I was able to get my MURPH WOD in this morning. It was a pain in my ass but a great workout!
I wanted to share a speech given by Marine Lt. General John Kelly for Memorial Day. Kelly gave this speech to eulogize two brave Marines who did their duty and paid the price. What the speech does not say, is that Lt. General Kelly's own son was killed in combat just four days before he gave this speech:
Two years ago when I was the Commander of all U.S. and Iraqi
forces, in fact, the 22nd of April 2008, two Marine infantry battalions, 1/9
“The Walking Dead,” and 2/8 were switching out in Ramadi. One battalion in the
closing days of their deployment going home very soon, the other
just starting its seven-month combat tour.
Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale and Lance Corporal Jordan
Haerter, 22 and 20 years old respectively, one from each battalion, were
assuming the watch together at the entrance gate of an outpost that contained a
makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines.
The same broken down ramshackle building was also home to 100
Iraqi police, also my men and our allies in the fight against the terrorists in
Ramadi, a city until recently the most dangerous city on earth and owned by Al
Qaeda. Yale was a dirt poor mixed-race kid from Virginia with a wife and
daughter, and a mother and sister who lived with him and he supported as well.
He did this on a yearly salary of less than $23,000. Haerter, on the other
hand, was a middle class white kid from Long Island.
They were from two completely different worlds. Had they not
joined the Marines they would never have met each other, or understood that
multiple America’s exist simultaneously depending on one’s race, education
level, economic status, and where you might have been born. But they were
Marines, combat Marines, forged in the same crucible of Marine training, and
because of this bond they were brothers as close, or closer, than if they were
born of the same woman.
The mission orders they received from the sergeant squad leader I
am sure went something like: “Okay you two clowns, stand this post and let no
unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.” “You clear?” I am also sure Yale and
Haerter then rolled their eyes and said in unison something like: “Yes
Sergeant,” with just enough attitude that made the point without saying the
words, “No kidding sweetheart, we know what we’re doing.” They then relieved
two other Marines on watch and took up their post at the entry control point of
Joint Security Station Nasser, in the Sophia section of Ramadi, al Anbar, Iraq.
A few minutes later a large blue truck turned down the alley
way—perhaps 60-70 yards in length—and sped its way through the serpentine of
concrete jersey walls. The truck stopped just short of where the two were
posted and detonated, killing them both catastrophically. Twenty-four brick
masonry houses were damaged or destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away collapsed.
The truck’s engine came to rest two hundred yards away knocking most of a house
down before it stopped.
Our explosive experts reckoned the blast was made of 2,000 pounds
of explosives. Two died, and because these two young infantrymen didn’t have it
in their DNA to run from danger, they saved 150 of their Iraqi and American
brothers-in-arms.
When I read the situation report about the incident a few hours
after it happened I called the regimental commander for details as something
about this struck me as different. Marines dying or being seriously wounded is
commonplace in combat. We expect Marines regardless of rank or MOS to stand
their ground and do their duty, and even die in the process, if that is what
the mission takes. But this just seemed different.
The regimental commander had just returned from the site and he
agreed, but reported that there were no American witnesses to the event—just
Iraqi police. I figured if there was any chance of finding out what actually
happened and then to decorate the two Marines to acknowledge their bravery, I’d
have to do it as a combat award that requires two eye-witnesses and we figured
the bureaucrats back in Washington would never buy Iraqi statements. If it had
any chance at all, it had to come under the signature of a general officer.
I traveled to Ramadi the next day and spoke individually to a
half-dozen Iraqi police all of whom told the same story. The blue truck turned
down into the alley and immediately sped up as it made its way through the
serpentine. They all said, “We knew immediately what was going on as soon as
the two Marines began firing.” The Iraqi police then related that some of them
also fired, and then to a man, ran for safety just prior to the explosion.
All survived. Many were injured … some seriously. One of the
Iraqis elaborated and with tears welling up said, “They’d run like any normal
man would to save his life.”
What he didn’t know until then, he said, and what he learned that
very instant, was that Marines are not normal. Choking past the emotion he
said, “Sir, in the name of God no sane man would have stood there and done what
they did.”
“No sane man.”
“They saved us all.”
What we didn’t know at the time, and only learned a couple of days
later after I wrote a summary and submitted both Yale and Haerter for
posthumous Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras, damaged
initially in the blast, recorded some of the suicide attack. It happened
exactly as the Iraqis had described it. It took exactly six seconds from when
the truck entered the alley until it detonated.
You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives. Putting
myself in their heads I supposed it took about a second for the two Marines to
separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck
came into their view at the far end of the alley. Exactly no time to talk it
over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough time to take
half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to do only a few
minutes before:
“ … let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.”
The two Marines had about five seconds left to live. It took
maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take aim, and open
up. By this time the truck was half-way through the barriers and gaining speed
the whole time. Here, the recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of
whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they
were—some running right past the Marines. They had three seconds left to live.
For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines’
weapons firing non-stop... the truck’s windshield exploding into shards of glass
as their rounds take it apart and tore in to the body of the son-of-a-bitch who
is trying to get past them to kill their brothers—American and Iraqi—bedded
down in the barracks totally unaware of the fact that their lives at that
moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground. If they had been
aware, they would have known they were safe … because two Marines stood between
them and a crazed suicide bomber.
The recording shows the truck careening to a stop immediately in
front of the two Marines. In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter
never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back.
They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight.
With their feet spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger,
firing as fast as they could work their weapons. They had only one second left
to live.
The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to
their God.
Six seconds.
Not enough time to think about their families, their country,
their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for
two very brave young men to do their duty … into eternity. That is the kind of
people who are on watch all over the world tonight—for you.
Enjoy your Memorial Day but don't forget why we have the day off.
San Antonio Spurs' Tim Duncan: Seventeen years in the NBA, one of the best power forwards of all time and four time champion. Tim Duncan closed out the series with the Oklahoma City Thunder tonight and they are going to play the Miami Heat in the NBA finals... again. Cal Ripken is certainly baseball's Iron Man, it can easily be argued that Tim Duncan is the NBA's.
