Day 87, Walk for Warriors

Take It Back
by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown (Excerpt)

Take it back, take it back, take that thing right out of here.
Right away, far away, take that thing right out of here.

Don't let them take me to where streams are red.
I want to stay here and sleep in my own bed.
Need all your loving, long blonde hair,
Don't let them take me 'cause I'm easily scared.
Take it back, take it back, take that thing right out of here...

I had heard that the walking on Pensicola Beach, Florida would be perfect for my designs. I had to tame the horses a bit though as I awoke at 3:22 AM ready to storm the Bastille. I went step by step through my routine and drew out the coffee brewing and sipping as long as I could. I was like the alcoholic who said, “It’s Happy Hour somewhere.” My happy hour had arrived and so I tidied the campsite, ate my mush, and put on some very clean and comfortable socks for a grinder at the water’s edge.

I drove east on U.S. 98 the entire distance and but for the crossing of four bridges, the trip was fairly straight forward. I pulled into an empty parking lot under the glow of lights that had to really irritate any astronomers in the region. The sun hadn’t dared show herself yet so I waited and listened to music and tinkered with the laptop. One of Pensicola’s finest rolled by very slowly trying to determine whether I meant harm to the fair citizens of this decidedly Navy town. I confidently nodded to the officer who pretended not to be looking at me.

When the light began to illuminate the world I tucked in my shirt tale, threw on my ruck and started west toward the opening of Pensicola Bay. The sand made a crunching sound that fine sand always makes. Usually I felt that crunch under bare feet but this morning I started the walk with shoes on. I stood under the new fishing pier and rejoiced at being there at that moment as a fragmented wave lapped to shore. Without direct light the wave looked blue-black and as it collapsed onto the sand it breathed a sort of sigh.

Shortly after my walk began on the soft sand I realized it was silly to keep the running shoes on. I took them off and tied their laces together to a latch on my ruck. I thought, “Ahhhh, I remember that feeling.” By contrast to the temperature I was accustomed to for weeks, the wet sand and the rising tide cooled me beyond all expectation. There was very little risk and great reward for choosing to visit Pensicola Beach.

The workers had marched by the score to staging tents for miles along the west side of the beach. I saw the oil patties and balls that had gathered over night with the tide. There was also an arrival of chopped up sea lettuce. Whole sections of beach had the lettuce-green algae coming ashore with the advancing tide. I don’t know if this is a seasonal occurrence, a regular occurrence or something strange for the location, but the plant looked very much like what the women of El Rosario harvested at low tide on Punta Baja.

I take it back. My first impression of the Oil Spill cleanup people was all wrong. Those men and women were working like dogs out under a very hot sun this morning and they have been doing that every day for over a month in the Gulf Coast area. There were reddish-orange, and coffee colored oil blobs all along the high tide mark at Pensacola Beach. Tents had been set up for the workers to take mini-breaks from the raking and scooping that they did for hours. But relief must have been short lived and inadequate in the face of that kind of manual labor.

One of the workers turned toward me as he wielded a shovel full of red-brown oil cake into a plastic bag. “How are you doing, sir?”

“I’m doing fine. It looks like you have your hands full.”

“We do that but I think we can handle it.”

“I’ll bet you can,” I said as the man smiled. “So what is this stuff like to work with? It looks kind of like stale angel food cake.”

“We’re getting the hang of it pretty well. Yesterday, every bit of it smelled like motor oil. Today it smelled like chocolate.”

“I’ll bet you’d rather have the chocolate smell.”

“No doubt.”

“Thanks for doing such a good job, man. This is a beautiful beach.”
He kept shoveling and said, “I sure do appreciate that. You have a good day, sir.”

“You too. And drink lots of water!” I warned. The man nodded.

I walked on the beach with maybe ten other tourists who wanted to get an early start on the day at the beach. A mother and her grown daughter gathered pieces of sand dollars that resembled pieces of pottery more than the object of their desire. Ours eyes met and we struck up a conversation. “Isn’t it a shame?” the mother asked me as I swung off my ruck and rested it on the sand.

“It is a shame. What a perfect spot.”

“Oh, it is,” said the daughter. She thumbed her cell phone and said, “Here, you have to see this ketchup bottle in the oil. It’s really a weird shot.”

As the daughter fiddled with the phone the mother asked me, “You look like you’re walking a long way. What are you doing?”

