“Thank you for your son”

Posted by lex, on December 5, 2006

Fallujah in June. A “routine” patrol, or at least it was until the IED went off just in front of the HMMWV. A Navy corpsman attached to a Marine rifle company bundles out with his brothers in arms and heads out on a foot race in search of the triggerman. They reach a door, go inside and find…

A frantic mother and a sick baby:

When Walsh and the Marines came to one doorway, M-4 rifles up and ready, a woman emerged from a room, holding an infant and saying, over and over again, “Baby. Baby sick.”

Walsh put his gun down and the woman put the baby down.

Walsh had seen bad things – as an EMT back home in St. Louis, and at war. But he told his comrades he had never seen anything like this: The child, just a few months old, looked as though her insides had been turned inside out.

Her name was Mariam, and she looked up at Walsh with dead eyes.

They stop hunting for the triggerman. They start helping the baby. They come back in secret night after night, doing what they can for her. They work on ways to get her back to the US for medical treatment. It isn’t easy, they’re grunt infantry and a Navy corpsman, and there’s a lot of red tape.

She’s last in a queue of 5000 Iraqis trying to leave the country for medical care. She’ll have to wait. The war goes on. There’s another IED. Corpsman Walsh and two Marines don’t walk away from that one. They get zipped up. They get flown home. Their families get “the thanks of a grateful nation.”

With their seven-month rotation about to end, and 11 members of their battalion dead and 83 wounded, the Marines decided there was only one way to honor their dead brothers and that was to make sure the baby was saved.

Read on to find what happened next. Read to the end if you can.

Read it all.

09-16-20 – If the linked save the Wayback Machine created from the San Diego Union-Tribune is not available, click here to read the rest of the story – Ed.

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