Updated March 24. 2008 10:13PM
Cedar Rapids corpsman prepares for 4th deployment
By Steve Gravelle
The Gazette
steve.gravelle@gazettecommunications.com
Photo
Josh Chambers
CEDAR RAPIDS — It's become a tradition the past few years for Josh Chambers. Around about every March, he and his extended family meet for dinner — a boisterous, tables-pushed-together gathering of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and a few extra-close friends.
Then, a week or 10 days later, Chambers leaves for Iraq.
"I was hoping not to go back, but your commanding officer, they see you do a good job," Chambers said at last night's gathering at a southwest Cedar Rapids pizza buffet.
Chambers will leave in a few days for Camp Lejeune, N.C., from which he departs April 5 for his fourth deployment. He's a Navy hospital corpsman, the Marine Corps' equivalent of a battlefield medic, charged with caring for the approximately 50 Marines in the platoon to which he's assigned.
Chambers, 25, joined the Navy soon after graduating from Cedar Rapids Washington High School in 2001. His mom, Pat Chambers, was an emergency room nurse, "and she always gave me her stories," he said.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, "I knew we were going to war," said Chambers.
During his first Iraq deployment, Chambers was part of the push to Baghdad. In 2005, he was in Fallujah, where he saved Army SSgt. Marcus Matthews. In a poem about the experience that members of Chambers' family passed around Monday, Matthews wrote in part:
Stay with me! Screamed the corpsman
Gesturing his first two fingers toward his eyes
Forcing me to make eye contact with him
And see how much this comrade of mine
Wanted me to stay alive
"We hit a daisy chain of IEDs, and he about lost his arm," Chambers said.
Not all the endings are happy.
"There were definitely some I've lost," Chambers said. "It stinks, especially when they're children. It just didn't work, and you've got to let it go."
Before his first deployment, Chambers worried whether he'd freeze in a crisis situation. Now he's the mentor to new corpsmen.
"I actually like it," he said. "I'm able to show them what I've done. I like being in the instructor's spot."
Corpsman's deployments typically run seven to nine months. Pat Chambers said she spends much of the time near the phone.
"I'm very nervous, but I know he's doing his job," said Pat Chambers, who now lives in Smithboro, Ill. "He loves his country."
Josh's older brother Jonathan Chambers, an Army sergeant, is scheduled to leave in October for his second deployment to Iraq.
"I want it all to end," said Pat Chambers, who said she's discussed her sons' funeral arrangements with them. "I want them all to come home. Enough is enough."
Josh Chambers wants to become a doctor when he finally comes home for good.
"You're taking care of people who are at their weakest points," he said. "I call it servitude — you're helping people."
Which is easier to explain than where he's about to go, again.
"Unless you've been there, you can't really understand," said Chambers. "I just tell (friends who ask) it's hell on earth, because you're taking care of your wounded brothers. That's who we go to war with. It's not that we want to be heroes, it's the person next to you."
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