Silver Star

UNION-TRIBUNE
When Lance Cpl. Benjamin Gonzalez heard the metallic clink beside him, he knew it couldn’t be good.

Just relieved from checkpoint duty on June 18, 2004, at the Saqlawiyah bridge in Fallujah, Iraq, he had knelt on the ground to adjust his heavy gear. Pfc. Charlie Koczan had decided to get a few minutes of rest under a brutally hot sun and stretched out next to Gonzalez.

Gonzalez looked beside him and saw the source of the clink: An enemy grenade had landed about a foot from his leg.

“Oh, (expletive),” he thought.

Then he glanced at Koczan, who was dozing. Instantly, Gonzalez leapt on top of his buddy, enveloping him in a bear hug.

“I braced myself,” Gonzalez recalled. “I remember the concussion. It jerked my body real bad. … I screamed out: ‘Damn! I’m hit!’”

His spontaneous act of valor earned him the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest honor for combat bravery. It also doomed his promising Marine Corps career, nearly costing him his legs and guaranteeing him a lifetime of physical pain.

Koczan wasn’t injured. Gonzalez’s timely hug is “pretty much the only reason I’m not messed up right now,” Koczan later told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Marine Corps Times via leatherneck.com
Gonzalez and the rest of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, had been moving through Fallujah, Iraq, the night before taking up a position on a bridge at the northern edge of the city the morning of June 18, 2004.

From the position he shared with three other Marines along the road, Gonzalez kept watch over pedestrians until around 9:30 a.m.

“I got off post and I was actually going to go to rest and check on all my gear, and that’s pretty much when it happened,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez remembers the sound of the insurgent releasing the spoon of the old, pineapple-style grenade and the “clink” the grenade made when it hit the ground in his fighting hole.

“Unhesitatingly and with total disregard for his own personal safety, Lance Corporal Gonzalez threw himself on his fellow Marine, shielding him from the blast,” according to his award citation. But that’s not exactly how Gonzalez describes it.

Gonzalez said he was actually about to jump away from the grenade when he saw his fire team leader “sitting there without a clue.” He said he didn’t exactly “throw himself” on his team leader.

“I can’t really remember much of those details, but I guess I hugged him,” Gonzalez said.

When the grenade detonated, the team leader was unharmed, but Gonzalez, who absorbed the blast, was riddled with shrapnel.

“I got burned. It broke both of my legs and broke and fractured other parts. It messed up my nerves really bad. I have permanent trauma. I can’t feel my feet or move my ankles. I have shrapnel in my stomach, too,” Gonzalez said.

“This must have been the crappiest grenade ever made because we were all really close. The detonation was one to two feet away from my legs. If it was one of ours, it would have taken us all out.”

Gonzalez was still conscious after the blast. A corpsman gave him general anesthetic, and he was medically evacuated.

“I was told I had gone through Germany for a day and a half, but I woke up in Bethesda and thought I was still in Iraq,” said Gonzalez, referring to the National Naval Medical Center north of Washington, D.C.

Gonzalez, who is on temporary retirement and can rejoin the Corps after he heals, has not regained full mobility or feeling in his feet and legs.

But he was able to stand in formation as his Silver Star was pinned to his suit jacket by Capt. William Zirkle, who, as a first lieutenant, was Gonzalez’s commanding officer at the time of the attack.

El Paso Times
In June 2004 in Iraq, Gonzalez, a member of Company F, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, threw himself on a fellow Marine when a hand grenade was thrown toward the observation post where he and three others were protecting a bridge that was critical to coalition supply lines. While the other Marine escaped injury, Gonzalez, a Riverside High School graduate, suffered injuries to his feet and ankles. He is recovering from reconstructive surgery.

Gonzalez was also given a hand-carved walking cane by veterans of the 19th Rifle Company, who also presented Telles with a Marine Corps flag.

During the ceremony, Gonzalez was given the Silver Star by his platoon commander, 1st Lt. Wade Zirkle, who flew to El Paso from Washington, D.C., for the ceremony. “The word ‘hero’ is thrown around a lot in today’s society. When I think of a hero, I think about what (Gonzalez) did, and that exemplifies to me what heroism is,” Zirkle said.

El Paso Times
At the time Gonzalez was injured, insurgent activity in Fallujah was considered the gravest threat to Iraq’s stability and security.
“Unhesitatingly and with total disregard for his own personal safety, Lance Cpl. Gonzalez absorbed the blast and sustained serious injuries to his lower body,” the medal citation states. “Due to Lance Cpl. Gonzalez’s heroic and selfless actions, he may have saved the life of his fellow Marine and at the very least protected him from life threatening injuries.”

When the Marines went into the city to drive out the insurgents in November 2004, they found 210 defensive positions in neighborhoods, mosques and schools, many of which were booby-trapped with improvised explosive devices, according to military press reports. The Marines also cleaned out more than 500 weapons caches and found 29 buildings used to make car and roadside bombs.

Gonzalez said the Marines in his unit — Company F, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force — had taken fire from all directions and had been ambushed during night patrols in the streets of Fallujah. During that tour of duty, seven Marines in the platoon of 30 were killed, he said.

But Gonzalez doesn’t see himself as a hero.

“It’s part of what we do. I know he would have done the same for me,” he said of the Marine he protected, who didn’t see the grenade coming. “We watch each others’ backs 24/7 while we’re out there.” And Gonzalez credits the group’s team leader for cleaning his wounds, keeping the Marines calm, setting up a lookout and calling in the Medevac helicopter.