Veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan proud to serve their country

The Marines didn’t think about it until back at the patrol base, where they could sit around a little table or take turns with a satellite phone that got the newlyweds teased for calling home too much.

That’s when it was OK to get — well, not afraid. But to think that it had been close that time, that they almost died that day.

1st Lt. Tim Fallon remembers getting shot at, ambushed, “just about every day” after he was deployed to Afghanistan in July 2010.

But as the 2nd Battalion 9th Marines platoon leader in North Marjah, one of the most violent areas of the war, Fallon said his training kept him calm. “You can always panic later, in a safer situation,” he says. He called his fiancee once every two weeks, just so his troops could have more time with the phone.

On Nov. 18, the day an improvised explosive device blast blinded Fallon, he shouted that he was all right. He asked his next in command to sweep the area. He told his men to find the Marine who had set off the blast, who would die in the helicopter as Fallon kept asking through chattering teeth if his friend was all right.

At only 24, Fallon is almost completely blind. But that wasn’t his chief concern when he woke up three days later at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“It was a big deal adjusting to the vision loss, and I’m doing a lot better with it than I was last November,” he says. “But the thing that bothered me most is I left my deployment early.”

If the young veterans of America’s most recent wars were bitter on Friday — Veterans Day — it would be difficult to blame them: Depending on the headlines, we’re doing too much and must pull out immediately; or, we’re not supporting our troops enough, not giving their sacrifices a chance to play out.

But whether they lost their legs or their vision or their best friends, many veterans of the 10-year-old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan simply wish they could do more for their country.

There’s Army Spc. Cristopher McCrae, who snapped the femur bone in his leg when a fellow soldier slipped and fell off a cliff. While McCrae’s comrades looked for a path down the mountain, he followed his buddy as directly as possible — by going straight down with him.

A Largo resident, McCrae, 23, joined the Army because he wanted “to grow up to be a hero.”

In Iraq, the sniper remembers, you had to control the fear or it would control you. His platoon had nicknamed the mountain he later fell from “Pride Rock,” after the crag in “The Lion King.” In his squad of 20, nine were severely injured — shot in the neck, blown up — or killed.

“I was upset that I got sent back early — I was worried about the platoon,” says McCrae, now taking classes at Prince George’s Community College.

Army Master Sgt. Jeff Mittman, 41, had been further along in his military career when a bomb was lobbed through his driver’s window, taking his nose, lips, and most of his eyes with it.

He had been in Desert Storm, to Korea, back to Iraq, and to Afghanistan before he returned to Iraq again in 2005.

He says he’s lucky that when he woke up in Walter Reed one month after the bomb blast, his wife could be there. He looked around the ward and saw a lot of kids — 18 , 19, 20 — without legs, their moms at their bedsides.

Sgt. Mittman has no memory of the July 7, 2005, attack. “I miss being a part of the effort,” he says.

The last thing he remembers was a few days earlier, on the Fourth of July. He was sitting on the hood of his car. It was nighttime, and his men were setting off fireworks, celebrating.

[email protected]