thedrifter
03-27-08, 10:33 AM
Tech student remembers service in Fallujah
By: Matt McGowan
Posted: 3/27/08
It is autumn 2005, and a young U.S. Marine patrols the unpaved streets of Fallujah, an Iraqi town west of Baghdad which, in the years prior, saw some of the Iraq War's bloodiest siege-like fighting - a town for which many Marines fought and, ultimately, in which many Marines died.
It was Bryan Wilson's first patrol in Iraq, but the insurgent snipers waited without regard for the faces in their crosshairs, whether the faces therein belonged to experienced squad leaders or new recruits.
Discrimination, it seems, rarely fits into the puzzle of war.
The sniper loaded his weapon, pressed its stock to his shoulder, ducked his head and waited for his enemy to walk into view.
It is late March 2003, and, after several days of U.S. air strikes, the first American boots touched Iraqi soil, bringing with them the full military might of the American-led coalition. Tanks, warships and other war machines of many shapes and sizes, missiles and more than 150,000 troops from America and its allies converged on the Middle Eastern country which, aware of imminent attack, already had entrenched itself.
Back home, Americans held their breath and waited for the coalition to crumble.
It fell as mechanized military units sliced through the sands of a faraway desert.
Back home, the invasion appeared surreal and foreign as it glowed through millions of television screens into millions of climate-controlled living rooms.
It was as if the country itself gently crouched where it stood while drawing and holding a long, deep breath. America held that breath and watched.
Looking at him today, Wilson shines through his disciplined-yet-unassuming eyes. He keeps his hair short underneath a baseball cap, sunglasses perched on the bill, but his posture alone tells a gripping, unique story.
Now a Texas Tech student, Wilson is a political science and English major from Pearsall who joined the Marines in 2004 after the war began.
He held his head high as he told his story, proud but ostensibly reserved. With a clean-cut appearance, Wilson looks as though he not only is a big kid who knows how to throw a football, but also is a warrior who knows, if need be, how to throw a hand grenade at the enemy.
A distinct line deep within Wilson, however, divides his football-playing self from the sharp-eyed Lance Cpl. Wilson. As imperceptible as it may seem at first, both the soldier and student in Wilson resonated through his calm and cordial voice. His duality punctuated his sentences as if it lived on the tip of his tongue.
Sitting near a fountain in the lobby of Tech's University Library, Wilson remembered his not-too-distant life as a Marine. There, in front of that fountain, he sat comfortably, at times even with the slightest trace of a toothy grin.
His story might sound very familiar to millions of others all over the country.
Growing up in his hometown of Pearsall, south of San Antonio, Wilson played football in high school. Even then, enlistment in the Marine Corps enticed him time and again.
With high school diploma in hand, he again considered the life of a Marine. His parents, however, urged him to attend college first. Again, he put his plans on the back burner and moved to San Antonio to begin classes.
For the next few years, he lived the life of a civilian college student in San Antonio, majoring in what he now calls "having fun, more than anything else at that time." On Halloween of 2003, Wilson even met and began dating Jessica McCosker, the girl he one day would marry.
Neither of the two could foresee, however, what would happen next.
When the war began, some of Wilson's high-school friends deployed, and he reconsidered his studies. He then decided it was time. If his peers would fight, so would he.
"I had some buddies who I played high-school football with," he said. "They couldn't really afford college, and they were out there during the invasion. I figured, I wasn't really doing my part, so, much to my parents' dismay, I quit school and joined the Marines."
The skills Wilson said he learned during military training drastically changed the way he saw the world. The transition from civilian to Marine, to him, was absolute.
"It's definitely eye-opening," Wilson said. "You notice things you never noticed before. You stand up a little straighter, and you definitely have a lot of pride. Guys from other branches, they would call us 'cocky' and everything, but I think we earned it."
Halfway through specialty training at infantry school, Wilson said, the Marine Corps assigned him his unit in the 1st Division's 7th regiment. Allocation to that unit brought with it a great deal of additional news.
He was glad to learn others with whom he trained had the same assignment. The assignment, however, also assured deployment, which, he recalled with absolute eyes, came as no surprise.
"That's why I joined." Wilson said. "I'm not sure what to say about how it felt. It was a different feeling, like, 'Oh, ****. You wanted it; here it comes.' It's excitement, a little bit of fear, anticipation. It's pretty indescribable, to tell you the truth, but you definitely know you're alive."
Before shipping out, he proposed to McCosker. She became his fiancée, and, within months, Wilson left for Iraq.
"(What worried me most) was not knowing if he would come back," she said, "and, if he did come back, that he would be a different person - completely affected by it miserably."
