My Dad was a Marine and I just wanted to share this young Marine's story ... I'm sure it is only one of many.



Marine driver honors a fallen hero he never knew
ROGER ROY
Orlando Sentinel


NUMANIYAH, Iraq - For nearly 24 hours the young Marine watched over the body of the fallen gunnery sergeant he never knew.

He brushed the desert sand from the black body bag and made sure the American flag stayed taped to the dead Marine's chest.

The sad, chance encounter seems to govern so much of war.

Lance Cpl. Ryan Yung, 21, had just emptied his truck after pulling into a resupply area, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, and was waiting to head back south when he got a new assignment.

Drive the body of a Marine killed in action back to Kuwait.

Immediately, Yung, who is with the 6th Motor Transport Battalion, knew he had to make sure his fallen brother-in-arms got full honors.

Yung, of Hopedale, Mass., put the canvas top over the bed of his truck.

At the field hospital, he was given a manifest and asked to sign for the body of a gunnery sergeant with the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion, killed in a battle at a nearby village March 27.

Yung was determined that the start of the long journey home for the gunnery sergeant would be done right.

There was no way he was going to allow the body to be carried in a filthy truck, even if he had to sweep the sand and mud away with his hands.

He knew the body would have to be strapped down for the rough ride south, but the straps in his truck were dirty and frayed. He finally found some clean ones in another truck.

From the States, Yung had brought an American flag. He planned to have the Marines in his unit sign it as a keepsake. Instead, he took his flag and placed it reverently on the chest of the fallen gunnery sergeant, taping it in place.

By now it was late afternoon but as some trucks were still being unloaded, word was passed that the convoy would not move out until the morning.

So Yung curled up in the cab of his truck a few feet from the body and tried to sleep.

It was 6 a.m. when the convoy left -- all but one of the 70-odd trucks was empty.

There was nothing on Yung's truck to mark its precious cargo, but everyone in the convoy knew that it carried a dead Marine.

The trip to Camp Viper was only 150 miles but there were detours along the way, bottlenecks at bridges thrown up hastily by Marine engineers, trucks that had broken down and others that had flat tires.

For 11 hours, Yung rode alone with the gunnery sergeant's body.

"I kept thinking that he could be anyone's father," said Yung, who was taught that the Corps is a brotherhood by his father, a former Marine.

The convoy's progress was slow and tedious but there were no snipers, no ambushes. They pulled into Camp Viper, about 100 miles south of Baghdad tired but grateful that all had escaped injuries.

The stop at the rear supply base was supposed to be only the first one for the gunnery sergeant's body. The plan called for him to be driven into Kuwait, another long day's drive through the desert. But it didn't seem right to Yung for the dead Marine to be trucked another day.

So Yung went to his commanding officer, Maj. Michael Yaroma, and it was decided to take the body to the hospital at the supply base.

Yung remembered later that when they carried the gunnery sergeant into the hospital's morgue there were already 13 Marines there.

Yaroma asked Yung where the flag came from and when he told him that it was his, the major asked if the Marine wanted it back.

"But I wanted to leave it with the gunney," Yung said. "I thought maybe his family would know that he was being taken care of -- that he wasn't just forgotten."

Yung never knew the sergeant's first name -- only the last name, Menusa, printed on the manifest when he picked up the body. "I'll never forget Gunney Menusa," Yung said. "I keep thinking about how even in his name it says USA."

The body that Lance Cpl. Ryan Yung drove was that of Sgt. Joseph Menusa, 33, of Tracy, Calif. Born in the Philippines, Menusa was a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. He is survived by wife Stacy and their 3-year-old son Joshua.

~ Janie ~

Hi, Ryan. If I'm not mistaken, I met you in the ER at Newton Wellesley Hospital in July 2004. You told me you were a Marine on the front lines of Iraq. I never got the chance to tell you thank you for your service to our country. I've read about your experience with gunney Menusa and that he was born in the Philippines. My father is Fililpino. He passed away last November, but if he were alive I know he would want to thank you for the loving care you provided gunney Menusa. God Bless & Regards, Melissa

Long, but worth the read. Great story - worth your time. Please pass it along….


