First Lt. Conor McDowell didn’t know he was writing about himself when he detailed concerns about rollover accidents he was seeing while training at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California.
“Sometimes you just need to vent even if it’s to a piece of paper,” he wrote in his journal to his fiancé, Kathleen Bourque. “I’m writing to you, so it’s like we’re having a conversation… …We got lucky no injuries occurred. It’s a miracle no one was killed. This is a reminder that at any moment, through careless action even in training Marines can die.”
Conor was killed when the light armored vehicle, or LAV, he was commanding hit a hidden ditch and rolled over in May of 2019. He was crushed. Six crew members were injured. The official report obtained by WUSA9 says Conor was not at fault in the accident.
His parents Michael and Susan got the tragic news from the Marine Corps at their Eastern Shore home in Chestertown, Maryland.
“’Just tell me he’s wounded,’” Michael recalls saying to the Marines. “‘Please don’t tell me he’s dead.’ And they said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’”
A Congressional Research Service Report shows over a 14-year period, the number of service members killed in accidents is double the number of those killed in action. In fact, accidental deaths account for one-third of all active duty deaths from 2006-2020. A total of 1,915 of them involved vehicles.
Less then 10 percent of military have been in combat yet every veteran I meet has a war story.
Well that’s not what I’ve found at all and I have known many from Vietnam till now. I’ve seen the before and after and the awful change from boy to man. The ones that I know that have been through hell come home, don’t or won’t mention it. I didn’t make the grade after their physical, I was 4-F. I’ve lost some good friends and high school classmates. I told one that had 3 tours in Vietnam that I felt guilty. He replied “don’t feel bad, we don’t have any bad feeling towards you”. He also said thank god you weren’t there. That’s just my experience with the veterans I personally know.
While the USS Guadalcanal (LPH7) was deployed to the
Middle East in response to the Iranian hostage situation,
in the six months my surgical response team was stationed
aboard, no fewer than four sailors were killed: one by head
injury and drowning in rough seas debarking from a liberty
boat to a steel donut; one by drowning in a liberty port**; one
hit by a civilian vehicle while on liberty, and; an unlucky
air bosun’s mate knocked over the side when a poorly
secured helicopter tipped over in rough weather in open
sea off the coast of Italy.
Our group left the ship halfway through the cruise, so
there could have been more deaths later on.
** – this one might have been a Marine enlisted man. The
rest were sailors.