thedrifter
08-08-06, 07:26 AM
Charlie Company Marine Killed In Fallujah
By JESSE HAMILTON
Courant Staff Writer
August 8 2006
The price Charlie Company is paying for its mission in the heart of Fallujah now has a name: Kurt E. Dechen.
After months of close calls and Purple Hearts, the Plainville-based Marines lost one of their own in Iraq last week. The lance corporal from Vermont fell under insurgent gunfire.
His body is in Dover, Del., now. That's where the military prepares its dead for the final trips to their hometowns. In this case, it's Springfield, Vt., where Dale and Richard Dechen wait in the netherworld between the knock last week on their front door and the homecoming of their son, Kurt.
The big Marine was in the 4th Platoon of Charlie Company, one of the platoons living in an old school administration building in downtown Fallujah, where The Courant embedded with the Marines for more than a month. The Connecticut-based Marines - about 200 of them - are the only U.S. troops living inside the city that was once controlled by thousands.
The days have swung dramatically between sun-baked boredom and the attacks of insurgents. Mortars. Rocket-propelled grenades. Roadside bomb ambushes. And gunfire.
While much of the world has turned its eyes to the bloodbath of sectarian killings in Baghdad, Al Anbar Province - with its violent urban pairing of Fallujah and Ramadi - sends a relentless stream of U.S. troops to combat hospitals and to mortuary services.
Lance Cpl. Dechen was on a foot patrol Thursday, the Marines said. Such patrols are daily occurrences, hazardous passages through the dusty city, through the markets or the neighborhoods or beside the Euphrates River. Sometimes the people of Fallujah smile at the passing Marines. Sometimes they don't. And often, somebody throws a grenade or shoots.
Dechen's patrol fell on his 24th birthday. It was a day that his parents were having a Vermont flag flown over the State House for him, specially on his birthday, so they could send the flag to his unit in Fallujah.
A Marine spokesman at the Massachusetts headquarters of his battalion said Dechen was shot in the abdomen and died by the time he reached a surgical hospital at nearby Camp Fallujah. Another Marine, Lance Cpl. Adam Escobar from Hampton, Mass., was hit in the leg and is at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., but is "going to be OK," said Staff Sgt. Fredy Tellocastillo at Charlie Company's Plainville armory.
Though Dechen was the first from Charlie Company to be killed in Fallujah, the company's former inspector-instructor in Plainville, Capt. Brian Letendre, died in a May suicide car bomb attack in Ramadi.
On Saturday, Tellocastillo was at a tag sale that families of the Marines had organized to raise money for Charlie Company's homecoming in late October. It was there he had to announce that Dechen was killed.
The Sunday before, Dale Dechen had been on the phone with her son. It was a pretty typical talk, except Kurt seemed subdued. "Usually, he was more upbeat." Kurt was a dedicated Marine, she said, just like he dedicated himself to the other things he cared for, whether it was Corvettes or the Washington Redskins or deer hunting.
He was looking forward to coming home in time for hunting season. Then he'd probably be back at Castleton State College to continue studying criminal justice so he could become a Vermont state trooper one day.
His mom, his former Marine dad and his older brother, Justin, were looking forward to it, too. "You just hope for the best and pray, pray that the knock doesn't come on your door," his mother said Monday. But it did, measuring Kurt's life in just 24 years, to the day.
Now, the Plainville Marines who didn't deploy to Iraq practice the precise steps of the funeral honors for Dechen they will conduct late this week. And Dechen's family lives day by day in shock, also worrying about how the other Marines in Fallujah are taking it. "I know it must be horrible, especially for his buddies," his mother said.
Dale Dechen said friends, neighbors and the military have offered support to her family. But, she said, "There's really nothing anybody can do. ... You're not supposed to outlive your children."
Still, she knew it was possible. She even asked her son once whether he would want to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. No, he told her, "I want to stay in Vermont."
So they will bury him near home in the coming days, in a plot they purchased for the family, not knowing they would place their youngest there.
Contact Jesse Hamilton at jhamilton@courant.com. The Hartford Courant's project, On The Ground With Charlie Company, is at www.courant.com/iraq.
