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View Full Version : The Untouchables: Part III



thedrifter
04-25-08, 07:25 AM
They were there; then they were gone again. It was a short reunion for Tim and his 2nd Platoon family. There was some healing, some relief, some happiness. Then it was over. The family parted ways again. His friends looked toward another tour in Iraq, and Tim looked back toward his new life in San Diego.


Tim spent another year in rehabilitation. He made the transition from active duty and used his medical retirement income to buy a place in San Diego where he could be close to Balboa and continue his prosthetics training, the portion of his rehabilitation he has found particularly cumbersome.

“It’s very difficult for above-knee, bilateral amputees,” Tim says. “It’s agitating watching other amputees walk after three months. I mean, I’m happy for them, but I just wish I could do it as easily.”

Tim works hard at walking on his prosthetics. He makes the trip from his condominium in the east San Diego suburb of La Mesa to Balboa three or four times a week. Balancing without help of a cane is difficult. Walking is quite a chore without legs.

Getting around in general is an involved process these days. Tim’s Traumatic Brain Injury causes a seizure disorder that the California Department of Motor Vehicles deems a safety risk behind the wheel, and his driver’s license was suspended as a result.

Traumatic Brain Injury has many debilitating effects, but Tim stubbornly refuses to let the injury deter his quest for independence.

“I don’t like to admit I have as much TBI as I do,” he says. “I don’t feel I have a bad memory problem. I get brain farts here and there, but it’s not that bad.”

Tim lives alone in his two-bedroom condo, and he is, for the most part, independent. He likes having a place to himself, but he also appreciates having his new Marine family close by in San Diego.

He remains in contact with Marines at the Wounded Warrior Battalion, and despite having no official obligation; Tim’s gunny from Balboa provides him transportation whenever he needs it.

“I call him for rides, and he always comes, no questions asked,” Tim says.

Marines take care of Marines. That unofficial mantra is inherent among them. From the closest bonds fortified by war, to strangers in a bar whose only commonality is the title – there is a tendency among Marines to go out of their way to help one another.

While Tim sought to become independent, he leaned comfortably on that tendency.

A New Friend:

When he made the transition to the Veterans Affairs health system, Tim added another member to his Marine family, one that he was connected to inmore ways than he could have imagined.

Retired Master Sgt. Joe Sturdivant left Okinawa May 23, 2005, two days before Tim officially transferred from the reserves to active duty. The position Sturdivant left was motor transportation chief at Motor T Co., 3rd Transportation Support Battalion, the unit Tim joined a few months later.

Sturdivant moved on to his final duty station at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and deployed to Iraq a few months later. In Iraq, he worked out of Camp Korean Village, a forward operating base in Anbar that protected the Syrian and Jordanian borders from insurgent activity. Jeffers protected convoys that supplied the base.

Sturdivant returned from Iraq March 29, 2006 and retired from the Corps Sept. 30 of that year. He started working as an addiction therapist a few months later at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in La Jolla, the opulent, coastal suburb in San Diego.

When the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs mandated the establishment of Seamless Transition Teams to provide better continuity of care from the DoD health care system to the VA, Sturdivant became a Transition Patient Advocate. TPAs serve as caseworkers for vets like Tim, tracking progress and providing a constant arm of support within the system for everything from explaining entitlements to helping TBI sufferers make it to appointments.

The TPA concept, Sturdivant says, was to hire combat vets who could provide patients the one thing medical staff couldn’t: empathy through shared experience.

“A lot of clinic staff don’t know how to connect and communicate with these vets,” Sturdivant says. “That’s where we come in.” Their similar backgrounds helped Sturdivant and Tim connect easily, and their working relationship quickly blossomed into a friendship.

As his family in San Diego grew, Tim kept in touch with 2nd Platoon in Iraq. He watched the calendar, kept them in his prayers and looked forward to their safe return.

As the end of their deployment approached, Tim planned another reunion – one that wouldn’t be abbreviated and rushed. He asked Sturdivant to go back to Okinawa with him.

“At first, I was like ‘Are you serious?’” Sturdivant says. “I was flattered that he would ask me. I broached it with my program manager, and he absolutely supported it. This is a special case; this guy’s coming back here for closure.”

Tim dismisses the notion that the trip was about closure. He says it’s simpler than that.

“I wanted to keep in contact with these guys,” he said. “They’re the ones who kept me from dying, and I wanted to see them together before they all change duty stations and get scattered all over.”

He shrugged.

“It’s family; ya’ know?”

Different Iraq, Different Platoon:

In the summer of 2007, 2nd Platoon returned to a much different Iraq than the one they left a year earlier. The tides had turned in Anbar Province. The area that was once one of the most volatile insurgent hotbeds in the country had become one of the most secure areas in Iraq.

Sunni tribal leaders in the region, tired of the brutality insurgents wielded against their people, turned against the insurgency and allied themselves with American forces, embracing the security the alliance provided.

And while the operational tempo on the ground had changed, so had the platoon dynamic. As platoon members were spread out to different areas and sections with different missions, the tightness the Marines had known before unraveled.

They enjoyed more security, but the Marines regarded the new calm with unease. Mostly, they missed the closeness they knew before.

