christian Erlenbush had to carry Cassady off the street.

Cassady was immediately airlifted to Baghdad, where he was rushed into emergency surgery that saved his life.

“You can’t just lay down,” said Cassady, now the platoon commander for Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines. “If they stayed out in the street when rounds were coming down, they were going to die.”

He was presented the medal Oct. 17 on the 5th Marines’ parade deck at Camp Pendleton, Calif., after returning from his third deployment to Iraq.

Col. Willy Buhl, 3/1’s battalion commander in 2004, said he and other Marine Corps and Navy officials were disappointed in how long it took for Cassady to receive the medal.

“The secretary of the Navy said that it was Chad’s case that convinced him that he should [delegate] awards like this to the commandant,” Buhl said. “It bothered him and [he] said it was unsatisfactory. Chad was a catalyst for positive change.”

Cassady, 33, one of the older second lieutenants in the Corps, didn’t enlist until he was 26 and had already earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science.

“If you would have asked me what I was going to be when I was 18, I definitely wouldn’t have said a Marine. But after I finished school, I looked at the world differently,” he said.

Buhl said he immediately recognized how Cassady stood out from the other snipers with 3/1.

“When he says something, it’s powerful,” Buhl said. “He knows what he is going to say before he opens his mouth. He got my respect and [that of] the men around him.”

While Cassady was overcoming his injuries, Buhl encouraged him to seek a commission. Cassady was accepted to Officer Candidate School, and despite discomfort from shrapnel still lodged in his intestines, he completed both OCS and the Basic School on time.

Three years after the mortar attack that nearly killed him, Cassady said hearing he’d been awarded the Silver Star left him thinking about the Marines with him who didn’t come back.

“It’s a bit overwhelming,” Cassady said. “It brings back a lot of memories and faces, like the Marines I grew up with that lost their lives in Fallujah.”

[Vulture6]

Silver Star awarded for leadership in battle

By Michael Hoffman - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Dec 6, 2007 7:12:57 EST

After three days holed up in a house outside Habbaniyah, Iraq, fighting off waves of attacks from about 60 insurgents in June 2006, half of Staff Sgt. Charles Evers’ Marines had finally dozed off.

Then, a white pickup truck packed with explosives burst through the entry control point and exploded, leaving a crater 20 feet across and seven feet deep.

Despite the mammoth blast and the thousands of rounds lodged in the house during what ended up being a four-day assault, not one of the 22 Marines in the platoon Evers commanded died.

Commandant Gen. James Conway awarded Evers the Silver Star on Nov. 23 in Iraq for his leadership and ability to hold a position.

Evers is on his second tour in Iraq, once again serving as commander of 3rd Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines — the platoon he brought safely through that four-day firefight.

The platoon, tasked with stopping IED emplacements along Route Michigan, had established an observation post in a house whose roof had clear sight lines down the road. The next day, about 60 well-trained insurgents lit it up with machine-gun rounds, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.

The unidentified insurgents continued their assault off and on for the next four days, including the truck bomb that exploded on the third day. But the platoon maintained its position, calling in repeated airstrikes and forcing back the attacks.

“I may have gotten the Silver Star, but the guys with me were the ones that did the job,” Evers said. “I’m just glad I got the opportunity to bring all those guys back.”

[Vulture6]

Corporal posthumously awarded Silver Star


By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Feb 8, 2008 11:26:34 EST

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — In the chaotic, intense house-to-house gun battles with insurgent fighters during the 2004 Battle of Fallujah, the point man of Lima Company’s 1st Platoon barreled his way through gunfire and exploding grenades.

Then-Pvt. Sean Stokes, with his wide grin and sparkling eyes, seemed to relish the role he readily assumed as his unit, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, pressed through the city’s notorious Jolan District, which was teeming with al-Qaida fighters.

Several times during missions from Nov. 9-11, 2004, Stokes braved enemy fire — “fearless in the face of danger,” according to the Marine Corps — to kill insurgents and enable his platoon to gain control of houses.

