'I thought that was death'

When Cpl. Jeremiah Workman heard the Squad Automatic Weapon open up, he didn’t think much of it.

But when he heard the AK-47 going off, he and the rest of his squad knew something was wrong.

And by the time they ran to the house in Fallujah, Iraq, where Marines were trapped inside, the gunfire was intense.

Workman, 23, said he stepped inside the house and saw two sergeants trying to talk to the Marines upstairs.

The bullets were hitting so close to the head of one of the sergeants that Workman screamed for him to get down.

The three went outside where Workman learned that about six Marines were trapped in the home.

After coming up with a plan, they were joined by a lieutenant who led between eight and 11 Marines toward the home, said Workman, then with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines.

“As soon as we get to the front door, the lieutenant backs out of the way … He peels off the stack, so now I’m first, and I’m just thinking, ‘Oh [expletive],’ ” said Workman, of Marion, Ohio.

When the Marines got to the staircase, the lieutenant told Workman to go up on the count of three. As soon as Workman started running up the stairs, bullets started to fly.

“It was like one of them damn cartoons where they shoot at the feet and the cartoon dances. I mean literally, it was right on my ass as I was running up the stairs,” he said.

By the time he got to a landing that offered cover, Workman realized that none of his fellow Marines had been able to make it up the stairs.

Workman said he saw three of the Marines trapped inside, but he was unable to yell to them over all the noise.

After being ordered to come back down the stairs, he dived down the staircase to rejoin the rest of the Marines.

“I got back down and they picked me up and the lieutenant’s like, I’m going to throw a grenade up there to soften them up,” Workman said.

Of course, the grenade bounced back down the stairs, but Workman and the others were able to take cover before it went off.

The Marines then made a second assault up the stairs, and this time all of the Marines made it up, Workman said. By this time, the three trapped Marines he had seen were gone.

He would later learn that they had made it to the roof in an attempt to escape.

Workman and about three other Marines were now firing at the insurgents. He was so close to another Marine’s weapon that he was getting showered with the brass casings.

During the firefight, Workman would have to put down his rifle as fellow Marines handed him grenades to throw.

“I felt naked. To throw the grenade, I’d have to let my rifle down and then throw it, and that was one of the most awful feelings ever, was not having my rifle up. You felt like you were vulnerable.”

After he grabbed his rifle to start shooting again, an insurgent tossed a bright yellow grenade at them. It landed a few feet from the Marines.

“I had enough time to, like, shield my head. I yelled ‘Grenade!’ and it went off.”

He said felt like someone had hit him in the leg with a baseball bat, but otherwise he was unhurt.

But the Marines were running low on ammunition, so they had to run downstairs and outside the house.

Once outside, Workman ran into one of the Marines who had been trapped inside the house. The man was bleeding and stumbling, so Workman dragged him to safety.

Afterward, he went back into the house and started firing and tossing grenades at the insurgents.

While making his way up the stairs, he heard a “God-awful, blood-curdling scream” from behind him.

One of his buddies had been hit in the arm with an armor-piercing AK-47 round.

“His arm was damn near gone. I mean, it completely blew his tricep out, so he has no — he’s trying to fire his rifle with one arm, and he’s not quitting.”

Workman and the other Marines got the wounded Marine outside, where the man demanded to go back into the house.

“I just remember, his exact words were, “Give me a [expletive] pistol!” Workman said. “He kept saying, ‘Give me a [expletive] pistol!’ This guy wanted — damn near on his death bed from loss of blood and everything else — he wanted to go back into this house with a pistol so he could keep fighting.”

He grabbed about seven magazines and ran back into the house.

Once he was inside, two insurgents ran at him and another Marine.

Workman kept hitting the bad guys, but they didn’t fall down, so he slung his M-16 and opened up with an AK-47 he had on him.

Finally, the two insurgents fell down, but then insurgents tossed another grenade at the Marines.

It blew up and knocked him down.

Workman tried standing up against a wall, but he ended up sliding down against it and throwing up.

“I thought that was death, when in fact I was just so dehydrated and so overwhelmed with everything that I just, was like, passed out,” he said.

Eventually, a major dragged Workman out of the home by his helmet.

Outside, he learned that all of the Marines were now accounted for. Three were dead.

Now the Marines sat quietly, some smoking, as they waited for the airstrike that had been called in to level the block.

His platoon commander was crying.

“I don’t know if he felt like he had failed because we had lost guys or what, but when I saw that, I started crying,” Workman said.

Now a sergeant, Workman is credited for killing more than 20 insurgents that day, but he is unsure how officials arrived at that number.

About two years later, Workman learned he would receive the Navy Cross for his actions that day in Fallujah.

“I think I almost instantly teared up, because it brought back everything, and all I could think about was the guys we lost.”