When he looks back to his service in Iraq, Wilson said he first remembers the heat, but not the heat alone. The consequences of heat get grimmer with the realities of war and the austerity of Marine life in the field. Showers were infrequent, and electricity was shoddy, at best.
Multiply the heat by the lack of amenities, Wilson said with a smirk, and it was a recipe for odor. Troops begin "missing those showers pretty bad."
He and the others in his unit, he added, did what they could with what they had: several bottles of water, baby wipes, some Radiohead music on an iPod and a shaded place to sit.
"It takes a while for your body to get used to the heat," he said, going back to his first day in Fallujah, back to the moments before his first patrol.
Because the Marines wanted to have a constant presence in the city, he said, one patrol would leave the platoon's small operating base immediately after the return of another.
Wilson watched with interest that afternoon as the preceding patrol returned from the town.
"We saw these first guys come back, and they were soaked all the way through their blouses, their flack jackets, their boots, their Kevlar's - you know, their helmets," he said. "I thought, 'Oh my God. And I'm wearing all of my gear.' I didn't know what to expect, so I had on everything I could think of."
As his squad left on that patrol, the heat soon dropped to the bottom of Wilson's list of concerns.
Meanwhile, McCosker wondered if her fiancé was okay. Still in college, she avoided the news and prayed for a phone call. She said they would not speak for long periods of time, some even lasting as long as three weeks. In the meantime, she would make regular visits to see Wilson's parents.
"The biggest trick was just to keep busy," she said. "I had a full-time job, and I went to school full-time. Basically, all I had time to do was just sleep and eat. I just had to keep busy because I couldn't think about it. If I did, all these negative thoughts would come into my head and take over, and that was never good."
As a Marine in Fallujah, Wilson's day-to-day duties varied. He said duties rotated between various activities, ranging from providing security roadblocks to guarding the platoon's forward operating base; from patrolling the streets of the town in vehicles to patrolling them on foot.
Snipers crouched in the buildings surrounding the forward operating bases, Wilson said, waiting for a shot at any Marine on-guard at the time. For those who guarded the operating bases, a keen eye and alert mind could save one's life.
"You'd get sniper shots and random (rocket-propelled grenade) shots and mortar rounds," he said.
Other duties called upon Wilson to be at-the-ready in case a patrol came under attack in town. The duty was called "Quick Reaction Force." If their fellow Marines signaled an attack, he and his squad "would spring into action" and, in cases where a man was wounded, start "flying out of there in Humvees … to wherever they are and get that person out of there and get them to medical attention."
These reaction teams, he continued, would be standing by to bring patrols more ammunition or manpower - "get our guns to the fight"- in case of an unexpected skirmish. Fallujah's highly combative climate never failed to keep the quick reaction forces very busy.
The duty of a foot patrol, however, awaited him on his first day there. As the first patrol returned, the heat seemed to disappear and survival took the reigns.
The insurgents had prepared a welcome.
"It was my first dismounted patrol," Wilson said, almost to himself. "A sniper action shot at me - well, either me or the guy next to me; you know, we got distance in between us. I was walking along, and I just heard a 'Pap,' just like that, and it hit the wall, and I heard it (ricochet) against the wall later. We all dropped down and were trying to figure out where the hell it came from."
Later, toward the end of the same patrol, another bullet flew at Wilson's squad as it neared the forward operating base. The team, flustered, signaled their location to the base and opted for a different route.
"We cut through houses and alleys trying to get back without letting the sniper get a good shot on us," Wilson said. The team soon made it back to the base without injuries or casualties, "but, you know, that was my first time out, so it was just a 'of things to come,' I guess."
Bullets continued to fly at Wilson throughout his deployment, but bullets only comprised some of the threat. Insurgents huddled, potentially, in every crowded square or within every abandoned house.
But improvised explosive devices, too, potentially loomed in every roadside gutter. In one instance, he said he and his squad found themselves standing directly over a burlap sack near the road. When they looked inside, the blood drained from their faces as they slowly backed away from two large metallic canisters wired together - a close encounter with almost certain death.
Finally, in February 2006, Wilson's unit returned home, where his family and fiancée awaited him on an airstrip.
In July of that year, Jessica McCosker became Jessica Wilson.
"For a while after I got back, I couldn't sit like this," Bryan Wilson said, motioning his arm at the café around him. "I had to sit with my back, like, against a wall."
Today, Bryan Wilson is out of active duty and currently is serving in the reserves. As a Tech student, he and his wife live in Lubbock together.
There is a rumor, he said, that his reserve unit may be deployed to Iraq in May.
In the meantime, Jessica Wilson said, the two don't like to talk about it.
