2002 NHS Grad—

Marine On The Road To Recovery After Ambush In Fallujah

By Shannon Hicks

Eric DesBiens’s family had not heard from him for a little while, and they were starting to get worried.

A 2002 graduate of Newtown High School, Eric, 23, is a lance corporal with the United States Marine Corps. He had been stationed in Fallujah about seven months ago.

“We’ve been worrying all along, of course, but he’d been calling whenever he could,” said his aunt, Stefanie Ehnot. “He called on Thanksgiving, and he called a few other times. But he hadn’t been heard from in a while… and then we got a call from a major who told us that Eric had been shot in an ambush.”

Fortunately, while the injuries that Lance Corporal DesBiens suffered on February 25 were very serious, none seem to be life-threatening. He arrived at The National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., on February 28, and was discharged this week on Tuesday. Ahead of him is a long recovery time to get through the injuries caused to his chest, back, ribs, one of his lungs, and his jaw.

Ms Ehnot was in Maryland last week, along with other family members, when Lance Corporal DesBiens arrived in Bethesda.

By phone earlier this week, Lance Corporal DesBiens was able to talk to The Newtown Bee about what happened in Iraq less than three weeks ago.

A member of FAST (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team) Company, based in Virginia, Corporal DesBiens’s team was deployed to Iraq in mid-September. FAST was on a deployment to Iraq, attached to a reconnaissance battalion.

On February 25, he was serving as point man.

“I remember everything. I was conscious the whole time,” Lance Corporal DesBiens said from his bed. “We were conducting a normal security patrol, around our [forward operating base, or FOB], and we had stopped a vehicle to search it. When we searched the vehicle, there were seven males in the vehicle, and it turned out that the vehicle they were driving was carrying a large amount of weapons.

“Everything from sniper rifles to machine guns, and ammunition for all of them, were in there,” he continued. “We took the guys out of the vehicle, we detained them and we were patrolling back to our FOB and we had just rounded a corner, and I told all the guys to keep their eyes open. If somebody saw what had just happened, they’ weren’t going to be too happy.”

Just as Lance Corporal DesBiens was warning the other soldiers to be on heightened alert, a machine gun started firing.

“As soon as I said that, I got hit in the chest. It just missed my body armor,” he said.

The bullet entered through his chest. It fractured three of his ribs and punctured a lung before exiting from his back.

“I started to return fire, and that’s when I got shot in the face. That blew teeth out of my mouth pretty good. I was still conscious and took cover in a canal. I just dove into the canal.

“When I looked up,” he continued, “I saw that our corpsman [a medical soldier] had been hit, and he was still taking fire. There were still rounds impacting around him, and he was calling for me, so I jumped up to grab him, and dragged him into the canal with me.

“I started assessing his wounds, and the gunfire slowed down a little bit,” he said.

FAST members began assessing the two wounded men who were, surprisingly, the only two wounded Marines. There were no fatalities. A Medivac unit was on the scene quickly because the FAST group had already radioed ahead to alert their higher command of the incident with the guns and ammunition.

“They already knew where we were. They got there fast,” Lance Corporal DesBiens said. He and the corpsman were first taken to Fallujah Surgical (the medical station in Fallujah, its full name is Surgical Company, Combat Logistics Battalion 8, 2nd Force Service Support Group, Forward), and then flown to a medical center in Germany before they were then flown to Bethesda.

The corpsman, said Lance Corporal DesBiens, is “fine. He’s doing all right.”

As for himself, he said, “I’m pretty sore all over. My body’s pretty sore because they did some exploratory surgery while I was in Germany. They wanted to make sure there was nothing else internal.

“My face, my jaw hurts pretty bad. Jaw is pretty sore, not really to speak but it hurts inside.”

Lance Corporal DesBiens’s parents, Paul and Sallie DesBiens, moved from Newtown to Texas a few years ago. His aunt is still here in Newtown and Lance Corporal DesBiens has decided to stay in Woodbury with his brother Chris during his convalescence. He plans to return to Virginia at the end of his leave to rejoin his company for the remainder of his enlistment, which is another ten months.

Eric DesBiens joined the Marines in September 2003. Stefanie Ehnot said it was always a dream for her nephew to become a Marine.

“I don’t have family members in the Corps,” Lance Corporal DesBiens said this week. “The Marines is just better than any other military branch.”