Ellie
By JESSE HAMILTON
Courant Staff Writer
August 8 2006
The price Charlie Company is paying for its mission in the heart of Fallujah now has a name: Kurt E. Dechen.
After months of close calls and Purple Hearts, the Plainville-based Marines lost one of their own in Iraq last week. The lance corporal from Vermont fell under insurgent gunfire.
His body is in Dover, Del., now. That's where the military prepares its dead for the final trips to their hometowns. In this case, it's Springfield, Vt., where Dale and Richard Dechen wait in the netherworld between the knock last week on their front door and the homecoming of their son, Kurt.
The big Marine was in the 4th Platoon of Charlie Company, one of the platoons living in an old school administration building in downtown Fallujah, where The Courant embedded with the Marines for more than a month. The Connecticut-based Marines - about 200 of them - are the only U.S. troops living inside the city that was once controlled by thousands.
The days have swung dramatically between sun-baked boredom and the attacks of insurgents. Mortars. Rocket-propelled grenades. Roadside bomb ambushes. And gunfire.
While much of the world has turned its eyes to the bloodbath of sectarian killings in Baghdad, Al Anbar Province - with its violent urban pairing of Fallujah and Ramadi - sends a relentless stream of U.S. troops to combat hospitals and to mortuary services.
Lance Cpl. Dechen was on a foot patrol Thursday, the Marines said. Such patrols are daily occurrences, hazardous passages through the dusty city, through the markets or the neighborhoods or beside the Euphrates River. Sometimes the people of Fallujah smile at the passing Marines. Sometimes they don't. And often, somebody throws a grenade or shoots.
Dechen's patrol fell on his 24th birthday. It was a day that his parents were having a Vermont flag flown over the State House for him, specially on his birthday, so they could send the flag to his unit in Fallujah.
A Marine spokesman at the Massachusetts headquarters of his battalion said Dechen was shot in the abdomen and died by the time he reached a surgical hospital at nearby Camp Fallujah. Another Marine, Lance Cpl. Adam Escobar from Hampton, Mass., was hit in the leg and is at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., but is "going to be OK," said Staff Sgt. Fredy Tellocastillo at Charlie Company's Plainville armory.
Though Dechen was the first from Charlie Company to be killed in Fallujah, the company's former inspector-instructor in Plainville, Capt. Brian Letendre, died in a May suicide car bomb attack in Ramadi.
On Saturday, Tellocastillo was at a tag sale that families of the Marines had organized to raise money for Charlie Company's homecoming in late October. It was there he had to announce that Dechen was killed.
The Sunday before, Dale Dechen had been on the phone with her son. It was a pretty typical talk, except Kurt seemed subdued. "Usually, he was more upbeat." Kurt was a dedicated Marine, she said, just like he dedicated himself to the other things he cared for, whether it was Corvettes or the Washington Redskins or deer hunting.
He was looking forward to coming home in time for hunting season. Then he'd probably be back at Castleton State College to continue studying criminal justice so he could become a Vermont state trooper one day.
His mom, his former Marine dad and his older brother, Justin, were looking forward to it, too. "You just hope for the best and pray, pray that the knock doesn't come on your door," his mother said Monday. But it did, measuring Kurt's life in just 24 years, to the day.
Now, the Plainville Marines who didn't deploy to Iraq practice the precise steps of the funeral honors for Dechen they will conduct late this week. And Dechen's family lives day by day in shock, also worrying about how the other Marines in Fallujah are taking it. "I know it must be horrible, especially for his buddies," his mother said.
Dale Dechen said friends, neighbors and the military have offered support to her family. But, she said, "There's really nothing anybody can do. ... You're not supposed to outlive your children."
Still, she knew it was possible. She even asked her son once whether he would want to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. No, he told her, "I want to stay in Vermont."
So they will bury him near home in the coming days, in a plot they purchased for the family, not knowing they would place their youngest there.
Contact Jesse Hamilton at jhamilton@courant.com. The Hartford Courant's project, On The Ground With Charlie Company, is at www.courant.com/iraq.
Ellie