shanneba
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A Lander Marine, Silver Star hero and Iraq War vet was reunited with the sniper rifle he used during the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. He said it was surreal to hold it again after losing the rifle when he was severely wounded by mortar rounds.
More than two decades after a barrage of mortars in Fallujah, Iraq, separated Chad Cassady from his U.S. Marine sniper rifle, he can hold it again.
That barrage left the Lander, Wyoming, man in a life-and-death struggle with a 10-millimeter piece of shrapnel that ripped into his kidney, liver and lungs. It also left him without his M40A3 bolt-action weapon, which was also damaged in the attack.
In the intervening 22 years, Cassady transitioned to an infantry officer and spent 16 more years traveling the world on assignments. His sniper rifle also traveled the globe in the hands of various Marines.
Cassady, now a 52-year-old gunsmith and Lander city councilman, characterizes the chain of events that brought the weapon — with the serial number that begins with “E676” followed by four more numbers — back to him as “surreal.”
“I cannot understand why this has happened,” Cassady said. “This whole bizarre story and circumstances hinge on this memory of this serial number that I never forgot.
"Once in a while I would be like, ‘I wonder where that rifle is.’ And then I would carry on with my day.”
But he is thankful to be able to once more hold the weapon that takes him back to a terrible time that included the loss of friends and the intensity and carnage of street fighting.
Yet on the flip side, he said it includes the selfless courage of comrades trying to save one another.
“There’s a lot of story behind it,” he said.
His friend did a Freedom of Information Act request on the weapon using the serial number and learned it was in “cold storage” at a Marine Corps base in Georgia.
“He is heavily involved in Marine Corps history, firearms, and knows a lot of people in those spaces,” Cassady said. “And they very slowly, within the bounds of the law, started to try and figure out if there was a way they could reunite that rifle with me legally.”
His friend found there was a method where if the rifle was transferred to the Civilian Marksmanship Program in Anniston, Alabama, there was a possibility that the organization could help get it back to Cassady.
Over three to four years, delayed by the COVID pandemic, people Cassady “never met” helped his friend get the weapon transferred to the civilian program.
Once they received it, officials in Alabama at the program could decide whether to sell it, hold it, or whatever they wanted to do.
They chose to give it back to Cassady.
Lander Silver Star Hero Reunited With Sniper Rifle He Used In Iraq 22 Years Ago
A Lander Marine, Silver Star hero and Iraq War vet was reunited with the sniper rifle he used during the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. He said it was…
cowboystatedaily.com
