3rd Tour Important To Marine

[333MP]

Chicago Tribune
February 24, 2005

3rd Tour Important To Marine

Slain Elk Grove man didn't have to go

By Aamer Madhani, Tribune staff reporter

Marine Cpl. John T. Olson had decided to opt out of the military when his four-year contract expired in 2006.

But until then, the 21-year-old soldier from Elk Grove Village planned to spend much of his remaining time in the Marines on the warfront and volunteered for a third tour in Iraq in January.

"He had done his part," his father, John R. Olson, said Wednesday. "He thought, `What kind of Marine would I be if I sat this one out and let my fellow Marines go there without me?'"

John T. Olson, a 2001 graduate of Elk Grove High School, died Monday in hostile action in the Al Anbar province west of Baghdad, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Family members said Wednesday that they had received few details from military officials about Olson's death but learned in telephone calls from Marines in Iraq that he had been killed when a roadside bomb exploded near his Humvee outside the turbulent city of Fallujah.

Family members who gathered at the Olsons' home said the Marines had helped John mature and toughen up without taking away his kind demeanor.

Not long before he left for his third tour in Iraq, Olson gave his mother a necklace with a gold pendant. He scrawled a short note to her on an attached card. "Thanks for all you've done for me," he wrote. "I know the past three years have been hard. I appreciate everything."

Family members recalled Olson's last call home, on Feb. 12, to wish his younger sister, Courtney, a happy 16th birthday.

As a child, Olson vacillated between wanting to be a movie director and a Marine, said his mother, Diana Olson. After graduating from high school, he entered Harper College in Palatine with the intent of transferring to Columbia College in Chicago to take film courses.

"He loved horror movies, but he thought they could be better made," his mother said.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reignited Olson's desire to join the military. He signed up and left for boot camp in May 2002.

Not long after arriving at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Olson was sent to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. Olson, who was assigned to the Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, was among the first U.S. service members to enter Iraq.

His company faced fierce fighting in the first days of the war in the southern city of Nasiriyah. His father said that after his first tour, Olson was repulsed by the way Iraqi fighters used children as human shields.

He won the respect of his comrades.

"John did really well in Iraq because he had an ability to easily adjust to the situation," said Sgt. Dan Brewster, who was with Olson for the invasion. "I had been in the Marines about a year and a half when John came to Lejeune, but from the first day he got there, he fit right in. It seemed like he had been there forever."

Olson was dispatched for a second tour last February. He spent most of that time stationed in the western city of Rutbah.

Soon after he returned stateside in October, an officer asked him to consider volunteering for a third tour, and he did so without hesitation, his father said. Days before he was to depart, his grandparents, Tom and Jennie Curran, visited him and his girlfriend, a Marine who also was getting ready to ship out, in North Carolina.

Jennie Curran said he took them to a nice restaurant near the base where the whole staff seemed to know him. She said they had a pleasant visit, but just as they were about to part ways, both she and Olson knew that she was going to tear up.

"He said, `Don't cry, grandma. Everything is going to be OK,'" she said.

[USMCRET6391]

Semper Fidelis says it all

Rest in Peace Marine

[SpongeJuan]

This gave me the chills. I've been to a couple of Marines' funerals, and it is just something else. It makes you want to go and get some yourself. Especially when you learn that they were killed by something stupid like a roadside bomb, or maybe because they were trying to protect a fellow Marine.