Jan Bender
speaker
5 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 11 Nov
Jan Bender’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
We come up and we're right beside this house and we're looking down the street and I think we were just kind of getting our wits about us. And this fireball just explodes right beside us. It just like was like a sledgehammer to the chest and boom hit this wall and
I remember kind of shaking my head and, of course, you can't hear anything. You got these guys yelling and it goes from, hey, Marine, get over here, to whoa, whoa, whoa. Like you can't, guys are yelling and you just can't hear it because your head's wrong. We didn't understand what had happened. We thought, you know, a car exploded or whatever it was. And as we pull guys back into this courtyard and we clear the first house we were in.
Our staff sergeant tells us that was a tank. Personally, I'd never been that close to the tank when it fired, and we were probably less than six feet from the front of an Abrams main gun, and it thumped. It rung all our bells. Ficamo and I are looking over some paperwork in one of these rooms, and he's right in front of me, and we're close. We're kind of face-to-face looking over this stuff and trying to read, and out of the corner of my eye,
I basically see an Iraqi man, you know, we called it a man dress, but the average attire for an Iraqi guy is basically a floor-length dress shirt, you know, and he's got the rag around the top of his head or whatever, and he comes in and just instinctively, you know, you've been in this environment and this mindset for so long that that means danger, that means death in a lot of circumstances. And, you know, like I said, it was out of the corner of my eye, and I didn't really want to
I learned the fact that I knew he was there, but I just draw fast. I got my 9mm right here, and I pull, aim in, and I'm half squeezed on this trigger. I mean, I am, in my mind, he's already dead. And it's Bolov. And he'd thrown this Iraqi attire on, thinking it was funny. And it really was not funny, especially when you're inside the city of Fallujah. So he got a body slam for that one, and I don't know. He just wasn't a very deep thinker, I guess.
Showing 1–5 of 5