On Nov. 17, 2004, after a grenade exploded near him, wounding him, the private managed to continue to use his weapon so the fire teams could reassemble and launch a counterattack.

For his actions during the intense week of close-in urban combat, the Marine Corps bestowed on the corporal the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest award for combat valor. His family received the medal and citation yesterday during a ceremony at Camp Pendleton, Calif., on what would have been Stokes’ 25th birthday.

According to the award citation, Stokes “fought through Fallujah with the resolve of closing on the enemy, while protecting the Marines around him at all costs.”

But on July 30, 2007, Stokes, then a corporal and on his third deployment to Iraq, paid the ultimate price when a buried roadside bomb detonated while he was scouring a road as a member of 3/1’s personal security detachment.

The news of Stokes’ death devastated his family and friends. “We didn’t know he was in Iraq when he was killed,” said his aunt, Laura Leupp, of San Diego.

As far as they knew last summer, Stokes was on the assault ship Bonhomme Richard, the lead ship in an expeditionary strike group carrying members of 3/1 and the rest of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. But the MEU had received orders to Iraq’s Anbar province.

“To protect his family from worry, he told them before he left and during his third tour that his ship, the Bonhomme Richard, was stopping at different ports around the world and was not going to go to Iraq,” Leupp said by e-mail. “He had already been through so much during his first two tours. Sean was supposed to just see the world by stopping at different ports. So we thought he was safe during his third and we hoped his last deployment. But not the way we hoped.”

His former 3/1 platoon commander, Lt. Jeffrey Sommers, wrote a poignant story online about Stokes’ early days at the battalion, where he had been reassigned from a sister battalion, 1/1, at Camp Horno. Stokes had encountered some trouble — a positive urinalysis pop for smoking pot and deserting the unit — that got him busted down two ranks to private, Sommers wrote in his Web blog.

“It’s tough being a private in an infantry deployed unit,” he wrote. But Stokes “took it all in stride, and his composure in operations on top of all the bull---- of being a private impressed me; he was a solid, dependable Marine. His work ethic and attitude prompted us to ask, almost beg, for his promotion.”

But that didn’t happen, he wrote, and Stokes “would remain a private for the rest of the deployment no matter what he did or was capable of.”

Then came the battle of Fallujah, where “nobody worked harder than Pvt. Stokes,” who led point for his squad, Sommers wrote, retelling the young Marine’s actions. “Time again, he was the one to get shot at first, he dodged death so many times as that point man over the course of the battle.”

Even when the grenade wounded him, Stokes kept firing his weapon at enemy fighters before he was later evacuated, Sommers wrote.

Stokes’ actions in that battle weren’t forgotten when the dust settled. “We returned home, and the mantra of not being able to promote a drug pop Marine carried into the awards process,” Sommers wrote. “[He] was never awarded for his actions.”

During the subsequent deployment, though, Stokes was promoted to corporal, and he eventually deployed again.

But on his third Iraq deployment, he met death in the IED blast. “Stokes was walking point, again, he always led from the front,” noted Sommers.

[Schnurbusch]

OOH-RAH indeed!

“I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.” – Groucho Marx
USA Military Medals, Army Medals, Navy Medals, Air Force Medals, Marine Corps Medals, Coast Guard Medals, Civilian Military Medals, Rack Builder, Ribbons Fan

[Vulture6]

Bronze Star for EOD who disarmed truck bomb

The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Mar 27, 2008 12:37:38 EDT

YUMA, Ariz. — A Marine who disarmed a huge truck bomb outside a bomb-making factory in Iraq last year has been awarded the Bronze Star medal.

Staff Sgt. Alexander Mazza was presented the medal Wednesday during a ceremony at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma. The explosive ordnance disposal technician went on more than 300 missions during his six-month deployment to Iraq in 2007 and safely disarmed 75 improvised explosive devices and disposed of more than 11,000 pounds of unexploded ordnance and explosives.