Ellie
By: Matt McGowan
Posted: 3/27/08
It is autumn 2005, and a young U.S. Marine patrols the unpaved streets of Fallujah, an Iraqi town west of Baghdad which, in the years prior, saw some of the Iraq War's bloodiest siege-like fighting - a town for which many Marines fought and, ultimately, in which many Marines died.
It was Bryan Wilson's first patrol in Iraq, but the insurgent snipers waited without regard for the faces in their crosshairs, whether the faces therein belonged to experienced squad leaders or new recruits.
Discrimination, it seems, rarely fits into the puzzle of war.
The sniper loaded his weapon, pressed its stock to his shoulder, ducked his head and waited for his enemy to walk into view.
It is late March 2003, and, after several days of U.S. air strikes, the first American boots touched Iraqi soil, bringing with them the full military might of the American-led coalition. Tanks, warships and other war machines of many shapes and sizes, missiles and more than 150,000 troops from America and its allies converged on the Middle Eastern country which, aware of imminent attack, already had entrenched itself.
Back home, Americans held their breath and waited for the coalition to crumble.
It fell as mechanized military units sliced through the sands of a faraway desert.
Back home, the invasion appeared surreal and foreign as it glowed through millions of television screens into millions of climate-controlled living rooms.
It was as if the country itself gently crouched where it stood while drawing and holding a long, deep breath. America held that breath and watched.
Looking at him today, Wilson shines through his disciplined-yet-unassuming eyes. He keeps his hair short underneath a baseball cap, sunglasses perched on the bill, but his posture alone tells a gripping, unique story.
Now a Texas Tech student, Wilson is a political science and English major from Pearsall who joined the Marines in 2004 after the war began.
He held his head high as he told his story, proud but ostensibly reserved. With a clean-cut appearance, Wilson looks as though he not only is a big kid who knows how to throw a football, but also is a warrior who knows, if need be, how to throw a hand grenade at the enemy.
A distinct line deep within Wilson, however, divides his football-playing self from the sharp-eyed Lance Cpl. Wilson. As imperceptible as it may seem at first, both the soldier and student in Wilson resonated through his calm and cordial voice. His duality punctuated his sentences as if it lived on the tip of his tongue.
Sitting near a fountain in the lobby of Tech's University Library, Wilson remembered his not-too-distant life as a Marine. There, in front of that fountain, he sat comfortably, at times even with the slightest trace of a toothy grin.
His story might sound very familiar to millions of others all over the country.
Growing up in his hometown of Pearsall, south of San Antonio, Wilson played football in high school. Even then, enlistment in the Marine Corps enticed him time and again.
With high school diploma in hand, he again considered the life of a Marine. His parents, however, urged him to attend college first. Again, he put his plans on the back burner and moved to San Antonio to begin classes.
For the next few years, he lived the life of a civilian college student in San Antonio, majoring in what he now calls "having fun, more than anything else at that time." On Halloween of 2003, Wilson even met and began dating Jessica McCosker, the girl he one day would marry.
Neither of the two could foresee, however, what would happen next.
When the war began, some of Wilson's high-school friends deployed, and he reconsidered his studies. He then decided it was time. If his peers would fight, so would he.
"I had some buddies who I played high-school football with," he said. "They couldn't really afford college, and they were out there during the invasion. I figured, I wasn't really doing my part, so, much to my parents' dismay, I quit school and joined the Marines."
The skills Wilson said he learned during military training drastically changed the way he saw the world. The transition from civilian to Marine, to him, was absolute.
"It's definitely eye-opening," Wilson said. "You notice things you never noticed before. You stand up a little straighter, and you definitely have a lot of pride. Guys from other branches, they would call us 'cocky' and everything, but I think we earned it."
Halfway through specialty training at infantry school, Wilson said, the Marine Corps assigned him his unit in the 1st Division's 7th regiment. Allocation to that unit brought with it a great deal of additional news.
He was glad to learn others with whom he trained had the same assignment. The assignment, however, also assured deployment, which, he recalled with absolute eyes, came as no surprise.
"That's why I joined." Wilson said. "I'm not sure what to say about how it felt. It was a different feeling, like, 'Oh, ****. You wanted it; here it comes.' It's excitement, a little bit of fear, anticipation. It's pretty indescribable, to tell you the truth, but you definitely know you're alive."
Before shipping out, he proposed to McCosker. She became his fiancée, and, within months, Wilson left for Iraq.
"(What worried me most) was not knowing if he would come back," she said, "and, if he did come back, that he would be a different person - completely affected by it miserably."
