A Hero Who Didn't Save Himself

After boot camp he spent two boring years guarding nuclear submarines at a base in Georgia. In August 2003, he married his high school sweetheart, Jessica Jordan.

In September 2004, he was sent to Iraq and stationed at a base outside Fallujah, the insurgent-controlled city where four American contractors had been killed in the spring, their corpses burned, dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge.

"Fallujah -- that was no man's land," he recalls. "When we drove past, you didn't even look because you knew it was a bad place."

In November 2004, Workman's platoon, part of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, got its orders: It would join the thousands of soldiers and Marines attacking Fallujah -- Operation Phantom Fury, the largest American military action since the invasion of Iraq. First, warplanes pounded the city with bombs. Then, in a driving rain, the Marines moved in.

Workman was a squad leader in a mortar platoon. For 17 days, they hunkered down in the mud in the northwest corner of Fallujah, firing at insurgent positions.

"We killed a lot of people with those mortar rounds," he says, "but it's not personal. You don't see the guys' eyes."

By mid-December, the Marines had conquered most of Fallujah and there wasn't much need for mortar fire anymore, so Workman's platoon was split in two and sent out to patrol the city, searching houses, looking for weapons. On Dec. 22, the other half of the platoon got into a nasty firefight.

"Some Marines were wounded pretty badly, and they're all charred. It looks like they've been in a fire," Workman recalls. "They come back and we're like, 'Holy cow!' So it's our turn to go out the next morning and we're kinda nervous. That night we're all still up at 2 o'clock in the morning, scrubbing our weapons, making sure they're perfect. We all had this gut feeling that the next day, we're gonna get in some sort of fight."

Ambush in Fallujah

"It starts out like any other normal day," Workman says.

Workman commanded one team of 10 Marines; his friend, Sgt. Jarrett Kraft, commanded another.

"I take my guys on the right side of the street. Kraft takes his guys on the left side of the street," he recalls. "We search the first two houses -- same old crap, we found some guns and ammo and carried it out to the street and threw it in the Humvee."

Searching the third house, Workman heard a blast of machine-gun fire from the house across the street, where Kraft and his men ran into a group of heavily armed insurgents.