A Marine’s Journey to Fallujah and Coming Home (Veterans Day)

And we continue here with our American stories and with our Memorial Day special. Up next, Joey Cortez brings us a story about the Second Battle for Fallujah in Iraq. This went back in November through December of two thousand and four.

Here’s Joey.

Following nine to eleven, U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant William Leonard was deployed to Iraq three times. On his second deployment, before becoming a sergeant, his unit was at the center of Operation Bansom Fury, the Second Battle for Fallujah. This battle lasted roughly a month and a half and resulted in ninety-five American deaths and five hundred and sixty wounded. William was one of the wounded, and several of his friends were killed. Here’s William recounting his experience after entering the city.

I heard some fire coming from a couple of houses over, so I take one of my guys. We go over. I said, “I’m going left, you go right.” I kicked the door open. I went left, he went right. I heard two gunshots behind me. As soon as he went right, I didn’t feel anything, so I faired it was fine, and I knew there was a guy in this little room up to the left, and as I came around the corner, it was like a little, uh, eight-by-eight, little sunken room. I’m coming around the corner. He starts firing, and I start firing, and so I’m just we’re both creeping our way around. You know. Said, “We’re going to finish this one way or another.” And he ends up shooting me in the wrist, and he shoots my gun. I’m craping you. One knocks my gun out of my hand, knocks me to the ground. He blows up the hits the brick on the side of the building. Whenever he shot the brick on the wall, that completely poppered my face, and I was bleeding from my forehead down the side of my neck, and I still have like purple dots in the side of my face from it. And choose me through the wrist, and I’m on the ground, laying on the ground. He throws the grenade out, laying drive beside me. It doesn’t go off. I come back out, and I grabbed my corn and shotgun because my gun was still laying out in front of the little doorway, and so I grabbed his shotgun. Go back up there, toss two or three grenades in there, and come around the corner, finish him off with a shotgun. I come to find out, the guy who went right, there was a guy right behind me. As soon as he went right, he shot him, and he was kind of drawn down on me. So luckily, he went right and got off two shots real quick, so that it could have been a bad day, but turned out to be all right. Just got a little shrap and home. They made it back to me out, and they said, “It’ll, we can’t remove any of the break out of your face. It’ll all work its way out eventually,” so we’ll get me back to my unit. They sent me back to Fallujah, and uh, we continued on clearing houses. We kept moving up, kept back clearing, and one night we were kind of at our, we’re going to settle in for the night, and I think it was an old school, old elementary school. I think that’s what it was. And so there was still a patrol out, and we hear gunfire, and whenever marit’s here a bunch of gunfire, they’d run towards it. So I grabbed my team, we took off, took off running towards the towards the gunfire. Finally found it in a kind of a row of houses, but the south side of it was just a field. It is like a soccer field, so it was all open, and so we called in our CAT team, where they had all the all the big guns, their Mark Nineteens or fifty cows and everything on top of their vehicles. They lined up in front of them, and they were kind of softening the houses that none of our guys were in, and we would kind of coordinate with them, go in and clear. And as I was headed into, headed into my first house, me and my square leader, I stepped over a guy as I was going in. His name was Melvin Blazer. So, kind of going back to when this all started, Melvin Blazer was my recruiter, and he came to my unit because he knew we were about to deploy, and so he ended up getting killed on that day, December twelfth, two thousand and four, in Fallujah, and I remember stepping over him going into this house to go upstairs. It never, it didn’t really sink in with me until later on that day, just kind of came, I guess, full circle for me, you know, that’s where I started, and that’s where it kind of ended for him. We went through, got to the front door. I went left, he went right. We cleared down, got to the stairwell, kind of getting ready to go upstairs. We were hollering at guys to come help us. We finally got guys coming in, and we started up the stairs. Sergeant Jason Ariano, he was my square leader. He led us up the stairs. As we got to the top of the stairs, a grenade came rolling out in front of us, and it blew, I want to save, about three foot in front of him, just right between his legs, blew him up bleue. I was right behind him, caught my legs with the sharp knol as well, and we had a stack of people up the stairs, and blew us, literally blew us all the way back down the stairs. We got to the bottom, he’s on top of me, and I kind of squirmed out from underneath. You know, there’s blood everywhere. He just tore up tremendously, and uh, you know, you got all the all the bad things running through your mind. It’s just a terrible place where he got hit just right there in his thighs, and you don’t know how bad it is. And get him, get him down to the bottom of the stairs, and you know, he’s looking at him, and we’re, you know, we’re real tight, and he was like, “You know, we got his, got his pants down, trying to figure out what we needed to do.” And uh, he said, “Is it? Is it gone?” Said, “Yeah, man, it is.” And uh, he started to tear up, and I was like, “Man, I’m just joking. Not everything’s still there. He should be good.” So he kind of had like a laugh-cry going on there almost for a minute, until I told him it was all good and carried him out to the track and got him loaded up. Now, that was the last time I seen him for a long time. Turned around, went back in, and another, pulled another one of our reins out. Lario Lopez dragged him out. He was still kind of, kind of goupy breathing, and he couldn’t talk. He was just barely able to breathe, so held him until he passed. So then go try and fight. Another house to go in, and just kind of turned into pulling more bodies out than it was fighting, and so it almost kind of turned into more of a recovery than a firefight. So I just kept kind of finding guys as I was trying to go in and get into the fight, kept finding guys to pull back out. We ended up losing quite a bit of our platoon and quite a few other guys I knew. And by the time I was kind of trying to go back in, they kind of pulled everybody out and back to us all up, and they just started dropping, dropping artillery on it, and decided that would be it. We got everybody out, dropped artillery, kind of went through and let the dust clear. We set up security on it to make sure nobody else got out, none of the bad guys. Anyways, you know, I went back for the night, loaded up all the bodies on the back of a truck, and they hauled them off. We, uh, you know, we kind of hunked her down for the night. Nobody got me to sleep that night.

Here’s William reflecting on the men he lost.

Step starred in Melvin Blazer. He was my Marine recruiter. He’s the one who got me into the Marine Corps. If you were to talk to him away from the recruiting office, away from the Marine Corps, you’d never know he was a marine. He was the absolute nicest guy you’d ever meet in your life. Just this wholesome, genuine, nice guy. Sergeant Kirk, he was our platoon sergeant. Me being the tall guy that I am, he was about a foot shorter than me, but he had this voice. He was a little guy, too. He wasn’t very big, but he just had this demanding voice and kind of this aura about him that he knew what he was doing. He was confident in everything he did for whatever reason. He, he was just one of those guys. He was a great leader, and he was a leader of Marines. Lario Lopez, he came into the Marine Corps with me. You know, I still keep in touch with his family. Just such a good dude. He was super young, I mean, compared to me, I went in old. I think he went in at seventeen or eighteen, had his whole life ahead of him. He was just, you know, he was going hard and wrong place at the wrong time. Jason Clara Day, he was in our platoon also. He was just a country boy from Arkansas, you know, a hell of a shot. We would be able to talk about hunting and fishing because we both kind of grew up in that type of area of him growing up in Arkansas. He had this Southern drawl about him, and he was just, just nice as could be. I named one of my last horses after him. You know, it’s they leave a lasting impression on you. You know that the guys who strive to make sure that you live so that their memory isn’t lost. And great work is always by Joey and a special thanks to William. Memorial Day special here on Our American Stories.