Today, we have the same story from three different shops. LCpl H. Golden, MCRD PI, Jeff Schogol, Stars and Stripes, and WAPO's Peter Carlson. It is Jack Burton's opinion that you can never do enough to offset the traitorious rants of the Hollywood Left slanders of tim robbins and brian depalma.Especially brian depalma's redacted,
 U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Jeremiah Workman, a drill instructor with Delta Company, 2nd Recruit Training Battalion, receives the Navy Cross Medal from Brig. Gen. Richard T. Tryon, commanding general, Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island/Eastern Recruiting Region, May 12. Workman received the award for actions performed while deployed to Iraq in 2004. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Troy Loveless By Lance Cpl. Heather Golden Parris Island |
| PARRIS ISLAND, S.C., May 26, 2006 —The Marine Corps has a long tradition of excellence in the line of duty. Marines stretching from 1775 to present times are recognized and remembered for their selfless acts and quick thinking on and off the battlefield. On May 12, another Marine was recognized for his actions. Sgt. Jeremiah Workman, a drill instructor with Delta Company, 2nd Recruit Training Battalion, and native of Richwood, Va., received the Navy Cross, second in prestige only to the Medal of Honor, during the recruit graduation ceremony at Peatross Parade Deck May 12, for actions while on deployment in Fallujah, Iraq, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004. According to the citation, he was awarded for extraordinary heroism, while serving as a squad leader for the Mortar Platoon, Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 1, 1st Marine Division, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif. Workman, exemplifying the old adage "no man left behind," repeatedly exposed himself to a hail of enemy fire to retrieve isolated Marines trapped inside an insurgent-infested building. Ignoring heavy enemy fire and a storm of grenades raining down on his position, Workman fearlessly laid down enough cover fire to allow the trapped Marines to escape. After seeing the first group of wounded Marines safely to a neighboring yard, Workman rallied additional Marines to his side and provided more cover fire for an attack into the building to rescue other Marines still trapped. He continued to fire even after receiving numerous shrapnel wounds to his arms and legs after a grenade exploded in front of him, stated his citation. Workman's efforts did not stop after the second rescue attack. Ignoring his wounds, Workman once again united his team for a final assault strike into the building to retrieve remaining Marines and to clear the building of insurgents. ...............................................................................30........................................................................ Cpl. Jeremiah Workman Navy Cross 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines By Jeff Schogol Stars and Stripes When Cpl. Jeremiah Workman heard the Squad Automatic Weapon open up, he didn’t think much of it. But when he heard the AK-47 going off, he and the rest of his squad knew something was wrong. And by the time they ran to the house in Fallujah, Iraq, where Marines were trapped inside, the gunfire was intense. Workman, 23, said he stepped inside the house and saw two sergeants trying to talk to the Marines upstairs. The bullets were hitting so close to the head of one of the sergeants that Workman screamed for him to get down. The three went outside where Workman learned that about six Marines were trapped in the home. After coming up with a plan, they were joined by a lieutenant who led between eight and 11 Marines toward the home, said Workman, then with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. “As soon as we get to the front door, the lieutenant backs out of the way … He peels off the stack, so now I’m first, and I’m just thinking, ‘Oh [expletive],’ ” said Workman, of Marion, Ohio. When the Marines got to the staircase, the lieutenant told Workman to go up on the count of three. As soon as Workman started running up the stairs, bullets started to fly. “It was like one of them damn cartoons where they shoot at the feet and the cartoon dances. I mean literally, it was right on my ass as I was running up the stairs,” he said. By the time he got to a landing that offered cover, Workman realized that none of his fellow Marines had been able to make it up the stairs. Workman said he saw three of the Marines trapped inside, but he was unable to yell to them over all the noise. After being ordered to come back down the stairs, he dived down the staircase to rejoin the rest of the Marines. “I got back down and they picked me up and the lieutenant’s like, I’m going to throw a grenade up there to soften them up,” Workman said. Of course, the grenade bounced back down the stairs, but Workman and the others were able to take cover before it went off. The Marines then made a second assault up the stairs, and this time all of the Marines made it up, Workman said. By this time, the three trapped Marines he had seen were gone. He would later learn that they had made it to the roof in an attempt to escape. Workman and about three other Marines were now firing at the insurgents. He was so close to another Marine’s weapon that he was getting showered with the brass casings. During the firefight, Workman would have to put down his rifle as fellow Marines handed him grenades to throw. “I felt naked. To throw the grenade, I’d have to let my rifle down and then throw it, and that was one of the most awful feelings ever, was not having my rifle up. You felt like you were vulnerable.” After he grabbed his rifle to start shooting again, an insurgent tossed a bright yellow grenade at them. It landed a few feet from the Marines. “I had enough time to, like, shield my head. I yelled ‘Grenade!’ and it went off.” He said felt like someone had hit him in the leg with a baseball bat, but otherwise he was unhurt. But the Marines were running low on ammunition, so they had to run downstairs and outside the house. Once outside, Workman ran into one of the Marines who had been trapped inside the house. The man was bleeding and stumbling, so Workman dragged him to safety. Afterward, he went back into the house and started firing and tossing grenades at the insurgents. While making his way up the stairs, he heard a “God-awful, blood-curdling scream” from behind him. One of his buddies had been hit in the arm with an armor-piercing AK-47 round. “His arm was damn near gone. I mean, it completely blew his tricep out, so he has no — he’s trying to fire his rifle with one arm, and he’s not quitting.” Workman and the other Marines got the wounded Marine outside, where the man demanded to go back into the house. “I just remember, his exact words were, “Give me a [expletive] pistol!” Workman said. “He kept saying, ‘Give me a [expletive] pistol!’ This guy wanted — damn near on his death bed from loss of blood and everything else — he wanted to go back into this house with a pistol so he could keep fighting.” He grabbed about seven magazines and ran back into the house. Once he was inside, two insurgents ran at him and another Marine. Workman kept hitting the bad guys, but they didn’t fall down, so he slung his M-16 and opened up with an AK-47 he had on him. Finally, the two insurgents fell down, but then insurgents tossed another grenade at the Marines. It blew up and knocked him down. Workman tried standing up against a wall, but he ended up sliding down against it and throwing up. “I thought that was death, when in fact I was just so dehydrated and so overwhelmed with everything that I just, was like, passed out,” he said. Eventually, a major dragged Workman out of the home by his helmet. Outside, he learned that all of the Marines were now accounted for. Three were dead. Now the Marines sat quietly, some smoking, as they waited for the airstrike that had been called in to level the block. His platoon commander was crying. “I don’t know if he felt like he had failed because we had lost guys or what, but when I saw that, I started crying,” Workman said. Now a sergeant, Workman is credited for killing more than 20 insurgents that day, but he is unsure how officials arrived at that number. About two years later, Workman learned he would receive the Navy Cross for his actions that day in Fallujah. “I think I almost instantly teared up, because it brought back everything, and all I could think about was the guys we lost.” ..........................................................................................30....................................................................... By Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 4, 2007; D01 Despite heavy resistance from enemy automatic weapon fire and a barrage of grenades, Corporal Workman fearlessly. . . Jeremiah Workman stood at attention and tried to listen as the narrator read the citation that detailed what he'd done to earn the Navy Cross, an award for valor that is second only to the Medal of Honor. . . . Corporal Workman again exposed himself to enemy fire while providing cover fire for the team when an enemy grenade exploded directly in front of him, causing shrapnel wounds to his arms and legs . . . He was standing on the parade ground, facing a grandstand packed with hundreds of people, including his wife and his mother. Behind him were several hundred Marine recruits who were about to graduate from boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., where Workman had recently lost his job as a drill instructor after he suffered what he calls a "mental meltdown." . . . Although injured, he led a third assault into the building, rallying his team one last time to extract isolated Marines . . . When the narrator finished reading the story of Workman's "extraordinary heroism" in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Richard T. Tryon pinned the Navy Cross to Workman's chest and the crowd in the grandstand stood and cheered. It was a moment of well-deserved triumph, but it didn't make Workman feel any better. "When they put that medal on me, from that point on, I sunk deeper into depression," he recalls. "Everybody says it must be awesome to win the Navy Cross. Well, as a matter of fact, it's not. I lost three guys that day, so for the longest time, I didn't even want to wear it. I'd look down at it and see three dead Marines." Workman, 23, is sitting in a restaurant at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, where he now works, his Navy Cross ribbon