Let us know: The Union College magazine is seeking alumni who have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Send us a message at magazine@union.edu and include basic details about your service in the Middle East.
During an evening foot patrol on Oct. 22, 2006 in Anah, Iraq, shrapnel from a roadside bomb ripped through the lower right leg of U.S. Marine Lt. Brent Filson ’03. A second Marine under Filson’s command suffered a similar leg wound and two others sustained minor injuries in the attack. The patrol was aborted and the injured soldiers were rescued by Humvee and later flown by helicopter to a military hospital. That marked the start of a long road to recovery.
Shortly before dawn about eight months after being wounded, Filson stands, with the help of a halo cast, near the confluence of the Hoosic and Green rivers in his hometown, Williamstown, Mass. He is fly fishing with his longtime girlfriend, Rebecca Joffe-Halpern, and childhood friend, Rufus Wyer. He casts the line and drags it over the mingling current of the two small rivers that cut through the Taconic Mountains. Fly fishing has been a kind of therapy in Filson’s long recovery from a wound that, without recent surgical advances, would have led to an amputation.
“I have been forced to sit on my butt for the last seven months. It is a huge change going from being 100 percent engaged to just doing nothing in a small little town in Massachusetts,” Filson said. “Fly fishing is something that can be relaxing. It is something to do, something to keep me occupied, something to look forward to.”
Filson is one of a group of Union College graduates who have served, often as officers, in the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq during the last six years. Among them are former U.S. Navy Lt. Thomas “Toby” Proctor ’98, who served as a tactical coordinator aboard surveillance planes flying over Iraq in 2002 and aboard combat missions in 2003. U.S. Navy Lt. Zac King ’00 served aboard the USS Bataan and USS Gettysburg during three deployments to support military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. Army Cpt. James Bascom ’96 has served as a civil affairs officer in Egypt and as an intelligence officer in two separate stints in Iraq. Mike Gifford ’97 was a military police platoon leader from May 2003 to July 2004. U.S. Army Spc. Caleb Bower served in a food and water supply yard for a year before graduating in 2006.
That’s a partial snapshot of a group of soldiers that make up another link in a chain of alumni service in U.S. wars that dates back to the War of 1812 and continues through World War II and the Vietnam War. Filson is also one of more than 12,000 soldiers who – as of early July – had been wounded and unable to return to duty since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
During his recuperation in Williamstown, the Union College magazine conducted several interviews with Filson, who will turn 27 in November. He gave a matter-of-fact account of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attack and subsequent recovery. It happened on the last day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which in 2006 was a violent period in Anah, a city in the Al Anbar province along the Euphrates River located to the northwest of Baghdad. Filson’s platoon, part of Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, had in previous weeks led two operations aimed at finding insurgent hideouts and weapons caches but was on a routine patrol on Oct. 22.
“We tried to stay in the middle of the street as much as possible because the IEDs are on the side of the road. As a matter of fact, if I was on the sidewalk, I probably would have been dead. The IED was embedded in a wall so there was no way anyone could have seen it. It was about 15 meters away from me when it went off. The exit wound was pretty large from the shrapnel going in and coming out again. I was losing a lot of blood. My bones were shattered. What I didn’t know at the time was that the veins were actually destroyed.”
Filson was flown by helicopter from Anah to a U.S. military hospital in the Iraqi city of Balad, just north of Baghdad. After undergoing emergency surgery including a vein graft to re-establish circulation, he was transported to a U.S. military hospital in Germany and a few weeks later flown to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. near Washington, D.C. He remained there until early December, when he returned to western Massachusetts. On Aug. 30 Filson was set to travel to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. to have the halo cast, which looks like scaffolding attached to his lower leg, removed. Then, he begins six to eight weeks of physical therapy followed by a new military assignment. If possible, he’d like to return to Iraq and lead Marines.
While in the Bethesda facility last November, Filson was visited by a group of friends from Union including Dennis Quandt ’03, Will Howe '02, Brian Demichele ’03 and Adam Malinowski ’03.
“It brought [the war] home. It made it a lot closer. It definitely makes you think about why we are over there and what we are doing,” Quandt said.
Filson’s father, Brent F. Filson, is a U.S. Marine veteran and well-known speaker and author on effective on leadership communication. He has written 23 books including Executive Speeches: 51 CEOs Tell You How To Do Yours and The Leadership Talk: The Great Leadership Tool. His father and mother, Magalis, live in Willamstown, home to Williams College. Filson’s two older brothers, Sean Rush Filson and Adam Filson, are a U.S. Marine officer and Army National Guard major respectively. Sean Rush Filson is a 1992 graduate of Bates College and was featured in that college’s magazine for his voluntary service in Afghanistan in 2004.
At Union, Filson was a psychology major. He transferred to the College after two years at Dean College in Franklin, Mass. He credited Union’s psychology courses with helping him manage relationships among his platoon in Iraq. Filson completed his first tour of duty in Iraq from March 2005 to September 2005 and was four months into his second tour when he was wounded.
The leading-edge surgical techniques employed to save Filson’s leg have left him with an uncertain future. Doctors simply don’t know how well he will recover, because most soldiers with his wounds lose their legs to amputation. The other Marine wounded by the IED explosion on Oct. 22, 2006, Lance Cpl. Thomas "Cody" Surber, of Martinsville, Va., had his lower right leg amputated.
“I definitely consider myself one of the lucky ones,” Filson said. “I have much more respect for Vietnam veterans now. They had nowhere near the same medical care and had a different welcome home.”