It is both heart breaking & heart warming to read these stories of valiantly & of courage & KNOW that these same stories were part of the Revolutionary War & every war since. Men & women knowing the risks, knowing the fear but knowing the commitment.
The weaponry is different, the enemy is different but the bottom line is the same. Our young wonderful warriors are now dead & heroes & DEEPLY mourned & missed by families & friends.
DOLLY
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The Fallen: 2nd Lieutenant JP Blecksmith, 24
By Jeff Gordinier; Photograph courtesy of the Blecksmith family
On the night before 2nd Lieutenant JP Blecksmith shipped out to Iraq, after his family took him out for dinner in Newport Beach, California, his older brother, Alex, picked up a pair of clippers and shaved JP’s head. When that was done and JP looked ready for combat, Alex gave his brother a hug. Then Alex climbed into JP’s green Ford Expedition and drove it north, back to the family’s house in San Marino, weeping part of the way. He had a feeling. So did his parents. A premonition. They didn’t talk about it much, but two months later, in November 2004, when JP joined a wave of U.S. Marines roaring into the city of Fallujah as part of Operation Phantom Fury, the feeling intensified.
On the night of November 10, Blecksmith and his closest friend in Iraq, Lieutenant Sven Jensen, slept on a rooftop in Fallujah. It was, miraculously, a quiet night, and chilly. They got a decent night’s sleep. They awoke just before sunrise and were amused to find a small pet bird with green wings and a yellow belly perched a couple of feet away from their faces. Jensen took a picture of the bird. There were other ones like it all over Iraq, because when U.S. troops were searching abandoned houses, they often found cages that had been left behind. The soldiers let the birds go free so they wouldn’t starve to death.
Hours before, JP had sent a letter to his girlfriend, addressing it formally, as always, to “Ms. Emily M. Tait.” In it he wrote, “By the time you receive this, you will know we have gone into the city. We’ve been preparing for it the last few days, and my guys are ready for the fight, and I’m ready to lead them. It’ll be hectic, and there will be some things out of my control, but the promise of you waiting at home for me is inspiring and a relief.” Now he was in the thick of it. Blecksmith and Jensen came down from the roof, ate their MREs for breakfast, and got their orders. Before the invasion the battalion commander, Colonel Patrick Malay, had given his men an analogy: “‘Imagine a dirty, filthy windowpane that has not been cleaned in hundreds of years,’” he recalls saying. “That’s how we looked at the city of Fallujah. Our job was to scrub the heck out of that city, and then take a squeegee and wipe it off so that it was clean and pure.” Most of Fallujah was empty, and anyone left in the city was presumed to be an insurgent.
Blecksmith and the other members of the India Company of the Third Battalion, Fifth Marines Regiment, moved south through the city, with their blood types scrawled in indelible marker on the sleeves of their uniforms. The streets smelled terrible—a stubborn aroma of rotting food and bodies. Late in the day on November 11, things started to go wrong. A marine in Blecksmith’s platoon, Klayton South, was shot in the mouth by an insurgent when he kicked open the door of a house. Blood gushed from his mangled teeth and tongue. The medics cut into South’s throat to give him an emergency tracheotomy. (He survived. He’s since had more than 40 operations to repair the damage.) “It shook the platoon up,” Jensen says now, “and JP was the most in-control person I saw. He had a sector to clear, so he rallied his guys and said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to continue clearing.’” Blecksmith’s and Jensen’s platoons moved off in different directions, and the two friends shot each other a glance. “I’ll never forget looking at his eyes the last time I saw him,” Jensen says. “He turned and he gave me almost an apprehensive look, like, Oh, crap, we’ve got some crap going on. I wanted to say ‘Hey, I’ll see you later.’ But I didn’t say anything to him.”
Minutes later, Blecksmith led his platoon into a house and climbed a flight of stairs to the roof to survey the surrounding landscape. Shots came from a building across the street. Blecksmith stood up to direct the squads under his command, shouting at them to take aim at the enemy nest. He was tall, and was now visible above the protective wall. “He was up front a lot, and he made a big target, and we’d talked to him about that,” Colonel Malay says. “He exposed himself consistently to enemy fire in the execution of his duties. He displayed a fearlessness to the point that we had to talk to him about the fact that nobody is bulletproof.” As Blecksmith stood on the roof, a sniper’s 7.62-mm bullet found one of the places on his body where he was vulnerable. It was a spot on his left shoulder, less than an inch above the rim of his protective breastplate. The bullet sliced downward diagonally, coming to rest in his right hip, and along the way it tore through his heart. “I’m hit,” Blecksmith said. He fell. He raised his head for a moment, and that was it. A Navy medic got to Blecksmith immediately, but he was already dead, and his men carried his heavy body back down the stairs. He was 24.
That night in San Marino, Alex Blecksmith came home from work and noticed that the house was dark. He opened the front door and saw his mother, Pam, sitting at the kitchen table with a couple of marines in dress blues and white gloves, and he heard the phrase We regret to inform you . . .
The funeral was so magnificent, so full of pageantry, that at times it was difficult for Alex to remember that the guy being buried was his brother. The Marines do it right when it comes to honoring the fallen. They do it so right that you can get swept up in the ceremony and feel as though you’re watching a parade. The funeral took place at the Church of Our Saviour in San Gabriel—the church where the most celebrated of San Marino’s favorite sons, General George S. Patton, had been baptized as a baby. As the flag-draped casket was carried out of the sanctuary and into the California sun, a long, silent line of almost 2,000 people followed. There were marines and midshipmen and local firefighters in uniform. There was a 21-gun salute. Four World War II fighter planes swooped toward the cemetery in the “missing man” formation—just as they passed over the funeral, the fourth plane symbolically split from the quartet and veered into the sky. A bagpiper played a Scottish dirge
~SNIP~