pinned to his uniform, just above his heart. "If we lost three people, why did I get an award?" he says softly. "The last thing I think is that I'm a hero." "I enlisted two days after my 17th birthday," Workman says. "I was a junior in high school. A year later, when I graduated, they shipped me to Parris Island." He grew up in Marion, Ohio, son of a factory worker and a housewife. A jock in high school, he wanted to be an Ohio state trooper, but you have to be 21, so he figured he'd join the Marine Corps first. "In my eyes, the Marine Corps was the elite, the tip of the spear," Workman says. "I walked into the recruiter's office and said, 'I want to be a Marine.' I was probably the easiest person they ever talked to." After boot camp he spent two boring years guarding nuclear submarines at a base in Georgia. In August 2003, he married his high school sweetheart, Jessica Jordan. In September 2004, he was sent to Iraq and stationed at a base outside Fallujah, the insurgent-controlled city where four American contractors had been killed in the spring, their corpses burned, dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge. "Fallujah -- that was no man's land," he recalls. "When we drove past, you didn't even look because you knew it was a bad place." In November 2004, Workman's platoon, part of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, got its orders: It would join the thousands of soldiers and Marines attacking Fallujah -- Operation Phantom Fury, the largest American military action since the invasion of Iraq. First, warplanes pounded the city with bombs. Then, in a driving rain, the Marines moved in. Workman was a squad leader in a mortar platoon. For 17 days, they hunkered down in the mud in the northwest corner of Fallujah, firing at insurgent positions. "We killed a lot of people with those mortar rounds," he says, "but it's not personal. You don't see the guys' eyes." By mid-December, the Marines had conquered most of Fallujah and there wasn't much need for mortar fire anymore, so Workman's platoon was split in two and sent out to patrol the city, searching houses, looking for weapons. On Dec. 22, the other half of the platoon got into a nasty firefight. "Some Marines were wounded pretty badly, and they're all charred. It looks like they've been in a fire," Workman recalls. "They come back and we're like, 'Holy cow!' So it's our turn to go out the next morning and we're kinda nervous. That night we're all still up at 2 o'clock in the morning, scrubbing our weapons, making sure they're perfect. We all had this gut feeling that the next day, we're gonna get in some sort of fight." Ambush in Fallujah "It starts out like any other normal day," Workman says. Workman commanded one team of 10 Marines; his friend, Sgt. Jarrett Kraft, commanded another. "I take my guys on the right side of the street. Kraft takes his guys on the left side of the street," he recalls. "We search the first two houses -- same old crap, we found some guns and ammo and carried it out to the street and threw it in the Humvee." Searching the third house, Workman heard a blast of machine-gun fire from the house across the street, where Kraft and his men ran into a group of heavily armed insurgents. "We were pretty much ambushed by a lot of insurgents on the second floor of the house," recalls Kraft, who is now a police officer in Fresno, Calif. He also was awarded a Navy Cross for his actions that day. "I was scared," Workman says, laughing. "I really was. . . . When you get caught in a situation like that, it's a real man check. For two seconds, you have to look in that invisible mirror that's not there and look at yourself and question yourself as a man. And say, 'Okay, I'm a corporal in the Marine Corps and I have guys that are looking up to me for leadership. What am I going to do?' . . . So I grabbed everybody in the house and we come running." Gun smoke rose from the windows of the house across the street. Workman ordered several men to guard the outside and then led the rest inside, where a lieutenant informed them that Marines were trapped on the second floor. "The lieutenant looks at me and says, 'We gotta get in there.' I said, 'Okay, I'll follow you.' " He laughs. They then formed a line called a "stack" at the foot of the stairway. "The lieutenant gets out of the way. Now, I'm the front man. I don't want to be." He laughs again. "In the citation, it says that Workman went in first every time. I'll be honest: It wasn't planned that way. . . . The lieutenant says, 'On three we're gonna go.' One, two, three. Bam! He kicks me and I go running up the stairs." As he ran, machine-gun bullets buzzed past him, but he made it to the safety of the landing, protected from insurgent fire by a thick wall. But he was alone. Nobody had followed him. "I remember him going up the staircase," says Kraft, who had managed to escape from the second floor after the ambush. There was a lot of confusion and the second guy in the stack sort of hesitated and that kept the rest of the stack back." "So these guys are downstairs yelling at me, 'Get back down here.' And I'm like, 'You get up here.' I'm cussing at 'em," Workman says, smiling. "But it was a lieutenant, so I pretty much have to go down. I closed my eyes and did a Superman dive down the stairs." The fall knocked the