When he looks back to his service in Iraq, Wilson said he first remembers the heat, but not the heat alone. The consequences of heat get grimmer with the realities of war and the austerity of Marine life in the field. Showers were infrequent, and electricity was shoddy, at best.
Multiply the heat by the lack of amenities, Wilson said with a smirk, and it was a recipe for odor. Troops begin "missing those showers pretty bad."
He and the others in his unit, he added, did what they could with what they had: several bottles of water, baby wipes, some Radiohead music on an iPod and a shaded place to sit.
"It takes a while for your body to get used to the heat," he said, going back to his first day in Fallujah, back to the moments before his first patrol.
Because the Marines wanted to have a constant presence in the city, he said, one patrol would leave the platoon's small operating base immediately after the return of another.
Wilson watched with interest that afternoon as the preceding patrol returned from the town.
"We saw these first guys come back, and they were soaked all the way through their blouses, their flack jackets, their boots, their Kevlar's - you know, their helmets," he said. "I thought, 'Oh my God. And I'm wearing all of my gear.' I didn't know what to expect, so I had on everything I could think of."
As his squad left on that patrol, the heat soon dropped to the bottom of Wilson's list of concerns.
Meanwhile, McCosker wondered if her fiancé was okay. Still in college, she avoided the news and prayed for a phone call. She said they would not speak for long periods of time, some even lasting as long as three weeks. In the meantime, she would make regular visits to see Wilson's parents.
"The biggest trick was just to keep busy," she said. "I had a full-time job, and I went to school full-time. Basically, all I had time to do was just sleep and eat. I just had to keep busy because I couldn't think about it. If I did, all these negative thoughts would come into my head and take over, and that was never good."
As a Marine in Fallujah, Wilson's day-to-day duties varied. He said duties rotated between various activities, ranging from providing security roadblocks to guarding the platoon's forward operating base; from patrolling the streets of the town in vehicles to patrolling them on foot.
Snipers crouched in the buildings surrounding the forward operating bases, Wilson said, waiting for a shot at any Marine on-guard at the time. For those who guarded the operating bases, a keen eye and alert mind could save one's life.
"You'd get sniper shots and random (rocket-propelled grenade) shots and mortar rounds," he said.
Other duties called upon Wilson to be at-the-ready in case a patrol came under attack in town. The duty was called "Quick Reaction Force." If their fellow Marines signaled an attack, he and his squad "would spring into action" and, in cases where a man was wounded, start "flying out of there in Humvees … to wherever they are and get that person out of there and get them to medical attention."
These reaction teams, he continued, would be standing by to bring patrols more ammunition or manpower - "get our guns to the fight"- in case of an unexpected skirmish. Fallujah's highly combative climate never failed to keep the quick reaction forces very busy.
The duty of a foot patrol, however, awaited him on his first day there. As the first patrol returned, the heat seemed to disappear and survival took the reigns.
The insurgents had prepared a welcome.
"It was my first dismounted patrol," Wilson said, almost to himself. "A sniper action shot at me - well, either me or the guy next to me; you know, we got distance in between us. I was walking along, and I just heard a 'Pap,' just like that, and it hit the wall, and I heard it (ricochet) against the wall later. We all dropped down and were trying to figure out where the hell it came from."
Later, toward the end of the same patrol, another bullet flew at Wilson's squad as it neared the forward operating base. The team, flustered, signaled their location to the base and opted for a different route.
"We cut through houses and alleys trying to get back without letting the sniper get a good shot on us," Wilson said. The team soon made it back to the base without injuries or casualties, "but, you know, that was my first time out, so it was just a 'of things to come,' I guess."
Bullets continued to fly at Wilson throughout his deployment, but bullets only comprised some of the threat. Insurgents huddled, potentially, in every crowded square or within every abandoned house.
But improvised explosive devices, too, potentially loomed in every roadside gutter. In one instance, he said he and his squad found themselves standing directly over a burlap sack near the road. When they looked inside, the blood drained from their faces as they slowly backed away from two large metallic canisters wired together - a close encounter with almost certain death.
Finally, in February 2006, Wilson's unit returned home, where his family and fiancée awaited him on an airstrip.
In July of that year, Jessica McCosker became Jessica Wilson.
"For a while after I got back, I couldn't sit like this," Bryan Wilson said, motioning his arm at the café around him. "I had to sit with my back, like, against a wall."
Today, Bryan Wilson is out of active duty and currently is serving in the reserves. As a Tech student, he and his wife live in Lubbock together.
There is a rumor, he said, that his reserve unit may be deployed to Iraq in May.
In the meantime, Jessica Wilson said, the two don't like to talk about it.
Ellie