Title: we need more men like this in america
Category: full of life
Blog Entry: In
the chaotic, intense house-to-house gun battles with insurgent fighters during
the 2004 Battle of Fallujah, the point man of Lima Company’s 1st Platoon
barreled his way through gunfire and exploding grenades.
Then-Pvt. Sean Stokes, with his wide grin
and sparkling eyes, seemed to relish the role he readily assumed as his unit,
3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, pressed through the city’s notorious Jolan
District, which was teeming with al-Qaida fighters.
Several times during missions from Nov.
9-11, 2004, Stokes braved enemy fire — “fearless in the face of
danger,” according to the Marine Corps — to kill insurgents and
enable his platoon to gain control of houses.
On Nov. 17, 2004, after a grenade
exploded near him, wounding him, the private managed to continue to use his
weapon so the fire teams could reassemble and launch a counterattack.
For his actions during the intense week
of close-in urban combat, the Marine Corps bestowed on the corporal the Silver
Star, the nation’s third-highest award for combat valor. His family
received the medal and citation yesterday during a ceremony at
Camp Pendleton , Calif . ,
on what would have been Stokes’ 25th birthday.
According to the award citation, Stokes
“fought through Fallujah with the resolve of closing on the enemy, while
protecting the Marines around him at all costs.”
But on July 30, 2007, Stokes, then a
corporal and on his third deployment to
Iraq , paid the ultimate price when
a buried roadside bomb detonated while he was scouring a road as a member of
3/1’s personal security detachment.
The news of Stokes’ death
devastated his family and friends. “We didn’t know he was in
Iraq when he was killed,” said his aunt,
Laura Leupp, of San Diego .
As far as they knew last summer, Stokes
was on the assault ship Bonhomme Richard, the lead ship in an expeditionary
strike group carrying members of 3/1 and the rest of the 13th Marine
Expeditionary Unit. But the MEU had received orders to
Iraq ’s Anbar province.
“To protect his family from worry,
he told them before he left and during his third tour that his ship, the
Bonhomme Richard, was stopping at different ports around the world and was not
going to go to Iraq ,” Leupp said by e-mail. “He had already
been through so much during his first two tours. Sean was supposed to
just see the world by stopping at different ports. So we thought he was
safe during his third and we hoped his last deployment. But not the way
we hoped.”
His former 3/1 platoon commander, Lt.
Jeffrey Sommers, wrote a poignant story online about Stokes’ early days
at the battalion, where he had been reassigned from a sister battalion, 1/1, at
Camp Horno. Stokes had encountered some trouble — a positive
urinalysis pop for smoking pot and deserting the unit — that got him
busted down two ranks to private, Sommers wrote in his Web blog.
“It’s tough being a private
in an infantry deployed unit,” he wrote. But Stokes “took it
all in stride, and his composure in operations on top of all the bull---- of
being a private impressed me; he was a solid, dependable Marine. His work
ethic and attitude prompted us to ask, almost beg, for his promotion.”
But that didn’t happen, he wrote,
and Stokes “would remain a private for the rest of the deployment no
matter what he did or was capable of.”
Then came the battle of Fallujah, where
“nobody worked harder than Pvt. Stokes,” who led point for his
squad, Sommers wrote, retelling the young Marine’s actions. “Time
again, he was the one to get shot at first, he dodged death so many times as
that point man over the course of the battle.”
Even when the grenade wounded him, Stokes
kept firing his weapon at enemy fighters before he was later evacuated, Sommers
wrote.
Stokes’ actions in that battle
weren’t forgotten when the dust settled. “We returned home,
and the mantra of not being able to promote a drug pop Marine carried into the
awards process,” Sommers wrote. “[He] was never awarded for
his actions.”
During the subsequent deployment, though,
Stokes was promoted to corporal, and he eventually deployed again.
But on his third
Iraq deployment, he met death in
the IED blast. “Stokes was walking point, again, he always led from
the front,” noted Sommers
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