wind out of him. His buddies stood him back up. They formed another stack with Workman again in front. He took off. This time, everybody followed and they reached the landing safely. They crept up another set of stairs toward the second floor. Workman had almost reached the top when a yellow grenade bounced into view. "This thing went off and it felt like somebody hit me in the leg with a baseball bat," he says. "I look back and guys were laying down, knocked over. And I go, 'Is everybody good?' . . . Pretty much everybody got hit with shrapnel but we were all able to fight." They climbed the stairs and fired at the insurgents, who were barricaded in a bedroom. After an intense firefight, the Marines ran low on ammunition and retreated outside to reload. By then, two of the Marines they'd come to rescue were dead. Two other Marines dropped their bodies off a porch, then jumped down after them. "One of the Marines comes stumbling out of this yard next to the house," Workman says. "He's covered with blood. He looked like a zombie. And he just falls over. I run up and grab him." "Workman grabbed him and dragged him down the street while the insurgents were firing down at us from the rooftop," Kraft recalls. Workman carried the wounded Marine to a couple of Humvees, where a medical corpsman began working on him. Workman saw two other Marines sprawled in the back of a Humvee: Cpl. Raleigh Smith and Lance Cpl. Eric Hillenburg. "Hey, doc!" he yelled. "Get up here!" "They're all right," yelled the corpsman, who was treating the Marine that Workman had dragged to safety. "I'm yelling, 'Doc, get your ass up here!' And he's yelling, 'They're all right, dammit, leave 'em be.' And I'm like, 'Get up here!' And he says, 'They're dead, man, they're dead.' " Workman jumped out of the Humvee. "This was the first time I'd ever seen a dead Marine, ever," he says. "It was like somebody flipped a switch, like it wasn't even me anymore. . . . I grabbed whoever's standing around and we ran back into the house. Now it's like vengeance. I want to take as many insurgents out as possible." The house was dark, the air heavy with smoke. Workman led another charge up the stairs and ran into another grenade. "It knocked most of us down," he says. "At this point, none of us wants to get up. We're like, 'We're gonna die here.' My buddy, he gets up and fights and I hear this horrendous scream. They hit him with an AK47 and it literally tore the whole triceps off his arm." Workman pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it into the bedroom where the insurgents were barricaded, and then the Marines tumbled back downstairs. "I collapse at the bottom of the stairs," he says. "I'm, like, done. And Major [Todd] Desgrosseilliers grabbed me by the helmet and dragged me out of the house." All the Marines were out of the building and an M1A1 tank had arrived. It blasted the house to rubble. At least 24 insurgents were killed in the battle. The Marines lost three men -- Smith, Hillenburg and Lance Cpl. James R. Phillips. "We went back to the makeshift morgue at Camp Fallujah," Workman says, "and we unloaded the bodies." A Recurring Nightmare He's been talking for over a hour, sitting in the museum at a table in Tun's Tavern -- named for the place the Marine Corps was founded. He started out with laughs but now he's serious, his green eyes sad and tired. "The next morning I felt like I'd been in a car accident," he says. Corpsmen had pulled some shrapnel out of him, some still remains. "Everybody was pretty much wounded. And three guys were dead. . . . Eric and James lived in the same bedroom. I went into that room and there are two empty racks. Seeing the empty cots, that's when it sank in. . . . When somebody dies, you gotta get all their belongings and take it back to base camp. You're going through the pockets in their cammies, finding pictures of their girlfriend, their mom and dad." After a few days of rest, Workman's platoon was back out, patrolling roads and manning checkpoints outside Fallujah. They remained there until April 2005. Workman didn't see much action, but he kept busy enough that he didn't think too much about the day his buddies died. He was promoted to sergeant and he reenlisted, requesting to become a drill instructor after his return. That spring, his platoon was back at Camp Pendleton in California. "That's when the world came crashing down," he says. "That's when you have time to think about what really happened, that they're really gone." Jessica, his wife, was back in Ohio, attending Nationwide Beauty Academy, studying to become a hairstylist. He was in California, partying every night. "It's easy to self-medicate with alcohol," he says. "With Marines, you're not gonna get off the plane and say, 'I need help from a psychiatrist.' We adapt by getting drunk every night." When he arrived at drill instructor school at Parris Island that September, he stopped drinking, he says. That's when the nightmares began: "I would dream this: a staircase, never ending. And I'm running back and forth, being chased by insurgents, and they're throwing grenades at me. And I run and I run and I run until I finally get tired and I can't go on and they catch me and they kill me. Then I'd wake up and I'd be crying and I'd have mental pictures of my guys laying in the back