names of casualities in operation phantom fury

#Names of casualities in operation phantom fury series
#Names of casualities in operation phantom fury simulator

This story is dedicated to them: the U.S. These young warriors had given more to their country in a matter of days than most Americans will give in a lifetime-and many of them wanted nothing more than to heal quickly and rejoin their units. In many cases, high-ranking Marine officers would meet the aircraft to honor their wounded and help carry them off the plane. To this day, my buddies speak reverently about the grit and courage of those men. Some of the patients were Marines wounded in Fallujah. As Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda released recuperating troops, my squadron mates would fly them to their home bases. The stateside missions involved staging our C-130 transports at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C. My unit, the 167th Airlift Wing, continued to support the war effort with missions in Iraq and the U.S. He had seen more than his share of combat, and he’d had enough. During a break in the sim training, he told me he needed only two more years of Reserve duty to qualify for retirement pay.

#Names of casualities in operation phantom fury simulator

One night, while training to regain currency in the airline’s jets, I shared a simulator cockpit with a pilot who had served eighteen years in the Army. As we swapped stories, I learned that some of them-especially those who flew helicopters in the Guard or Reserve-had lost friends and suffered deep psychological wounds. At the airline, I found myself reunited with several other pilots who had made it home safely from tours in Iraq. (The hospital’s Trauma Bay II remains on exhibit at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland.)Īt the time of the Fallujah battle, I had recently finished a year and a half of active duty as a flight engineer with my West Virginia Air National Guard unit, and I had returned to my civilian job as an airline pilot. Other scenes taken from actual events include the shot-up amusement park, the air cover from the AC-130 gunship, and the Patriot Detail at the Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad. Real-life events informed the chapter where Blount’s platoon finds a “torture studio,” as well as the scene where Marines discover a mosque used as a weapons cache. Sadly, that includes the descriptions of victims tortured and killed by insurgents. However, many of the details in this story come from firsthand accounts. The Iraqi interpreter described in these pages is not based on any real person, living or dead. Al-Zarqawi escaped capture only to die in a U.S. Historians estimate insurgent deaths at more than a thousand an official tally does not exist. Baathist hardliners and foreign fighters had turned Fallujah into a terrorist stronghold and hideout of insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.Īt a cost of more than fifty American lives, Coalition forces took control of Fallujah by the middle of November. By then, the forces of Saddam Hussein’s regime had collapsed, and the conflict had entered a phase of insurgency. Marines in some of the most intense urban combat of the Iraq War. The Second Battle of Fallujah, in November 2004, embroiled U.S. In this remarkable novella, riveting in its action, shocking in its candor, we see through his eyes as Blount and his comrades discover that the limits of what men will do, both for good and evil, go beyond anything they ever imagined that the line between friend and enemy is much more complicated than they thought - and that courage and mercy come in the most surprising of forms.

#Names of casualities in operation phantom fury series

Blount teams up with Young’s series heroes Michael Parson and Sophia Gold to fight an extraordinary terrorist in North Africa.īut it was a decade earlier, during Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, that Staff Sergeant Blount really learned what war meant. In Tom Young’s novel Sand and Fire, a six-foot-eight black Marine gunnery sergeant named A.E. Buy the Book: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble