To Iraq and Back
JMU students serve, one awarded Purple Heart
By Rachana Dixit, news editor
Posted on December 7, 2006

When Chris Evans joined the U.S. Marine Corps after graduating from high school in 2001, there wasn’t any question as to where he or his classmate Brandon Call would end up.

“I pretty much knew I was going to Iraq even before I went to boot camp,” Evans said.

On March 17, 2006, that became a reality as Evans, who graduated from JMU in 2005, flew to Fallujah after training for three months. Call, now a JMU senior and Evans’ longtime friend, was with him.

“It’s a really weird kind of anticipation,” Call said. “You don’t know what to expect. I seriously thought when we got there it was going to be like the beginning of a movie.”

Both men would serve for seven months in Iraq under the same battery. The two came up with the name “Black Flag” for their 120-man unit, because of their love for Flogging Molly and pirates.

Their battery ran security convoy missions all over Iraq and the Middle East. The missions mostly involved transporting supplies and Iraqi prisoners, and were held at night when only military traffic was allowed on the roads. Since they were driving most of the time, neither of them had much interaction with Iraqi civilians.

Evans and Call were divided into different platoons. They both said for the most part they were fortunate. Neither one of their platoons lost any men and many missions were successful.

“Something didn’t happen every day,” Evans said.

This did not always hold true.

During their separate missions, both men encountered IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, and detonated their fair share over the seven-month period. Evans and Call hit 12 and 23 IEDs, respectively.

“[The explosion] is not even so much a sound as it is a compression,” Call said. “It rattles every bone in your body.”

Call said on one occasion, his platoon saw an IED beside the road and had to stop to deactivate it. Nearby, they saw something else.

“We saw a guy sitting on a hill, staring at us,” he said. “We thought, ‘there’s no reason that guy should be sitting in the middle of the desert unless he had something to do with the IED.’”

Fortunately, that particular IED turned out to be a decoy. Call said they saw many decoys during missions, but these situations made him constantly alert for any nearby danger.

“You get the feeling that someone’s staring at you through the scope of a rifle,” he said.
Evans was injured from an IED explosion on July 23 and will be receiving a Purple Heart. His convoy was returning to Fallujah after delivering concrete to a camp north of Baghdad. Evans’ humvee, the lead scout, was the first vehicle in the line of 10. 

“I told my driver to go left around [the IED],” he said. “It turned out there were pressure plates all over the road.”

The front-right tire hit one of the IEDs and it went off beside the door. Evans said pieces of shrapnel went through part of the humvee and cut into his heel in the shape of an L. The cut, he said, was 1 1/2 inches deep.

“I blacked out,” he said. “It was like being on a roller coaster for a few minutes.”
Call said Evans was one of the first in their battery to be injured.

“That was one of the worst days,” he said. “It really drove it home that we were in Iraq.”
Evans said the number of IEDs he encountered increased between March and October, largely because violence increases during the summer months.

“We didn’t see any IEDs for the first two months we were there,” he said. “When we left, we were seeing one on every single mission.”

Evans also came close to a suicide bomber in downtown Fallujah. At the time, his convoy was driving into town to deliver prisoners to the Iraqi police.

“We saw this big flash and a plume of black smoke,” Evans said. He added that, fortunately, they were running late because a Gatorade bottle had gotten stuck in one of the humvee’s engines.

“If we had showed up on time, they probably would have hit us,” he said.

Eventually, October rolled around. Evans and Call left Iraq on Oct. 6 and were back in the United States a few days later. 

Call said when he was leaving Fallujah, “It was a lot like the last day of school.” But, he added, “[Being home] didn’t really sit at first.”
Evans echoed similar feelings of happiness and anxiety.

“It was almost more nervous coming home than going there in the first place,” he said.
But both soldiers said they thought being in Iraq helped combat the insurgency and decrease the number of incidents.

“You’re going to see an IED every day and see small arms fire in the city,” Evans said, “but someone wouldn’t die every day.”

Call said, “Before I went over there, I asked a lot of questions. Actually getting there and being around a lot of Iraqis, I really feel like it’s a good thing we’re there.”