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thedrifter
12-13-06, 02:00 PM
Exclusive: Marine’s name should be added to Marine Corps Marathon
W. Thomas Smith Jr
Author: W. Thomas Smith Jr
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: December 13, 2006

FSM Contributing Editor W. Thomas Smith Jr. reflects on the life and work of Major Megan McClung, the highest-ranking servicewoman to die in Iraq.

Marine’s name should be added to Marine Corps Marathon
By W. Thomas Smith Jr.

Major Megan Malia McClung was a special kind of Marine officer. She didn’t kick in doors or storm insurgent-cell strongholds. But last week, the 34-year-old Washington State native was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq’s notorious Al Anbar Province.

McClung, the highest-ranking servicewoman to lose her life in Iraq, was a public affairs officer (PAO) assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters Group. In that capacity, she was working as a spokesperson for both Marine Corps and Army units. She was also a press coordinator for journalists operating in theater and those writing back in the states.

I had gotten to know McClung through our frequent back-and-forth communications since she had replaced another media contact friend who had rotated back earlier in the year.

As I said, McClung was a special kind of officer: “A friendly face” with a personality “as bright as her red hair” is how reporter Mike Barber of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer described her.

Though I never met McClung face-to-face, I’m sure she was that, but she was so much more. In my personal experience – and that includes many years of working with some of the finest military PAOs from all services around the world – I found McClung to be one of the kindest, hardest-working, quickest response-turnaround, most efficient PAOs ever. Some have a flair for this kind of work; and McClung was simply one of the best.

On Tuesday evening, my friend, Beth Zimmerman, an editor at Marine Corps Times and a former Marine combat correspondent, told me, “Her [McClung’s] death has had a big impact on the Marine Corps public affairs community. The community is so small that Marines within that community who have never met her, have worked with her in some way. Everyone respected her.”

Federal mandate bars female military personnel from serving in ground combat units. But on the day McClung was killed, she was reportedly in Ramadi trying to help a reporter get his story when a massive bomb blast ripped through the vehicle in which she was a passenger.

McClung had been to Iraq once as a post-active-duty civilian defense contractor. Then in 2005, she was recalled to active service and deployed to Iraq in January.

Aside from her service as a Marine officer (she was promoted to major in June), McClung was a Naval Academy graduate – Class of ’95 – a lifelong gymnast, triathlete, member of the Annapolis women’s diving team, and an avid distance runner. Which – considering the fact that multiple tributes from journalists who knew her have already been written – brings me to the point of my writing about her, here.

On October 28, 2006, the first-ever Marine Corps Marathon Forward was held – a satellite race in Iraq that ran the same day as the Marine Corps Marathon held in Arlington, Virginia. It was the 30th anniversary of the now-famous stateside marathon, and the idea for the Iraq marathon was – you guessed, it – McClung’s.

More than 100 military personnel stationed in Iraq participated in the 26.2 –mile Marine Corps Marathon Forward that wound throughout the American base at Al Asad. And McClung, who ultimately placed second among the female runners, organized it as a tribute to U.S. military personnel who have been killed in the war.

Two months later, we are all paying tribute to her, and to a life that quite literally epitomizes the strength that is America.

Fittingly, McClung will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But she should be further honored: Perhaps in years to come, the stateside Marine Corps Marathon – which she so loved – might become the Major Megan McClung Memorial Marine Corps Marathon.

Certainly the Marine Corps Marathon Forward should be.

Ellie