of that truck." He avoided the nightmare by avoiding sleep. All day he worked as a drill instructor, all night he paced and brooded about Iraq. "Physically, I was a drill instructor," he says. "Mentally, I was somewhere else." One day in the spring of 2006, he marched his recruits into the mess hall and then froze, staring into space. "I didn't see the recruits, I didn't see anything," he recalls. "People are saying, 'Hey, what's going on?' I said, 'I don't give a [bleep] about you, I don't give a [bleep] about the recruits.' . . . I went downhill from there and they sent me to mental health." Suddenly a Hero The doctors concluded that Workman was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They prescribed some pills and sent him home for 10 days. "They wanted to get me home to be with my family to mellow out," he says. Back in Ohio, he stayed with Jessica at her parents' house. Late one night, he got out of bed and wandered into the garage. "He was out there for a while and I thought, 'What's he doing out there?' '' Jessica remembers. "I went out there and he had my dad's rifle, and I asked him what he was doing and he said, 'I don't know why I'm here.' " She took him inside and later that night saw him swallowing a handful of pills. "I had to literally stick my hands in his mouth and make him vomit," she recalls. "Obviously, I probably wanted to hurt myself," Workman says. "But I don't remember much about it." When he returned to Parris Island, he was no longer a drill instructor. Instead, he was assigned to do odd jobs, "basically like a janitor," he says. And then he won the Navy Cross. Suddenly, he was a hero. Reporters interviewed him. Generals posed for pictures with him. He met Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Ross Perot, Hillary Clinton and various other bigwigs. His home town declared Jeremiah Workman Day. Strangers begged to buy him a drink. "Everybody else was more excited than I was," he says. "I was just slipping further into depression because I was reliving everything now. Everybody wants you to tell the story: How did you do it? How many people did you kill? I'm like, why don't you ask me to tell stories about my guys?" His guys, Smith, Phillips and Hillenburg, haunted him. He saw them in his dreams. He saw them when he looked at his Navy Cross. They got killed and he got a medal. Did that make any sense? That summer, he had their names tattooed on his back. "This," he says, "is what I have to put in my mind to be able to wear this medal and not be ashamed: I accepted this medal for three guys who didn't make it back. So it's really theirs." In the fall, Workman was transferred to Quantico and stationed at the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. He walks around in his uniform, talking to tourists, sometimes posing for pictures with the ones who recognize the importance of the Navy Cross ribbon on his chest. "I'm an ambassador for the Marine Corps, I guess," he says with a laugh. Jessica found work as a hairstylist at a nearby spa. On February 21, she gave birth to their first child, a son, Devon. Months ago, Workman stopped taking his medicines. "I don't want to be a pill popper," he says. "But I pay for it. I have more bad days than I probably would if I was on the medication." "I'd rather that he was still on the medications," says Jessica. "His mood swings are so much worse. He'll be fine one minute and then he's freaking out. With PTSD, you never know. It's a roller coaster every day." 'You Don't Have a Choice' When people call you a hero, what do you think? He thinks for a moment. "Hero?" he says. "I almost laugh." And then he does laugh. But he quickly gets serious. "Almost any infantry Marine would have done what I did. You don't have a choice. What are you gonna do? Not do it? And live for the rest of your life knowing that you hesitated and didn't act and more people may have died because you didn't do anything?" He risked his life for his fellow Marines and that pleases him. "I did learn a lot about myself that day," he says. "In front of family and friends, you're the big tough Marine but . . . you always question yourself about whether you have what it takes in a situation like that. Not everybody does. I answered my own question that day. I was scared and I didn't want to do it, but I did it. That gives me some pride, I guess." But that was then, he points out, and this is now. "I couldn't tell you if I could do it again," he says. "I would love to believe that every time something like that happened, I would do the same thing, but I don't know." He does know one thing: He wants to go back to Iraq. "I've volunteered. I've told everybody I can. Right now, they want to keep me here. . . . A lot of these high-ranking people think they know what's best for you. And in their minds, what's best for me is staying here and having a normal family life and going home every night. Whereas in my mind and in my heart, I want to get back into the fight." He says: "A lot of my friends have been there three or four times. I think if I got one more tour over there, I'd feel better in the heart. I don't want to go down as a one-hit wonder." .................................................................................30.................................................................... |