I told her about the Walk for Warriors and Fisher House. “My husband is a veteran,” she said with a look like she just remembered something. “Our best friends have a son who lost a leg in Iraq. Those are the people who brought them to Walter Reed I think. That’s a great thing to support,” she said with increasing enthusiasm.

Her daughter finally found the photo of the bottle and the red oil. “Look, isn’t that a cool picture?”

“Very strange, but cool.” Thanks for sharing that. I need to keep my pace so I thanked them, wished them well and turned up the beach again. About two hours later, as I walked back toward the pier, the mother caught sight of me from the water and yelled and waved, “That’s our man! Hi!” The daughter waved and yelled hello too.

It is one thing to walk on concrete or packed sand and quite another to walk for nearly six hours in soft or sinking sand. This morning was beautiful and full of all of the sensations I had yearned for but it also was a strenuous bit of exercise. My right arch was sore from yesterday’s walk so walking barefoot in the soft sand was very therapeutic. But the amount of energy it took to wade through wet sand added approximately 50% to the effort.

My legs used muscles that were not normally required to walk over compacted earth. At the end, my foot wasn’t sore anymore and my soul was dancing a jig on the white sand so I had no regrets. When the walk wound down I noticed that the population of the beach had grown from ten people to ten thousand. I must have blinked.

If you ask Chief Petty Officer Jeremy K. Torrisi, he would say, “It’s all about the team.” Navy and Marine Corps Corpsmen risk their lives every day in combat. They are always a part of a larger team just as is any Marine or soldier. The risks are shared by all and the results are shared by all. But the actions of individuals make the difference when the bullits fly.


MARSOC Corpsman Receives Silver Star Medal for Heroics in Afghanistan
Date: 03.03.2010 | Story by Cpl. Richard Blumenstein
Posted on Wednesday, March 03, 2010 8:50:13 AM by Recon Dad

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — "You hear your buddies go down ...You close your eyes... You think about everything ... You hear you're the only other corpsman. What would you do?"

Chief Petty Officer Jeremy K. Torrisi, a hospital corpsman with U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Special Operations Command, faced that question, June 26, 2008 in the mountains of Afghanistan during the fiercest firefight of his life. Torrisi saved the lives of four of his comrades and received the Silver Star Medal at the Court House Bay Gymnasium, Jan 21.

So far, one Navy Cross, two Silver Star Medals, and two Bronze Star Medals with combat distinguishing devices have been awarded in the battle's aftermath.

"I'm the one getting recognized today, but everybody knows, I hope, the story that went down that day it wasn't one person, it wasn't two, it wasn't three, it was everybody," Torrisi said during the award ceremony. "Everybody doing their part. We have a lot of guys around today walking, talking, and breathing because of that. I was just part of the well-oiled machine that we were."

The Battle

On June 26, 2008, two Marine Special Operations Teams with 2d Marine Special Operation Battalion, MARSOC, and Afghan national army soldiers set out on a mission to locate a high value target in the mountains of Afghanistan.

After driving across the desert, the teams came to a draw surrounded on each side by mountains. MSOT 1 pushed into the narrow draw with two tactical vehicles and an additional tactical vehicle from MSOT 2. The forward vehicle of the team encountered a cave system with two abandoned cars parked in front.

The team's vehicles spread out inside the draw. The team dismounted from their vehicles and used their standard operating procedures to insure the vehicles were not rigged to explode; they were not, according to Torrisi, who was with MSOT 2.
That's when two "ranging shots" gave way to a hail of gunfire that literally seemed to rain down on the team's position, according to Torrisi.

"I've never heard gunfire like that before," Torrisi said. "It was like four or five guys just depressing on a [M2 50. caliber machine gun] at once."
The bullets shot into the antennas, doors, windows, gun turrets, vehicles, engine blocks, and tires.

"In the first four to five minutes we received roughly four to five casualties," Torrisi said.

Among them was Sgt. Samuel E. Schoenheit, an operator with MARSOC and now a staff sergeant.

Schoenheit and Sgt. Carlos Bolanos, the MSOT 1 communications chief, were in the second vehicle roughly 50 meters away from the forward most vehicle. Both sergeants received Bronze Stars with combat distinguishing devices, for their actions in the firefight.

