First Person: Remembering Fallujah

As we near the 10-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, Yahoo News asked U.S. servicemen and women who served to share their perspectives and discuss how it changed them. Here's one story.

FIRST PERSON | Fallujah was our Gettysburg, our Waterloo. It was the high-water mark in the flood of our war.

Until then, our enemy was elusive and small, but there the enemy was waiting for us. The details and circumstances leading up to the November Battle of Fallujah are for historians to chronicle. I was a U.S. Marine corporal. My job was to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy. In Fallujah, that is exactly what we did.

We attacked Fallujah in the rainy dawn light of Nov. 11, 2004, on Veterans Day. When I try to remember the details of the fighting, it is as if I am remembering a dream. It was real, but it was so surreal that I have a hard time believing it was. One of my best friends was killed a few hundred meters from me. That changed me forever. From that point on, whenever we went on patrol, I was the man up front. I was always pointman, the position where you are most likely to be killed. I couldn't stand the thought of another friend of mine getting killed. I would do anything to keep that from happening.

Fallujah ended, and we went home. A few months later, I was sitting in English 101, a 22-year-old freshman. I did not succeed at college.

During those years, I had to face the demons of my own memory; I can only remember being afraid in Iraq once, but I cannot count the numbers of nightmares I have had since then. Time does heal all. I, like most veterans, quietly returned to civilian life and slowly recovered from the psychological wounds we all face. I will never forget when we were called to be this nations warriors; we answered, and we were lions.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/first-person-remembering-fallujah-213700983.html

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