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Corporal posthumously awarded Silver Star

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — In the chaotic, intense house-to-house gun battles with insurgent fighters during the 2004 Battle of Fallujah, the point man of Lima Company’s 1st Platoon barreled his way through gunfire and exploding grenades.

Then-Pvt. Sean Stokes, with his wide grin and sparkling eyes, seemed to relish the role he readily assumed as his unit, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, pressed through the city’s notorious Jolan District, which was teeming with al-Qaida fighters.

Several times during missions from Nov. 9-11, 2004, Stokes braved enemy fire — “fearless in the face of danger,” according to the Marine Corps — to kill insurgents and enable his platoon to gain control of houses.

On Nov. 17, 2004, after a grenade exploded near him, wounding him, the private managed to continue to use his weapon so the fire teams could reassemble and launch a counterattack.

For his actions during the intense week of close-in urban combat, the Marine Corps bestowed on the corporal the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest award for combat valor. His family received the medal and citation yesterday during a ceremony at Camp Pendleton, Calif., on what would have been Stokes’ 25th birthday.

According to the award citation, Stokes “fought through Fallujah with the resolve of closing on the enemy, while protecting the Marines around him at all costs.”

But on July 30, 2007, Stokes, then a corporal and on his third deployment to Iraq, paid the ultimate price when a buried roadside bomb detonated while he was scouring a road as a member of 3/1’s personal security detachment.

The news of Stokes’ death devastated his family and friends. “We didn’t know he was in Iraq when he was killed,” said his aunt, Laura Leupp, of San Diego.

As far as they knew last summer, Stokes was on the assault ship Bonhomme Richard, the lead ship in an expeditionary strike group carrying members of 3/1 and the rest of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. But the MEU had received orders to Iraq’s Anbar province.

“To protect his family from worry, he told them before he left and during his third tour that his ship, the Bonhomme Richard, was stopping at different ports around the world and was not going to go to Iraq,” Leupp said by e-mail. “He had already been through so much during his first two tours. Sean was supposed to just see the world by stopping at different ports. So we thought he was safe during his third and we hoped his last deployment. But not the way we hoped.”

His former 3/1 platoon commander, Lt. Jeffrey Sommers, wrote a poignant story online about Stokes’ early days at the battalion, where he had been reassigned from a sister battalion, 1/1, at Camp Horno. Stokes had encountered some trouble — a positive urinalysis pop for smoking pot and deserting the unit — that got him busted down two ranks to private, Sommers wrote in his Web blog.

“It’s tough being a private in an infantry deployed unit,” he wrote. But Stokes “took it all in stride, and his composure in operations on top of all the bull---- of being a private impressed me; he was a solid, dependable Marine. His work ethic and attitude prompted us to ask, almost beg, for his promotion.”

But that didn’t happen, he wrote, and Stokes “would remain a private for the rest of the deployment no matter what he did or was capable of.”

Then came the battle of Fallujah, where “nobody worked harder than Pvt. Stokes,” who led point for his squad, Sommers wrote, retelling the young Marine’s actions. “Time again, he was the one to get shot at first, he dodged death so many times as that point man over the course of the battle.”

Even when the grenade wounded him, Stokes kept firing his weapon at enemy fighters before he was later evacuated, Sommers wrote.

Stokes’ actions in that battle weren’t forgotten when the dust settled. “We returned home, and the mantra of not being able to promote a drug pop Marine carried into the awards process,” Sommers wrote. “[He] was never awarded for his actions.”

During the subsequent deployment, though, Stokes was promoted to corporal, and he eventually deployed again.

But on his third Iraq deployment, he met death in the IED blast. “Stokes was walking point, again, he always led from the front,” noted Sommers.

REMEMBER: Cpl. Stokes