A Marine infantryman, returning from combat and a second tour in Iraq, usually allots the last night of his military leave to be with friends and family. Unwittingly, I telephoned Lance Corporal Tony Eresman, 22, of Rockaway, N.J., on one such evening.
It was a cool night and raining, and Eresman had been packing his gear for the next morning’s trip back to Camp Lejeune, N.C., home to the 2nd Marine Division. But he agreed to talk, and we arranged a phone interview for later that night. Before I hung up I quickly asked him if he looked forward to returning to duty the next morning.
“Aw, hell no, man,” he said. His response reflected the love-hate affair that many Marines carry on with the Marine Corps.
During the dwindling hours of his leave later that evening, Eresman recalled his combat experiences—namely, the outset of the war, when the first 24 hours of operations involved nonstop combat.
It was March of 2003. “We drove through endless desert,” Eresman said of Task Force Tarawa, the invasion force of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, to which his unit—1st Marines 2nd Battalion (1/2)—was attached. The armored convoy snaked single file for two days across the open land.
“Our amtraks [Amphibious Assault Vehicles or AAVs] rode by these sheep herders—out in the middle of nowhere—who seemed to have no idea of what was about to take place,” he said. The expansive terrain belied the closed-in conditions of combat that awaited them.
While making their final approach into An Nasiriyah, the Marines were told to lock and load their weapons. Their mission was to seize key bridges along the Euphrates River in order to secure an easier, quicker passage to Baghdad for the 1st Marine Division.
“As we were rolling in, I had an amtrak helmet on. Our company XO [executive officer] was riding with us. He was on the radio. I heard him in the earpiece saying, ‘Open up fire, you’re cleared hot.’ I said, ‘Roger that.’”
The ramp on the AAV went down and the Marines descended, immediately pressed by enemy fire.
“My squad leader was trying to direct guys, telling them which way to go,” Eresman said. “I didn’t see anyone going down around me, but when I shot my weapon, I could see a body go down.”
Eresman likened the first few moments of combat to playing a video game. The frenetic actions of war for which he had been trained thrust him forward. But the reality of its deadly consequences lagged behind.
A surreal moment came when he looked off in the distance at an American AAV lifted completely off the ground. An Iraqi rocket-propelled grenade (RPG round) had scored a direct hit, entering the vehicle through its top.
He knew the Marines that were inside the struck vehicle. Four of them were instantly killed. Somehow, four others survived. They required medical treatment, immediately.
In the chaos of war there is no pause button. A Marine’s duty is not only to kill the enemy and avoid death, but also to help and protect his injured buddies, or “brothers” as Eresman calls them.
“Tony has five confirmed kills,” Eresman’s father, Rich Eresman, of Rockaway, N.J., told me recently. “For a 22-year-old kid, that is a difficult thing to reason why. For him, it’s that he’d do anything to protect one of his brothers.”
Eresman ran to the demolished AAV to assist with the evacuation of the wounded Marines.
A fellow Marine, with blood filling both ears, cried out to him, “I can’t hear anything.”
Eresman described the horror scene as a “hot LZ,” meaning that rounds ripped through the air above the Marines while they frantically loaded the bodies of the dead and wounded onto the CH-46 helicopter.
The condition of another Marine friend was worse. Massive shrapnel wounds had left one of his legs dangling, just barely attached to his torso.
“There are flashbacks that come back to him,” the elder Eresman described of his son. “And there are at least three times that I have heard him ask, ‘Why did I come back and not my friends? Why?’”
Eresman rushed into the blown-up AAV. The initial video-game qualities of war disappeared.
“As we pulled the bodies out from the trak, it really hit me,” he said, of the reality of war.
“Dead Marines were in there, like my buddy Corporal Roesacker. He looked perfectly fine from one side. When I got him out, the other half of his face was missing.”
The helicopter pulled away with the corpses and bloody bodies and Eresman returned to the firefight, momentarily blinded by the undulating sand whipped up and rolling back down over the troops below the blades of the chopper.
The day would see much more bloodshed.
In the end, battalion casualties reached 40, Eresman said. Eighteen of those were killed in action. But the casualties were not all attributable to enemy fire.
Flying overhead, U.S. Air National Guard A-10 warplanes accidentally zeroed in on Marines, and, according to Eresman, “wiped out an entire machine gun section and most of a mortar section.”
That tragedy was confirmed by a report released last year from the U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Florida. As a result of the so-called friendly-fire incident in An Nasiriyah, to which Eresman alluded, the news release stated that at least eight Marines were killed.
After being rendered combat ineffective, Eresman’s unit did not continue on to Baghdad.
Today, more than two years later, the confined quarters of close order combat may have left Eresman with some internal conflict. He explained how much he “hates” walking through tight spaces and feels “paranoid” at times around too many people.
This was evident in a recent account given by his father. After his son received some time off, Rich Eresman accompanied Tony to Daytona Bike Week in Daytona Beach, Fla.
“We were walking down the crowded Main Street,” the elder Eresman recounted, “when I noticed Tony getting jittery, because people were bumping into him from all sides.”
When he checked Tony’s eyes and saw how agitated his son was becoming, the father said he got a “very uncomfortable feeling.”
He immediately steered his son out and away from the jostling crowd.
“He was not in control of the situation,” the elder Eresman said. “He needed space.”
In the tight and claustrophobic spaces of war, in the mental strains of life even now, Eresman attributed his perseverance to love of country and the fellowship of his brothers.
Pinned down in a firefight in Iraq once, Eresman said, “I was taking enemy fire when I saw a Marine on the SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon] swing around toward me and start blasting away [at the enemy] until I could make it out.
“We fight for each other.” he ended, “and we fight for you. We don’t choose to go to war, we go where we’re told, and we put our lives on the line. We love America and all it stands for. Without us, there is no America.”
P. Steven Ghiringhelli, a former Marine, is a 2005 graduate of Rutgers-Newark and a writer at Kairos Magazine. He has published articles in the Star-Ledger of Newark, the New Jersey Herald of Newton, and the Times-Herald Record of Middletown, N.Y. Posted August 2005.
