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Sgt. Eric Shelvy, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, India Company, was with the first forces to enter Baghdad, and later fought in the famous month-long battle at Fallujah. He is now an assistant detachment commander stationed at the American embassy in The Hague, Netherlands.Senior year at DeSmet Jesuit High School, Eric Shelvy was fed up with classwork, eager for “adventure, character building, separation from my peers—a unique distinctiveness.” In July 2002, he left for U.S. Marines boot camp as a high school graduate, then flew to Kuwait.
“We hung out in the desert for about a month,” he says. “Then the president gave the word, and we started moving north and didn’t stop until we got to Baghdad.” After the city was liberated from Saddam Hussein, Shelvy returned to the States for almost a year. In November 2004, his battalion was assigned to attack Fallujah.
“It was loud, and it was violent,” he says. “Hue City from Vietnam is what they compare it to. All-out chaotic urban battle for almost a month. We were on the streets, in the homes, buildings blowing up, constant gunfire.” They discovered 568 weapons caches, 26 IED factories and 47 mosques being used as fighting positions, and they detained 2,435 insurgents, reports Lt. Lawton King, media officer for the 1st Marine Division. (The number of civilian deaths has not been made available.) By November 15, the U.S. Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton had an estimate of 1,200 insurgents killed. Shelvy’s unit went house-to-house. Half-dead combatants fired AK-47s at them from the ground, sprang out of cupboards or dropped from ceilings. U.S. casualties that month were the highest to date: 141 killed, 1,431 wounded.
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What got Shelvy through it? “You are with your friends,” he says simply. What do you say if someone’s having a rough time? “Most people didn’t,” he replies. “This is what you are trained for.”
The photographer embedded with Shelvy’s squad photographed skulls with flesh still clinging to the bone, bodies dragged bloody through the dust, Marines leaping across the tops of bombed-out buildings. The
3rd Battalion, 5th Marines received six Navy Crosses—the second highest award a Marine can receive—for Fallujah alone.
There’s an inverse law in this war: The worse the experience, the more matter-of-fact the account. Asked again what was hardest about that month, Shelvy says, “Just being tired. We slept on the ground or in houses or in holes”—or not at all, if they were in a 12-hour gun battle. Unit leaders got together at night, Shelvy says, to plan; in the morning the plans were executed. Word went all the way up and down the line, by radio and word of mouth.
“I wouldn’t say there was anything in particular that bothered me more than anything else,” he says. “Do I think about Iraq? Sometimes. But do I think about it negatively or have some type of negative condition that makes me think about it? Probably not any more than someone my age would think about college.”
A Vietnam vet, hearing that statement, shakes his head slowly. “I don’t believe his ass,” he says. “But I would have said the same thing.”
Did Shelvy lose any friends in Iraq? “Sure.”
One? More than one?
“Enough.”
Shelvy’s mother, Diane Guerra, says that two weeks after he arrived in Iraq, his corporal was killed. In Fallujah, he lost another good friend. “He told me a bit about it at the time,” she says. “Then he stopped talking about it.”