As is often the case in war, the rigors they faced in 2006 had a galvanizing effect on the Scorpions.

“The situations we’re put in, having to depend on each other – you get used to it,” says Cpl. John Rockwell. “You don’t ever have to think about whether your brothers will have your back; you know they’re there. It’s a way of life.”

‘That Moment’

Combat Logistics Battalion 4 returned to Okinawa March 20. They filed off busses to meet friends and family at the Community Center on Camp Foster.

To most of the returning Marines, the small, spectacled young man in the wheelchair was a stranger. To a handful of seasoned Marines from Motor T Company, he was the missing man who had finally come home.

“There’s nothing I would ever trade in the world,” says Sgt. Charles Trask, “for that moment – when I saw Jeffers sitting there waiting for us, just waiting for us to say hi. To see ourbrother just waiting for us to come back and welcome us home …”

He tapered off.

‘The hardest thing I ever did’

Trask and Tim were corporals together in Iraq. Tim slept in the bunk above Trask at Al Asad. Tim’s was usually the first face Trask saw every day when he woke up.

Trask was the turret gunner in a scout vehicle ahead of the convoy the day Tim was hit.

When the rear vehicle was hit with the first IED, Trask’s vehicle got the call to provide security. The crew made their way to the rear of the convoy. Mortars started impacting nearby, and one hit an oil tanker. The tanker erupted into a mass of flames and black, billowing smoke.

“I thought, ‘Oh f---,” Trask said. “This is a bad day.”

Then Trask heard the radio transmission that a man was down.

Again, the crew was redirected to provide security. Driving back toward the front of the convoy, Trask wondered who had been hit.

“I was thinking ‘who could it be?’” he said. “I thought it couldn’t be Jeffers because he’s the only Marine who was in church every Sunday.”

When Trask arrived, a Marine from Tim’s vehicle and a corpsman were treating the wounded Marine, scrambling to tie tourniquets on his legs and control the bleeding from his head.

The violent scene pulled Trask’s eyes from the direction of his gun toward his brother, now a bloody mess on the ground. He traced the trails. There was so much blood. His heart twisted in his chest. Adrenaline set his thoughts afire. His emotions shot through him like hot shrapnel from an artillery blast.

Trask felt the unrelenting force of instinct pulling him to Tim – the same unexplainable compulsion that causes Marines to lurch forward in battle when other men would shrink, the same compulsion that had already pulled Tim’s gunner, Sgt. Joshua Vee, out of his turret to immediately tie the tourniquets that saved Tim’s life.

“The hardest thing I ever did was have to sit in a gun turret and watch him laid out on the ground while other people fixed him,” he says. “All I wanted to do was be there next to him, but I had to stay right there in that gun turret, not because I wanted to, but because my staff sergeant told me to – to do my job and pull security.”

Trask scanned his sector, violent thoughts of retribution flooding his mind: “Let this be the day the enemy reveals himself – a trigger man, an ambush, anything.” Trask looked for a target on which to unleash his agony in those tortured moments as he called out to let Tim know he was with him.

“I love you, Jeffers!” he screamed at the top of his lungs from the turret. “I love you! You’re gonna be all right!”

He kept screaming. The medevac helicopter swooped in and grabbed Tim, and the convoy drove on.

“We delivered the goods and got home,” Trask says. “That’s our sacrifice.”

Getting Back

When 2nd Platoon returned from Iraq last month, there was much to celebrate. Everyone had made it back alive and in one piece, and the only man who was missing from the return flight to Okinawa the first time was finally back with his family.

About a half dozen of the original Scorpions planned a celebratory weekend getaway at the Okuma Recreation Facility on Okinawa’s northwestern coast March 28-30. It was the perfect setting to have the reunion they had wanted to have for so long.

They spent the weekend getting back – back to Okinawa, back to family, where they had been before. They went jet skiing, talked about girls, smoked and drank, talked about life, cracked jokes, razzed each other endlessly.

“This is probably the best weekend I’ve had on Okinawa,” said Cpl. Jason O’Hearn. “This is about family, about relaxing after a deployment. It’s a calming therapeutic feeling – being out here with the crew. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Trask says the Marines who gathered that weekend had bound themselves to one another long ago in the untouchable days before Iraq.

“Before or after what happened to Tim, any one of us would give our life for each other,” he says. Sgt. Joseph Tocci says it’s a feeling that can’t be articulated to outsiders.

“These guys are the best people in the world,” he said. “You think you have friends back home, but those friendships don’t compare to this. There’s no better feeling.”

In The Distance That Sunday afternoon at Okuma, the Marines packed their things and went back home. Tim flew back to California the next day. It was probably the last time they’ll all get together that way.

Trask, O’Hearn, and Cpl. Daniel Lopez all reenlisted to stay in the Corps at least a few more years. Tocci, Rockwell and Drexler are all getting out.

Life will propel them all forward, further into the uncertain depths of tomorrow. And when it does, they’ll look over their shoulders from time to time and glance back at the days of youth when the world was theirs, when the only thing they needed was each other – the days when they were untouchable.

And someday they’ll meet again, and they’ll say, “Remember when …”