Student marine reflects on time in service

He was in his seventh grade English class when it happened. Like many that day, his unfamiliarity with the World Trade Center turned into sadness and fright after watching the events unfold. 

“At first I just had no clue what the World Trade Centers were at all but … we just went through the rest of the day at school, and I got home and ended up watching the news for quite a while after school,” Andrew Grant, a senior business management major, said. “It was just tragic, it was kind of sad and kind of scary, you know we weren’t sure exactly what was going on.”

Little did he know at that time that he would soon be enrolling in the United States Marine Corps. Grant expressed that he decided to join the Marines because of his desire to take a different path after high school, different from the traditional path that most students take.

“The most significant reason I decided to enlist in the Marines was that I decided I wanted to have some different experiences than I would normally have if I had just gone straight to college,” Grant said. “Being in the Marines has really given me a lot of opportunities and experiences that I would never have been a part of had I not joined. “

At the age of 17, in January of 2007, he signed his enlistment papers, and just six months later started his training in boot camp. His training began at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, S.C., where he stayed for three months. Soon after, he left for Camp Lejeune, where he stayed for three weeks, and finally finished in Huntsville, Ala., where he spent five weeks going through job-specific training.

After all of his preliminary training was complete he left for Iraq, in August of 2009, where he was stationed at Al Asad Airbase, which is the second largest United States military airbase in Iraq. There he served as an ammo technician assigned to the Combat Logistics Battalion 46, (CLB 46). As an ammo technician, his duty, along with the rest of his unit, was to do a complete inventory of all the ammunition on the airbase, which he did for the first three weeks 12 hours a day. Furthermore once inventory was taken they disposed of expired ammunition by burning it or blowing it up, depending on what type of ammo it was.

The overload resulted from the fact that it was more expensive to ship surplus ammunition than it would have been for the places that needed it to acquire their own, causing much of it to expire, Grant says.

“…There are certain specifications once ammunition has fallen below a standard, you can’t use it in combat anymore. There was so much ammunition that it was too much to really use in training also. It would be more expensive actually to ship the ammunition back to the states or over to Afghanistan, where they couldn’t have used most of it,” Grant said.

During his time away, he was still able to talk to his friends, because the base provided everyone with a wireless Internet connection. Garrett Korn, his roommate and senior English major, says he was able to keep in touch with him via Facebook.

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“The only way we could really contact him is Facebook,” Korn said. “He would post videos and stuff of what was going on out there, post pictures. We would message back and forth, just to keep in each other’s lives.”

His time was sadly cut short, only serving for a month and a half, due to a leg injury. He specifically broke both his tibia and fibula and was sent to Landsthul Regional Medical Center in Germany, where he recovered for around three weeks. The surgery left him with 16 screws and plates in his leg.

Since he returned to the United States, his roommate Logan Brown, a senior psychology major, says that he sees now that he is more appreciative of the college lifestyle.

“I think he is definitely more appreciative of this lifestyle now you know, getting to experience it for a few months when we were freshman and then having to be pulled away from it and now getting to come back to it,” Brown said. “I think he sees there’s more opportunities and I also say maybe that he’s a little more liberal in his thinking.”

Grant is still active in the Marines, as he serves as a reservist now. Once a month he travels to Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta, Ga., where he completes annual qualifications training, various hour-long classes, administrative duties, rifle qualifications and physical fitness tests, that they complete once or twice a year.

Since he returned from the war he holds that if he needed to go back today he would.

“I can say that I’ve signed up for a job, and if I’m called to go back I’ll do it willingly and in a heartbeat for, amongst other things, those that serve with me,” Garrett said.

Posted by Lauren Davidson on Sep 8 2011. Filed under Features, Lead stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.