Wednesday, August 31, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Saved Rounds
Editor’s note. This story
is about Marines. And a quil-
ter. Therefore, it contains a
touch of salty language.
One of my companions
for the evening was U.S.
Marine Gunnery Sergeant
Robert Gallup.
Gallup, 32, was wounded
in the second battle of
Fallujah in 2004, scene of the
bloodiest fighting in the Iraq
War, where 82 Americans
were killed, and some 600
wounded. We were at a beer
garden on the garrison at
Hohenfels, where Marines,
Georgians, and Hungarians
were celebrating comple-
tion of their final exercise,
drinking beer, taking selfies,
eating schnitzel, and cutting
loose after six months of
non-stop training.
On his day in Fallujah,
GySgt Gallup — then a
Corporal — was one of 36
Marines stacked inside of an
Amphibious Assault Vehicle.
An AAV weighs 29 tons. It
was never designed for urban
fighting, and on its best day
usually carries less than half
that number of Marines. In
perfect conditions, it is a
miserable place.
“We were standing on
each other’s shoulders,”
Gallup said. “It was hard to
breathe.”
His close friend Brian
was sitting next to him.
Gallup recalls the track stop-
ping suddenly, and word
passing that they were going
to drop the ramp. They were
already in the fight, Gallup
said, could hear the guns
outside. Gallup looked at
Brian and asked if he was
ready. Brian was.
And then the world
exploded. Gallup suspects
it was an RPG, though 12
years later he still isn’t sure.
“It just went black,” he
said.
Gallup’s finger had
been severed. He still had
it though, because he was
wearing gloves. It was only
later, when he tried to grab
his rifle and get out of the
track, that he began to think
something was wrong.
“It was actually pretty
quiet inside,” Gallup told
me. “Nobody was yelling for
their mothers or any of that
movie stuff.”
Inside the track, Marines
were entangled in an impos-
sible knot of weapons, gear,
bodies, smoke, and darkness.
And somewhere in all of
that quiet confusion Gallup
heard Brian calmly ask-
ing, “Has anybody seen my
arm?”
Gallup was evacuated
to Landstuhl, Germany. He
arrived still wearing his
bloody uniform, though they
had taken his blouse some-
where along the way. He
remembers it was freezing
outside, and as they got on a
bus someone handed each of
them a quilt, handmade, and
donated for the purpose.
A month later Gallup was
back home in Georgia, con-
valescing, and taking care
of his mother, who had been
diagnosed with ALS. One
afternoon Gallup took up
his quilt and saw again the
phone number sewn into it
by the maker. He decided
to call, to say thank you, to
share the quilt’s story and
maybe some of his own, so
that whoever had crafted it
would know that it actually
had made a difference in
someone’s life.
The phone rang too many
times and Gallup was about
to hang up when an elderly
man finally answered. The
man listened quietly and
said he’d been following
the news, watching the bat-
tle unfold on television. He
asked Gallup about himself,
how Marines could fight in
all that gear and equipment,
about the heat, about Iraq,
about the Marine Corps.
Gallup kept expecting
the man to hand the phone
off to his wife. And then the
old gentleman said, shyly,
almost demurely, “I hope
you don’t think I’m a pussy
for making quilts. I was at
Iwo Jima.”
There, in the reverie of
the beer garden, it got a little
dusty for the Gunny and me.
But we pulled it together.
Gunny lit a cigarette. He
took a long drag.
“When he told me that,”
Gallup said, holding his
palm out over the ground at
about the height of a three-
year-old, the scars on his
hand pronounced and almost
glowing in the fluorescent
light, “I felt about this big.”
And so it circles back,
that brotherhood, the rever-
ence and respect that reaches
through veterans from dif-
ferent ages and binds them
21
together against time. There
would be other meetings,
Gallup told me, in the next
few years, with veterans
of the Chosin Reservoir in
Korea, Hue City in Vietnam,
and he’s felt the same way
every time.
What’s true enough is that
Gunnery Sergeant Gallup
has earned his rightful place
among those who sacrificed
for each other in hallowed
fights, though he doesn’t feel
like it, and has a very hard
time seeing himself in their
company.
I asked him if he was
staying in the Corps for the
long haul, and he laughed.
We were at the back of the
beer garden, in the corner,
the organ grind of continu-
ous training melting away by
the pint. Gunny was watch-
ing closely. Marines were
starting to break things and
it was getting louder.
“What else am I going
to do?” he said. “This is my
life, and I love these guys.”
Gunnery Sergeant Gallup
and his team of U.S. Marines
will deploy in October to
Afghanistan, with the 32nd
Georgian Light Infantry
Battalion, for the Resolute
Support Mission ordered by
the President of the United
States.
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