Re: Resurrecting an old thread...
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Originally Posted by Yee-Ming
Welcome aboard Captain!
I'm just curious, how on earth did you 'find' this post four years later? I mean, I wouldn't be looking in random forums for posts from old friends looking for me. Did someone who knows you spot it and tell you about it?
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Kind of an odd story there. I am currently an attorney practicing in Louisville (I defend people and businesses that have been sued). I searched the web for a plaintiff's counsel's website to do some research on the competition, and became frustrated that I could not find his firm's website. Turns out there are about twenty marketing websites that capture information about lawyers, which makes it virutually impossible to find the actual firm's web page. So I became curious to see if they'd done that with me as well, and googled my own name.
Seems there's about a million "Scott Dyer's" out there ( URL Not allowed) one of whom tragically lost his life while serving in Afghanistan - ironically, he was the same age as I am (we both graduated highschool in 1987)). I found 'Scott Dyer' writers, musicians, photographers, doctors and microbiologists, but not me. So I added things I knew were in my bio (Captain, USMC, Lawyer, etc.) to refine the search and found this thread.
Anyway, Eric and I met in the dorms at Chico State (at the time, the number one party school in America) and our floor was called "The Ghetto" in reference to how it looked after the many parties we held there. I had just graduated from Marine Boot Camp, and the contrast between the most disciplined place in America and living on the number one party floor in the co-ed dorms of the number one party school made for some interesting times. Through a combination of partying, and taking frequent 'sabbatacles' to go serve in the Marines, my total time to graduate took 7 years (5 years of actual classes). Chico is (was) about the best place for a young man to spend his late teens and early 20's. It was the very picture of what most people think of, when they think of a great college "experience."
My military career took me all over the United States and the world. I was activated in support of Desert Storm (but never left CONUS) while in the Reserves at Chico, and later as an Infantry Officer on Active Duty, I served in Bosnia & Croatia (peacekeeping), and worked with our European and North African allies in deployments to the Mediterranean. I left active duty in '01 (wnt back into the Reserves) to attend law school (by then I had found my wife and decided I liked her better than the Marines, but still wanted to serve...). Half-way through law school, I was activated (again) as part of Alpha Company 8th Tanks (by then I was a Tank Officer, and the Executive Officer of the company) to serve in Iraq.
Our company (of some of the best young Americans you could hope to meet) was part of Task Force Tarawa, and fought in the Battle of An Nasiriyah (the place PFC Lynch's company was ambushed). My company rescued everyone in that Army convoy who was not captured or killed, and fought the next 18 hours of intense combined-arms urban combat alongside the infantry Marines of 1 / 2. It took us about a week of intermittent fighting to finally 'secure' Nasiriyah. At the end, I sent three of my tanks in support of the mission that recovered PFC Lynch and the fallen soldiers located at the Sadaam Hospital, and the next day we began an exodus around southern Iraq. At the time, many of the locals really seemed to appreciate our efforts to liberate them (despite what you may have seen on the news, every town we went to after Nasiriyah (with the exception of Kut) we passed hundreds of smiling, waving Iraqis - who brought us gifts (food, cigarrettes, etc.), and whom we treated well.*
If you're interested, I was one of about 55 Marines interviewed for a book on our battle, called, (URL Not Allowed) "
Ambush Alley" by Tim Pritchard. There's other books out there about the battle, but I think Tim did the best job of capturing the 'feel' of the battle. (It's a pretty raw account, so be forewarned, if you choose to read it...).
*I really do not want to get into a debate about the merits of the war, itself. I just want to share my experience to the fact that despite a pretty tough battle that consisted of 18 hours of intense combat, followed by several subsequent clashes over a week to ten-day period, my overall experience during the seven-month deployment was positive, and I feel we did some good.
