Decorated Marine helps others cope

September 5, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

One of the most highly decorated Marines during the war in Iraq had to drink to fall asleep. He once tried to kill himself.

This was after Jeremiah Workman’s tour in Fallujah, where on Dec. 23, 2004, he demonstrated such extraordinary heroism that he was awarded the Navy Cross, an award for valor second only to the Medal of Honor.

He led three assaults into a house where insurgents had trapped other Marines. Injured by grenade shrapnel, he helped save many of those Marines and kill 24 insurgents.

Retired Staff Sgt. Workman, now 27, originally is from Richwood and was a high-school football player. He tells these biographical details to current and retired Marines, including the ones he recently has spoken with in Ohio.

“I wasn’t broken before I went in,” he tells them. “I’m you.”

He still goes to counseling, he says, and he still takes medicine for post-traumatic stress disorder. If a football player, not to mention a Navy Cross recipient, admits that he needed help after a deployment, maybe other Marines will admit it, too.

“The wheels can still fall off the bus” no matter who you are, Workman said.

Workman is a deputy program manager for the Marine Corps’ Wounded Warrior Regiment, which connects wounded, ill and injured Marine veterans with the resources they need. Workman retired from the Marines and now works for the Corps as a civilian. A lot of his job involves paperwork in a Quantico, Va., office.

But occasionally, he travels to talk to Marines about his own experience with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. He’s recently been to Dayton, Chillicothe and Lima.

Last week, he spent some time with members of the Columbus-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines. Most of the company is now deployed in Afghanistan, but some staff members remain here.

“He’s got street cred,” said Maj. Jonathan Holder, the company’s inspector/ instructor. “Anyone who has done the things that Jeremiah Workman has done deserves the ultimate respect.”

Workman also spoke with a client of the Wounded Warrior Regiment, retired Lance Cpl. Joe Shearer, 24, of Columbus. Shearer deployed to Iraq in 2005. Now that combat operations there are over, the regiment is especially important, he said.

“Oh well, it’s done,” many civilians will think, Shearer said. “But there are still lots of people who haven’t gotten help.”

Maj. Eric Dent, the regiment’s injured support coordinator for much of Ohio, has spent the past couple of months handling cases that Workman has assigned him.

“He may already be a hero by the letter [of his Navy Cross citation],” Dent said. “The stuff he’s doing now, I think that makes him even more of a hero.”