Reporter's Notebook: The Fight After Fallujah

TAOS, N.M., April 10, 2005 — -- Huddled in an abandoned house last November, Sgt. Jason Arellano gave his platoon a pep talk as they prepared to push deeper into insurgent-occupied Fallujah.

"So they're right here in this area. There are going to be more and more as we push further down," he said. Arellano gave the speech after a Marine on an adjacent street had both his legs blown off by insurgents' grenades. "You don't want other squads giving speeches to their men about one of us, right? I don't want that," he added.

An ABC News crew was embedded with Arellano's company for the assault on Fallujah last fall, and we very quickly realized he was the guy we wanted to stick with. The operation was relatively smooth for Arellano and his men. They secured their slice of the city in eight days and we left.

More than a month later, I got an e-mail from Arellano, sent from a hospital bed in Germany. He'd already had seven operations on shrapnel wounds in his neck and leg and a bullet wound in his groin.

Arellano had been on patrol, still in Fallujah, where he'd spent his 27th birthday. On Dec. 12, he was hit. He became the Marine that squad leaders tell their men about.

"I remember it very vividly. It was, it was slow motion," he told me later. "I remember the blast itself happening, the curtains from the room picking up slowly, smoke pushing through all the bricks and the wall and just the sound of just shrapnel ripping through everything," he said. It felt like he had been electrocuted, he said. When he was being taken to a field hospital, Arellano told the medics to stop giving him morphine so he could feel the pain and know he was still alive.

"It was very, very close. I mean I can honestly say I guess I was in the right place at the right time you know, how my body was postured, everything just it happened for a reason you know," he said while recovering at his mom's house in Taos, N.M. "I was very close to being hit in my jugular, very close to my femoral artery and no bones were broken or punctured by the shrapnel and I guess one could say very quickly that I was lucky, but I believe I was blessed."