LIEUTENANT J.P. BLECKSMITH DIED IN FALLUJAH
GREW UP: SAN MARINO
FOOTBALL STAR
COLLEGE:US NAVY ACADEMY
HE HAD IT ALL, AND DIDN'T HAVE TO GO. BUT HIS LOVE OF COUNTRY WAS BIGGER.
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On the night before 2nd Lieutenant JP
Blecksmith shipped out to Iraq, after his family took him out for dinner in
Newport Beach, California, his older brother, Alex, picked up a pair of
clippers and shaved JP’s head. When that was done and JP looked ready for
combat, Alex gave his brother a hug. Then Alex climbed into JP’s green Ford
Expedition and drove it north, back to the family’s house in San Marino,
weeping part of the way. He had a feeling. So did his parents. A premonition.
They didn’t talk about it much, but two months later, in November 2004, when JP
joined a wave of U.S. Marines roaring into the city of Fallujah as part of
Operation Phantom Fury, the feeling intensified.
On the night of November 10, Blecksmith
and his closest friend in Iraq, Lieutenant Sven Jensen, slept on a rooftop in
Fallujah. It was, miraculously, a quiet night, and chilly. They got a decent
night’s sleep. They awoke just before sunrise and were amused to find a small
pet bird with green wings and a yellow belly perched a couple of feet away from
their faces. Jensen took a picture of the bird. There were other ones like it
all over Iraq, because when U.S. troops were searching abandoned houses, they
often found cages that had been left behind. The soldiers let the birds go free
so they wouldn’t starve to death.
Hours before, JP had sent a letter to
his girlfriend, addressing it formally, as always, to “Ms. Emily M. Tait.” In
it he wrote, “By the time you receive this, you will know we have gone into the
city. We’ve been preparing for it the last few days, and my guys are ready for
the fight, and I’m ready to lead them. It’ll be hectic, and there will be some
things out of my control, but the promise of you waiting at home for me is
inspiring and a relief.” Now he was in the thick of it. Blecksmith and Jensen
came down from the roof, ate their MREs for breakfast, and got their orders.
Before the invasion the battalion commander, Colonel Patrick Malay, had given
his men an analogy: “‘Imagine a dirty, filthy windowpane that has not been
cleaned in hundreds of years,’” he recalls saying. “That’s how we looked at the
city of Fallujah. Our job was to scrub the heck out of that city, and then take
a squeegee and wipe it off so that it was clean and pure.” Most of Fallujah was
empty, and anyone left in the city was presumed to be an insurgent.
Blecksmith and the other members of the
India Company of the Third Battalion, Fifth Marines Regiment, moved south
through the city, with their blood types scrawled in indelible marker on the
sleeves of their uniforms. The streets smelled terrible—a stubborn aroma of
rotting food and bodies. Late in the day on November 11, things started to go
wrong. A marine in Blecksmith’s platoon, Klayton South, was shot in the mouth
by an insurgent when he kicked open the door of a house. Blood gushed from his
mangled teeth and tongue. The medics cut into South’s throat to give him an
emergency tracheotomy. (He survived. He’s since had more than 40 operations to
repair the damage.) “It shook the platoon up,” Jensen says now, “and JP was the
most in-control person I saw. He had a sector to clear, so he rallied his guys
and said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to continue clearing.’” Blecksmith’s and Jensen’s
platoons moved off in different directions, and the two friends shot each other
a glance. “I’ll never forget looking at his eyes the last time I saw him,”
Jensen says. “He turned and he gave me almost an apprehensive look, like, Oh, shit, we’ve got some shit going on.
I wanted to say ‘Hey, I’ll see you later.’ But I didn’t say anything to him.”
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Minutes later, Blecksmith led his
platoon into a house and climbed a flight of stairs to the roof to survey the
surrounding landscape. Shots came from a building across the street. Blecksmith
stood up to direct the squads under his command, shouting at them to take aim
at the enemy nest. He was tall, and was now visible above the protective wall.
“He was up front a lot, and he made a big target, and we’d talked to him about
that,” Colonel Malay says. “He exposed himself consistently to enemy fire in
the execution of his duties. He displayed a fearlessness to the point that we
had to talk to him about the fact that nobody is bulletproof.”
As Blecksmith stood on the roof, a
sniper’s 7.62-mm bullet found one of the places on his body where he was
vulnerable. It was a spot on his left shoulder, less than an inch above the rim
of his protective breastplate. The bullet sliced downward diagonally, coming to
rest in his right hip, and along the way it tore through his heart. “I’m hit,”
Blecksmith said. He fell. He raised his head for a moment, and that was it. A
Navy medic got to Blecksmith immediately, but he was already dead, and his men
carried his heavy body back down the stairs. He was 24.
That night in San Marino, Alex
Blecksmith came home from work and noticed that the house was dark. He opened
the front door and saw his mother, Pam, sitting at the kitchen table with a
couple of marines in dress blues and white gloves, and he heard the phrase We regret to inform you . . .