As the gunfire rained down on their position the sergeants immediately began laying down cover fire in hopes the Marines further on the ground would be able to take cover. Bolanos jumped from the driver seat to man a M240G machine gun and sprayed rounds into the mountainside while Schoenheit fired a barrage of Mark 47 Striker 40 automatic grenade launcher rounds.

"When he's running out of ammo, I'm shooting and when I'm down he's shooting, we're talking guns," Bolanos said.

The Marines received the order to move forward. Bolanos exposed himself to the enemy's line of fire to move closer to the forward vehicle. He jumped out of the vehicle and the two sergeants resumed laying fire into the mountainside.
However, the enemy positions seemed impossible to find, and their fire was deadly accurate.

A single shot tore though Schoenheit's night vision goggles and Kevlar helmet, then split and entered his skull.

"My bell was rung pretty good," Schoenheit said. "At first I blacked out momentarily in the turret and woke up in the truck. In my mind I'm thinking I'm fine, I'm fine, but my ability to speak was shut down."

Bolanos pulled Schoenheit into a safe position in the truck and bandaged his head wound. Another Marine ran back to the vehicle to take up the automatic grenade launcher and was then shot through the hand and shoulder. Bolanos pulled him into the vehicle.

Meanwhile, Gunnery Sgt. John S. Mosser and Maj. Dan Strelkauskas, then a captain and team leader, were dealing with mounting injuries and relentless fire on the ground near the cave system. Mosser was awarded the Navy Cross and Strelkauskas received a Silver Star Medal for their actions that day. Over the radio, Mosser, ordered no one else enter the draw.

"He was basically saying over the radio, 'nobody else comes in. If anybody else comes in you're going to die,'" Torrisi said. Then a bullet ripped through the only other corpsman on the ground, piercing his lungs and other vital organs.

"That's when I heard [the other corpsman] was injured. ... They don't have any other corpsmen in there... You hear your buddies go down ...You close your eyes... You think about everything ... You hear you're the only other corpsman. What would you do?" Torrisi said. Torrisi was in the trunk of a MSOT 2 vehicle that was heading toward the draw to provide additional support. However, Mosser's orders and the rugged terrain halted them. Torrisi jumped out of the vehicle and sprinted 50 meters through the enemy's line of fire to the rearward vehicle. He addressed the Marines' wounds and then sprinted another 50-75 meters to Bolanos' and Schoenheit's vehicle.

"The vehicle was getting pinged like it was cool, because they saw me run up," Torrisi said.

Bullets entered the inside of the vehicle from the turret and windows. Immersed in rapid sniper fire, and unable to provide Schoenheit care, Torrisi did something a little crazy to end the snipers assault on their position.

"I launched a bunch of 203 rounds [grenade rounds fired from an M203 grenade launcher mounted on the underside of a service rifle] up through the turret from my sitting position, probably not the smartest thing, but it stopped the fire," Torrisi said. Torrisi administered aid and then ordered Bolanos to back the vehicle to a safer location. The boulders made navigating though the draw difficult, and slowing down or turning around was impossible, Bolanos said.

"There was no maneuvering forward, just backward. There was just one path in and one path out," Bolanos said.

Torrisi then fireman-carried Schoenheit the rest of the way to the rearward vehicle. Three of the wounded Marines where evacuated by air support.

As the firefight raged on, Torrisi found himself with seven other Marines taking cover tightly along the side of the forwardmost vehicle. Torrisi was shot in the leg while administering aid to the wounded corpsman. He refused aid until the corpsman's wounds were addressed. With the Marines pinned down, Moser exposed himself to enemy fire to gather more accurate grid coordinates on the enemy's position. He then radioed in the grid coordinates and air support dropped a barrage of bombs, distracting the enemy.

Three Marines and Torrisi took the opportunity to carry the wounded corpsman to the cave system. The Marine driving the forward-most vehicle smashed it into one of the abandoned cars to clear a path. The vehicles pulled in, and the Marines loaded their wounded into the vehicles and headed to a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that landed inside the danger zone. The severely wounded were evacuated. The Marines then pulled out of the draw, to a safe location where the rest of the wounded Marines where evacuated.

"It sounds cheesy, but we don't do it for the medals," Bolanos said. "We don't do it for the awards. We do it for each other and to make sure we come back safe and sound."

©2010 John Van Dyke Cote’
All Rights Reserved

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