troops in the second battle of Fallujah, less than 100 were killed. Injured and waiting back at Camp Pendleton, California, Chapman would scour the lists to see if he knew any names of Marines that had been injured or killed in the battle. Ryan Chapman, a TOW-gunner, was shot in the head on the second day of the battle, and survived. I hung out with you for four hours yesterday.” “Hey man, what’s going on.” Chapman remembers asking as he embraced his friend Josh when he arrived for a visit.Īfter a funny glance, he asked: “I’ve seen you since I’ve been back, haven’t I?” It was during that Thanksgiving visit that the Marine started realizing something else had permanently changed, his memory. He had a few angry words with his parents. The wake-up call was meant as sweet nostalgia, a reminder of days when Chapman had lived at home and his father would wake him up for school by turning on the lights or flipping the whole mattress to wake him up.īut now, the bang jolted the Marine, who had just returned from Iraq a few weeks before. This Thanksgiving visit, Chapman had been woken up by his father banging on the wall. “Oh, it will.”Ĭhapman’s family hadn’t been thrilled he joined the Marine Corps, but now they were just thankful he was alive. It was “the tone of voice,” he recalled. “It doesn’t even hurt,” the Marine told the corpsman. It was the moment after a corpsman yanked open his eye, and Chapman realized he could still see, that he will remember forever. He remembers reaching up to feel goggles, wax and blood. “Zig zag, back and forth, and the next thing I know everything went white,” Chapman said. He was in too close of quarters to shoot the TOW missile - the back blast would kill everyone - but he used the sight to search windows and scan the street. “A single shot usually meant sniper.”Ĭhapman didn’t know where the sniper was, so he couldn’t return fire. He remembers someone getting shot before him: An Iraqi National Guardsmen had been hit in the stomach area. The last time he had looked at his watch it was 4:34 p.m. He was shot two days into the battle: Nov. To get to the toilet you had to walk on arm rests and crawl over gear.” The aisles of the airplane were pretty packed. “We packed in - a bunch of gear with you. The Marines had flown over to Kuwait on a commercial flight. Erick Dickey, were D9 operators attached to 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. Thaddeus Dymczenski along with Lance Cpl. I knew we were going to be going to Iraq.”Ĭpl. “I was as mentally prepared as I could be,” Chapman said. contractors were dragged from their vehicles through the streets of Fallujah and eventually hung over a bridge. The 24-year-old, who had joined the Corps after trying college and had celebrated his 21st birthday in boot camp, remembers the news from the first battle of Fallujah. He had gone on the deployment knowing it could get bad. He had the best seat in the house, he said, “and the only form of air-conditioning you can get.” Yet, Chapman had been shot from about 300-400 meters away by a rifle that should have killed him at twice that distance, he said.Ĭhapman liked sitting on the top of the truck. It wasn’t confirmed, but the alleged blonde-haired, blue-eyed sniper was apparently a Chechen mercenary, likely a paid-for professional fighter among the al-Qaida-led insurgents. The 0352 TOW gunner had been medically evacuated out of Iraq after getting shot above his left eye. Ryan Chapman was on convalescent leave and sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with his immediate family. Nearly 7,000 miles away in Lawrence, Kansas, Lance Cpl. “It was a complete feeling of gratitude, of thankfulness for making it through.” From their safe spot with seven-layers of bulletproof glass, it was often hard to watch the wreckage happening around them.īut that Thanksgiving Day, Berge knew that the Marines had the city under control.
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