The funeral was so magnificent, so full
of pageantry, that at times it was difficult for Alex to remember that the guy
being buried was his brother. The Marines do it right when it comes to honoring
the fallen. They do it so right that you can get swept up in the ceremony and
feel as though you’re watching a parade. The funeral took place at the Church
of Our Saviour in San Gabriel—the church where the most celebrated of San
Marino’s favorite sons, General George S. Patton, had been baptized as a baby.
As the flag-draped casket was carried out of the sanctuary and into the
California sun, a long, silent line of almost 2,000 people followed. There were
marines and midshipmen and local firefighters in uniform. There was a 21-gun
salute. Four World War II fighter planes swooped toward the cemetery in the
“missing man” formation—just as they passed over the funeral, the fourth plane
symbolically split from the quartet and veered into the sky. A bagpiper played
a Scottish dirge. One of JP’s old friends would later observe that the day, in
all of its glory and pomp, made him think of Princess Diana’s wedding.
As Public support for the war in Iraq
wavers, it’s easy to forget that people like JP Blecksmith even exist. The
American military is so predominantly blue-collar that we tend to assume that
the sons and daughters of the rich never voluntarily die in warfare anymore.
Blecksmith was born in September 1980, just weeks before his state’s own Ronald
Reagan was elected president, and he spent most of his youth in the small Los
Angeles County town of San Marino during what felt, for many of its wealthy and
conservative inhabitants, like something of a Leave It to Beaver golden age. To look at a photograph of him,
blue-eyed and suntanned and grinning, is to understand the enduring magnetism
of the word California. He stood six
foot three and weighed 225 pounds. His chest was a keg; his biceps were gourds.
His biography reads as though it were scripted by a Hollywood publicist:
legendary quarterback on the Flintridge Prep football team, track star,
graduate of the United States Naval Academy.
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His father, Ed Blecksmith, who is 64,
runs an executive-recruiting firm in Los Angeles. He and Pam met in the early
seventies, while both were working in the White House. Along a wall leading
into their kitchen hang framed Christmas cards from Dick and Pat Nixon. “Here’s
a kid,” Ed says, “who didn’t need to do this.” It’s as though JP were
transplanted into our world from the Eisenhower years. Somehow, in an ironic
age of Jon Stewart and South Park,
the guy grew up in a kind of pre-Summer of Love bubble in which young men of
strength and valor still yearned to distinguish themselves on the battlefield.
He was groomed, in a sense, for something that no longer exists, at least not
for guys who grow up in the wealthiest zip codes in the country. He believed in
ideals of duty and sacrifice that have become, for many men, anachronistic and
even unfathomable.
“I was in awe,” says Peter Twist,
Blecksmith’s closest friend since preschool. Twist played wide receiver to
Blecksmith’s quarterback on the Flintridge Prep football team; a local
newspaper called the duo “Fire & Ice.” Blecksmith was known for being fast,
composed, smart, and unflappable, and his giant arms could propel the ball a
good 80 yards down the field. If he had an athletic flaw, it was that he was
aware of his own flawlessness. “He had such personal confidence,” says Tom Fry,
a mentor to Blecksmith in high school and one of the assistant coaches on his
team. “He felt that if all the stars aligned, there was nothing he couldn’t
do—it was JP’s world.” When they graduated in 1999, Twist and a couple other
teammates went off to the University of Arizona, where it’s safe to say the
prospect of partying was on their minds, while Blecksmith opted for the rigors
and restrictions of Annapolis. “I was stoked for the man,” says Twist, 26, who
lives in Newport Beach and works in the mortgage business. “Most of us are
still trying to figure it out, but JP always had a goal.”
November 11, the date on which JP
Blecksmith died, was noteworthy for other reasons: It’s Twist’s birthday. It
also happens to be the birthday of General Patton, who grew up in San Marino
and holds a prominent place in the town’s history. This coincidence has only
bolstered the mythology of JP Blecksmith—a feeling that it was his destiny to
die in combat. The Blecksmiths have a statue of Patton on a shelf in their
home, and it becomes clear in conversation that Ed, a decorated Vietnam veteran
himself, sees a kind of mystical link between the fate of his son and the
military triumphs of the legendary general (who was a passionate believer, it
just so happens, in reincarnation).
Indeed, JP Blecksmith fit the “hero”
mold in such classic, square-jawed American style that a kind of cult of JP has
begun to develop in San Marino. They give out awards in his name at the local schools.
On the Fourth of July, San Marino hosts a JP Blecksmith 5K run. A Marine Corps
training center in Pasadena has been christened Blecksmith Hall. On a hot
Sunday morning this past August, Alex parked his brother’s Expedition in the
cemetery and walked across the grass to the pale granite stone that says james
patrick blecksmith. An elderly man wandered over to the headstone, hand in hand
with a grade-school kid who had a blond Mohawk, and told Alex, “I never met JP,
but I go by here and show my grandson his grave.”
THE WORLD IS A BETTER PLACE BECAUSE HE WAS IN IT. MY GOD, I WISH HE WERE HERE.
