This tribute to a Navy football player turned infantryman and role model is
fitting for these hard times!
By
Jeff Gordinier
Details Magazine
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 JP¹s head. When that
was done and JP looked ready for combat, Alex gave his brother a hug. Then
Alex climbed into JP¹s green Ford Expedition and drove it north, back to the
family¹s house in San Marino, weeping part of the way. He had a feeling. So
did his parents. A premonition. They didn¹t talk about it much, but two
months later, in November 2004, when JP joinead 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 night¹s 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 wouldn¹t starve to death.
Hours before, JP had sent a letter to his girlfriend, addressing it
formally, as always, to ³Ms. Emily M. Tait.² In it he wrote, ³By the time
you receive this, you will know we have gone into the city. We¹ve been
preparing for it the last few days, and my guys are ready for the fight, and
I¹m ready to lead them. It¹ll 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.² 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: ³ŒImagine a dirty, filthy windowpane that has not
been cleaned in hundreds of years,¹² he recalls saying. ³That¹s 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.² 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
Blecksmith¹s 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 South¹s throat to give him an emergency
tracheotomy. (He survived. He¹s since had more than 40 operations to repair
the damage.) ³It shook the platoon up,² Jensen says now, ³and JP was the
most in-control person I saw. He had a sector to clear, so he rallied his
guys and said, ŒOkay, we¹ve got to continue clearing.¹² Blecksmith¹s and
Jensen¹s platoons moved off in different directions, and the two friends
shot each other a glance. ³I¹ll never forget looking at his eyes the last
time I saw him,² Jensen says. ³He turned and he gave me almost an
apprehensive look, like, Oh, shit, we¹ve got some shit going on. I wanted to
say ŒHey, I¹ll see you later.¹ But I didn¹t say anything to him.²
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. ³He was up front a lot, and
he made a big target, and we¹d talked to him about that,² Colonel Malay
says. ³He 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.²
As Blecksmith stood on the roof, a sniper¹s 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. ³I¹m hit,² 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 you¹re
watching a parade. The funeral took place at the Church of Our Saviour in
San Gabriel‹the church where the most celebrated of San Marino¹s 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 ³missing
man² 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 JP¹s old friends would later observe that
the day, in all of its glory and pomp, made him think of Princess Diana¹s
wedding.
As Public support for the war in Iraq wavers, it¹s 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 state¹s 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.
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. ³Here¹s a kid,² Ed says, ³who
didn¹t need to do this.² It¹s 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.
³I was in awe,² says Peter Twist, Bleck-smith¹s closest friend since
preschool. Twist played wide receiver to Blecksmith¹s quarterback on the
Flintridge Prep football team; a local newspaper called the duo ³Fire &
Ice.² 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.
³He had such personal confidence,² says Tom Fry, a mentor to Blecksmith in
high school and one of the assistant coaches on his team. ³He felt that if
all the stars aligned, there was nothing he couldn¹t do‹it was JP¹s world.²
When they graduated in 1999, Twist and a couple other teammates went off to
the University of Arizona, where it¹s safe to say the prospect of partying
was on their minds, while Blecksmith opted for the rigors and restrictions
of Annapolis. ³I was stoked for the man,² says Twist, 26, who lives in
Newport Beach and works in the mortgage business. ³Most of us are still
trying to figure it out, but JP always had a goal.²
November 11, the date on which JP Blecksmith died, was noteworthy for other
reasons: It¹s Twist¹s birthday. It also happens to be the birthday of
General Patton, who grew up in San Marino and holds a prominent place in the
town¹s 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 ³hero² 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 brother¹s 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,
³I never met JP, but I go by here and show my grandson his grave.²
Three years after Blecksmith¹s death, his bedroom still looks the way it did
when he left for Annapolis in 1999. There¹s a Green Bay Packers poster over
the bed, a dense forest of athletic trophies, toy race cars lined up on the
dresser. ³This is all his stuff from Iraq that they sent over,² Alex says,
looking down at a cardboard box on the floor. ³We haven¹t gone through it,
really.²
Ed Blecksmith walks into the bedroom, and within a few seconds his voice is
cracking and his blue eyes are growing wet. ³It¹s still tough,² he says.
³You see all these pictures and things . . .² He insists on sitting down in
front of the TV downstairs and watching DVD footage of that magnificent
funeral, fighting back a sob at the moment when one of the eulogists, a Navy
SEAL, describes JP as having been ³the best of the best.² Ed has some Fox
News footage, too. In it, you can see JP speaking to his men hours before
the battle in Fallujah, and that¹s where you get a brief glimpse of the
regular guy behind the mythology. Because there stands JP, in fatigues and a
floppy Boonie hat, holding a map, telling his marines to ³expect everything
you can possibly imagine.² When he looks at the camera for a moment, he¹s
smiling.