But it was a mission on May 18 where he earned the Bronze Star, with a “V” for valor.

In a courtyard in Fallujah, Marines found the dump truck loaded with a ton of explosives. Realizing that exploding the truck would have placed large numbers of civilians at risk, “Staff Sgt. Mazza fearlessly climbed into and manually rendered safe the truck-borne improvised explosive device,” the citation read.

After receiving the medal, Mazza put it on a memorial honoring 19 other Marine explosive technicians who died.

“They were out there doing the exact same thing I was doing, only I was fortunate enough to come home,” Mazza said. “I will be wearing this Bronze Star from here on out in remembrance of them, not for the actions that it was awarded to me for.”

[Vulture6]

Construction begins on USS Jason Dunham

By Dan Lamothe - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Apr 21, 2008 7:57:14 EDT

A lot has changed for the parents of the late Cpl. Jason Dunham since he died in 2004, after saving two other Marines by throwing himself on an insurgent’s grenade in Karabilah, Iraq.

They visited the White House, where President Bush presented Dunham’s parents with his Medal of Honor on Jan. 11, 2007. They witnessed the naming of the post office in their hometown of Scio, N.Y., in his honor.

And they watched as their three other children continued to grow up, with one getting married, another starting college and the third becoming a teenager.

On April 11, Dan and Debra Dunham honored their hero son again, traveling to Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, to help as their two sets of initials were ceremonially welded into the keel of the future Navy destroyer Jason Dunham. The ceremony took place three days short of the fourth anniversary of the blast that claimed the Marine’s life.

“Even though we lost him and it still hurts, there’s a lot of pride,” said Debra Dunham, from her home after the ceremony. “The gift that he gave his brothers was truly that, a gift.”

The ship bearing Dunham’s name, DDG 109, will be an Arleigh Burke-class, guided-missile destroyer. One of two boats awarded to Bath in a $953 million contract, it will stretch 511 feet long, with room for 380 service members.

Deb Dunham, the ship’s sponsor, said the visit to Bath was uplifting, though she wishes dearly her Marine son could have lived past 22 and attended himself.

“The Marine Corps is a very tight and warm family, but Bath Iron Works had the same feel to it,” she said. “We went away with a sense of commitment and pride and warmth from what they’re doing.”

That warmth remains strong between the Dunham family and the late corporal’s comrades in Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. Several are in touch regularly, including the two other Marines who sustained serious injuries in the blast, Deb Dunham said.

Sgt. William Hampton, a lance corporal when Dunham died, got married and now has a baby girl. Kelly Miller, a private first class at the time, left the Corps and is in college, Deb Dunham said.

“I think it’d be fair to say we’ve adopted them into the family,” Dunham said of Kilo Company. “There’s not a guy that I couldn’t call, and they’d drop what they were doing and come and help us out.”

Several Marines recently offered her husband good-natured advice when they learned Dunham’s little sister, Katelyn, 15, had her first boyfriend, Deb Dunham said. The suggestion: Leave a gun in plain view to let him know who’s boss.

“They’re just as protective of my daughter as they would be of their sisters,” the mother said with a laugh. “They gave Dan a lot of suggestions to let her new boyfriend know that she had more brothers than he was probably aware of.”

[ClutterbusterNY]

Nice one!

[Vulture6]

Marine gets Bronze Star

The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Oct 31, 2008 7:27:41 EDT

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — A Marine radio operator who helped kill five attackers and reloaded under fire in an Iraqi battle will be awarded a Bronze Star medal for heroism.

The Marines said 21-year-old Sgt. Joshua R. Gehret of Souderton, Pa., stayed in the turret of his Humvee and fired at the enemy when his patrol was fired on while chasing an insurgent vehicle on March 7. Gehret also reloaded while exposing himself to fire.

The medal will be presented Thursday afternoon at Camp Lejeune.

Gehret is an assistant team leader with 1st Platoon, Force Reconnaissance Company, 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion.