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A Hero Who Didn't Save Himself
At least 24 insurgents were killed in the battle. The Marines lost three men -- Smith, Hillenburg and Lance Cpl. James R. Phillips.
"We went back to the makeshift morgue at Camp Fallujah," Workman says, "and we unloaded the bodies."
A Recurring Nightmare
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A Hero's Troubled Heart Sgt. Jeremiah Workman was awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism while on duty in Fallujah, but he has not yet found closure. |
He's been talking for over a hour, sitting in the museum at a table in Tun's Tavern -- named for the place the Marine Corps was founded. He started out with laughs but now he's serious, his green eyes sad and tired.
"The next morning I felt like I'd been in a car accident," he says. Corpsmen had pulled some shrapnel out of him, some still remains. "Everybody was pretty much wounded. And three guys were dead. . . . Eric and James lived in the same bedroom. I went into that room and there are two empty racks. Seeing the empty cots, that's when it sank in. . . . When somebody dies, you gotta get all their belongings and take it back to base camp. You're going through the pockets in their cammies, finding pictures of their girlfriend, their mom and dad."
After a few days of rest, Workman's platoon was back out, patrolling roads and manning checkpoints outside Fallujah. They remained there until April 2005. Workman didn't see much action, but he kept busy enough that he didn't think too much about the day his buddies died.
He was promoted to sergeant and he reenlisted, requesting to become a drill instructor after his return. That spring, his platoon was back at Camp Pendleton in California.
"That's when the world came crashing down," he says. "That's when you have time to think about what really happened, that they're really gone."
Jessica, his wife, was back in Ohio, attending Nationwide Beauty Academy, studying to become a hairstylist. He was in California, partying every night.
"It's easy to self-medicate with alcohol," he says. "With Marines, you're not gonna get off the plane and say, 'I need help from a psychiatrist.' We adapt by getting drunk every night."
When he arrived at drill instructor school at Parris Island that September, he stopped drinking, he says. That's when the nightmares began:
"I would dream this: a staircase, never ending. And I'm running back and forth, being chased by insurgents, and they're throwing grenades at me. And I run and I run and I run until I finally get tired and I can't go on and they catch me and they kill me. Then I'd wake up and I'd be crying and I'd have mental pictures of my guys laying in the back of that truck."
He avoided the nightmare by avoiding sleep. All day he worked as a drill instructor, all night he paced and brooded about Iraq.
"Physically, I was a drill instructor," he says. "Mentally, I was somewhere else."
One day in the spring of 2006, he marched his recruits into the mess hall and then froze, staring into space.
"I didn't see the recruits, I didn't see anything," he recalls. "People are saying, 'Hey, what's going on?' I said, 'I don't give a [bleep] about you, I don't give a [bleep] about the recruits.' . . . I went downhill from there and they sent me to mental health."
Suddenly a Hero
The doctors concluded that Workman was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They prescribed some pills and sent him home for 10 days.
"They wanted to get me home to be with my family to mellow out," he says.
Back in Ohio, he stayed with Jessica at her parents' house. Late one night, he got out of bed and wandered into the garage.
"He was out there for a while and I thought, 'What's he doing out there?' '' Jessica remembers. "I went out there and he had my dad's rifle, and I asked him what he was doing and he said, 'I don't know why I'm here.' "
She took him inside and later that night saw him swallowing a handful of pills. "I had to literally stick my hands in his mouth and make him vomit," she recalls.
"Obviously, I probably wanted to hurt myself," Workman says. "But I don't remember much about it."
When he returned to Parris Island, he was no longer a drill instructor. Instead, he was assigned to do odd jobs, "basically like a janitor," he says.
And then he won the Navy Cross.
Suddenly, he was a hero. Reporters interviewed him. Generals posed for pictures with him. He met Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Ross Perot, Hillary Clinton and various other bigwigs. His home town declared Jeremiah Workman Day. Strangers begged to buy him a drink.
"Everybody else was more excited than I was," he says. "I was just slipping further into depression because I was reliving everything now. Everybody wants you to tell the story: How did you do it? How many people did you kill? I'm like, why don't you ask me to tell stories about my guys?"
His guys, Smith, Phillips and Hillenburg, haunted him. He saw them in his dreams. He saw them when he looked at his Navy Cross. They got killed and he got a medal. Did that make any sense? That summer, he had their names tattooed on his back.
"This," he says, "is what I have to put in my mind to be able to wear this medal and not be ashamed: I accepted this medal for three guys who didn't make it back. So it's really theirs."
In the fall, Workman was transferred to Quantico and stationed at the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. He walks around in his uniform, talking to tourists, sometimes posing for pictures with the ones who recognize the importance of the Navy Cross ribbon on his chest.
"I'm an ambassador for the Marine Corps, I guess," he says with a laugh.
Jessica found work as a hairstylist at a nearby spa. On February 21, she gave birth to their first child, a son, Devon.
Months ago, Workman stopped taking his medicines. "I don't want to be a pill popper," he says. "But I pay for it. I have more bad days than I probably would if I was on the medication."
"I'd rather that he was still on the medications," says Jessica. "His mood swings are so much worse. He'll be fine one minute and then he's freaking out. With PTSD, you never know. It's a roller coaster every day."
'You Don't Have a Choice'
When people call you a hero, what do you think?
He thinks for a moment. "Hero?" he says. "I almost laugh."
And then he does laugh. But he quickly gets serious. "Almost any infantry Marine would have done what I did. You don't have a choice. What are you gonna do? Not do it? And live for the rest of your life knowing that you hesitated and didn't act and more people may have died because you didn't do anything?"
He risked his life for his fellow Marines and that pleases him. "I did learn a lot about myself that day," he says. "In front of family and friends, you're the big tough Marine but . . . you always question yourself about whether you have what it takes in a situation like that. Not everybody does. I answered my own question that day. I was scared and I didn't want to do it, but I did it. That gives me some pride, I guess."
But that was then, he points out, and this is now. "I couldn't tell you if I could do it again," he says. "I would love to believe that every time something like that happened, I would do the same thing, but I don't know."
He does know one thing: He wants to go back to Iraq.
"I've volunteered. I've told everybody I can. Right now, they want to keep me here. . . . A lot of these high-ranking people think they know what's best for you. And in their minds, what's best for me is staying here and having a normal family life and going home every night. Whereas in my mind and in my heart, I want to get back into the fight."
He says: "A lot of my friends have been there three or four times. I think if I got one more tour over there, I'd feel better in the heart. I don't want to go down as a one-hit wonder."
