Photo By Sgt. Mike MacLeod | Tributes from those paying final respects lie at the boots, weapon and helmet of Cpl....... read more read more
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CAMP RAMADI, Iraq — There are few John Wayne heroes left in Iraq.
What’s left of the Iraq conflict can be described as citizen versus insurgent, with little overt role left for American troops beyond security-force mentoring and moving equipment off the ever-closing forward operating bases. Thus the double tragedy of losing a Soldier here, and losing a Soldier now.
It’s been a week since the memorial ceremony for Cpl. Daniel O’Leary was held at Camp Ramadi: hundreds of Soldiers, standing-room only, spring winds buffeting a high canvas roof. His unit, Company F or "Foxtrot," is back at work ferrying supplies to brigade components over the hardball of Al Anbar, a province the size of North Carolina.
O’Leary was a truck driver for 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the Soldiers and services that sustain the Army’s first fully-developed advise-and-assist brigade — 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division (Advise and Assist).
The brigade’s mission is to professionalize the Iraqi army, police and border patrol, collectively known as Iraqi Security Forces; their goal, to enable ISF to provide adequate security for the Iraqi national elections held, March 7. By law, U.S. forces were not allowed within 200 meters of any polling center. It was trial by fire.
Returning from a run to Fallujah in the early evening of Feb. 23, the Army fueler that O’Leary was traveling in rolled over and he was killed instantly. There is tragedy in any human death; for a Soldier, risk of death is a wager against some notion of nobility achieved by sacrifice. Sacrifice, from the Latin sacrificium, means literally "to make sacred."
Cpl. Daniel T. O’Leary was part of one of the hardest-working units in the 82nd Airborne Division’s Devil Brigade, the "eighty-eight mikes," military jargon for truck drivers. In the first six months of deployment, Foxtrot Company had bagged over 180 missions, each mission a round-trip convoy to some island of U.S. forces.
Convoys are mostly night operations to marginalize the impact on Iraqi civilian life. The "mikes" maintain, fuel, water, load, strap, haul, unload and repeat as needed, at least once a day, sometimes twice, seven days a week. Some missions go 23 hours.
"We get the meals we need. We get the sleep we need," said Spc. Jared Christopherson, one of O’Leary’s friends since advanced individual training four years ago. "The biggest complaint has been lack of time to contact family," he said.
O’Leary was not a complainer, however.
"It didn’t matter what we were doing," said Christopherson. "We’d do a mission 24-hours straight, and we’d come back and he’s just all smiles, laughing, joking. The worse it got, the more he laughed."
Burly. That was O’Leary’s nickname.
"Everything from his stature to his presence was burly," said Christopherson. "He’s big, he’s tough, but he’s fun."
The soldiers still referred to O’Leary in the present tense, as though he was still in the room.
"His nickname for me was "Di-ho," said Spc. Dillon Donahoe, a close friend and groomsman at O’Leary’s wedding. "He called Christopherson Sweedish Meatballs. Dan was all about friends and family," he said.
His buddies recalled visits to the house of O’Leary’s parents in Creedmore, N.C., of shooting pool in the upstairs of the garage Dan and his dad built.
"Anyone visiting the house had to write a quote on the bathroom wall," said Donahoe. "Every square inch of that wall is written on."
It was the O’Leary way of appealing to a common human denominator. Who hasn’t had something to say to the bathroom wall?
"His family accepted you, no matter who you were," said Donahoe.
"Todd and Virginia are probably the most open, accepting people I’ve ever met," added Christopherson. "If you met them for an hour, they were like family to you."
O’Leary left behind an older sister, Mary Ellen, and two younger siblings, John Joe and Shannon. He also left a young wife.
"Dan’s a rowdy guy," said Donahoe, again in the present tense. "He dropped out of high school when he was pretty young. His wife is like the prom queen, ‘goody-goody,’ a dancer, you know, all that stuff, and he was the bad-boy rebel. For some reason, they worked. They were soul mates straight up. I have never seen a more perfect couple."
Dan and Nikita Abeyta of Wake Forest, N.C., were married on Donahoe’s birthday, July 18, 2009. The long-term plan was for O’Leary to attend N.C. State and study engineering. Nikita had just landed a very good job. Just days from the most important event of his brigade’s deployment — the successful completion of the Iraqi national elections during which not a single person died in Anbar as a result of election-related violence — the burly paratrooper, husband, sibling and beloved son passed away.
"We lost a great person," said Christopherson. "If he had a dollar to his name and you needed it, he would hand it over in a heartbeat."
"It’s true," said Donahoe. "I’m the worst with money. You can ask any of these guys. One night, I didn’t have any money. Dan said, ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’ I said, ‘I’ll pay you back.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I told him I wasn’t going out. He said ‘You’re going,’ and dragged me out the door.
"That’s just the way he was."
To his friends, that’s how he is.
Said Command Sgt. Maj. Mark Sturdevant at O’Leary’s memorial ceremony, "I hope his family realizes by the sheer size of the audience and how the memorial was performed — which was flawless — how highly the people that knew their son the best regarded him, and that he was a great paratrooper and a great asset to this battalion. It was a huge loss for Foxtrot and [2-504th PIR]. It’s unfortunate that we lost a paratrooper in this fashion. He will definitely be a hard memory to lose in this battalion."
As John Wayne might say, Rest well, Pilgrim. You’ve earned it.
| Date Taken: | 03.11.2010 |
| Date Posted: | 03.11.2010 12:01 |
| Story ID: | 46522 |
| Location: | CAMP RAMADI, IQ |
| Web Views: | 800 |
| Downloads: | 335 |
This work, Intimate look at a truck driver who left a legacy with sustainment unit, by SGT Mike MacLeod, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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