(The below-quoted article was written in October 2000 by Wisconsin resident Michael T. Powers (whose name has been omitted from most of the Internet-circulated versions), transcribed from a videotape he made of a talk given by author James Bradley at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Bradley, whose father, John, was one of the six men pictured in the famous photograph of the flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi in February 1945 (and is thus depicted in the monument's sculpture), had earlier that year published Flags of Our Fathers, an account of the life stories of those six men.)


TALE OF SIX BOYS


Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC, with the eighth grade class from Clinton, WI. where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation's capitol, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall's trip was especially memorable.

On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history -- that of the six brave soldiers raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, during WW II.

Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed towards the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked, "Where are you guys from?"

I told him that we were from Wisconsin. "Hey, I'm a cheese head, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story."

(James Bradley just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who has since passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, D.C., but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.)

When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. (Here are his words that night.)

"My name is James Bradley and I'm from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I just wrote a book called "Flags of Our Fathers" which is #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list right now. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.

"Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game. A game called "War." But it didn't turn out to be a game.

Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don't say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old.

(He pointed to the statue) "You see this next guy? That's Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene's helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph... a photograph of his girlfriend. Rene put that in there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years old. Boys won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys. Not old men.

"The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the "old man" because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn't say, 'Let's go kill some Japanese' or 'Let's die for our country.' He knew he was talking to little boys. Instead he would say, 'You do what I say, and I'll get you home to your mothers.'

"The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Ira Hayes walked off Iwo Jima. He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him, 'You're a hero.' He told reporters, 'How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?' So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes died dead drunk, face down at the age of 32 .. ten years after this picture was taken.

"The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky. A fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me, 'Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn't get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night. Yes, he was a fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother's farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. The neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

"The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley from Antigo, Wisconsin, where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite's producers, or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say, 'No, I'm sorry, sir, my dad's not here. He is in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don't know when he is coming back.' My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually, he was sitting there right at the table eating his Campbell's soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn't want to talk to the press.

"You see, my dad didn't see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, 'cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a caregiver. In Iwo Jima he probably held over 200 boys as they died. And when boys died in Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed in pain.

"When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, 'I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.'"

"So that's the story about six nice young boys. Three died on Iwo Jima, and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time."

Suddenly, the monument wasn't just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless.

We need to remember that God created this vast and glorious world for us to live in, freely, but also at great sacrifice. STOP and thank God for being alive and being free at someone else's sacrifice.

REMINDER: Everyday that you can wake up free, it's going to be a great day.

Ryan,
I "Googled" Ryan Yung and this site was one of the two or three where the news story was being discussed. That's how one finds it!

May God Bless all of the soldiers doing their duties so well. I wish the names of all the fallen were mentioned daily in the daily news. It seems wrong not to have their names accessible for the "common prayer" of all who hear their names. Names matter to me.

It matters that buddies take care of each other in such devastating situations. The Nintendo generation was not raised expecting this war and I'm impressed at how well our military has prepared and supported those who chose to put themselves out there.
Sandi

As a Marine I have to say it was hell........I know I found this site years after the effect... My god it still f*ck*en hurts. Though let's remeber the gunney and share his heroism......Thamk you all and you are so helpful to my healing, God bless the Munusa family------ OOOH-RAH SEMPER

Regards and SEMPER
LCPL. Yung, Ryan USMC

Ryan, I don't know how you found this post, but - if you are the Marine in this story - God Bless You!!!

My name is Lcpl. Ryan Yung, I'm the Marine in this story . I just want to say thank you for sharing the Gunney's story. I know he's remembered. SEMPER FI to all of you.

Janie, what a beautiful albeit, sad story. Thank you for sharing it with us. I didn't know your Dad was marine. You must be very proud of him.

Vicki

Sugarlips

Dear Janie,
From one Marine's daughter to another...thank you for this beautiful tribute.
My Dad always recites this line from one of his favorite Marine poems--it tells of a Marine arriving in Heaven:

...and to St. Peter I will say, "Another Marine reporting, Sir.....I've served my time in Hell".

Semper Fidelis to all of those who serve and have served.
Greater love hath no man, than to give up his life for a friend.

SemperFi

Every day a holiday,
Every meal a picnic!