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2A I DAWSON COUNTY NEWS I dawsonnews.com
Wednesday, July 3,2019
Sam Walley’s journey through war, wounds, recovery
Scott Rogers DCN Regional Staff
Samuel Walley, of Winder, visits the Freedom Garden Friday, June 21, at the
Northeast Georgia History Center.The Afghanistan War veteran was wounded
by an IED and now is volunteering with PTSD groups while going to school.
By Nick Bowman
DCN Regional Staff
Samuel Walley’s mind was clear as
the blast separated the soldier from the
earth and two of his limbs, lifting him
20 feet on a cloud of dust and adrenaline
and death.
He’s younger than he looks, leaning
forward over a coffee table in the over-
air-conditioned lobby of the Martha T.
Nesbitt Academic Building at the
University of North Georgia Gainesville
campus. Covered in tattoos but holding
onto the clean-cut military haircut, he
navigates life using a prosthetic leg and
a head full of experience and memories
that most 26-year-olds in Gainesville are
blessed to be without.
He’s the son of a construction worker
father, Kelly Walley, and a mother,
Connie Walley, who in his early life
worked cleaning churches but now
works with Project ADAM, a drug-
rehab ministry in his hometown.
He’s a former soldier of the 82nd
Airborne Division and was very close to
being killed while deployed to the Zhari
district near Kandahar in southern
Afghanistan.
These days, he’s a student of political
science at UNG with hopes of getting
into politics to help make life a little
easier for veterans. He’s lived in
Gainesville since leaving the Army in
2014.
“He’s been very instrumental in all of
our fundraiser events, and he’s been a
big supporter of For The Warriors
Foundation,” said Mike Seely, a retired
airman and former brigadier general in
the Georgia National Guard. “I can’t say
enough about him. He’s been very ener
getic, very dedicated.”
Most of all, Walley’s recovered —
from his wounds, from the nightmares
that followed him home from
Afghanistan, from the deaths and sui
cides of his former squad mates who
returned stateside and, for one reason or
another, couldn’t find their own recov
ery.
“These are the guys you have to turn
back to. You have the biggest common
ality with them,” Walley said, describing
bonds that form tighter than family in
the midst of firefights, bomb sweeps and
patrol after patrol.
His connection to his fellow soldiers
was forged tight in the stress of war:
Killing, seeing friends be killed and
navigating through a prolonged war in
rural Afghanistan.
“When you get out, everybody is
going to deal with their demons whether
it’s 7 weeks after returning stateside or
its 20, 30 years down the road,” Walley
said.
He paused, and then added: “We’ve
lost four guys in my platoon stateside.”
'I wanted to be in the fight'
Walley was born June 4, 1993. He
attended County Line Elementary,
Russell Middle and Winder-Barrow
High School. He graduated in 2010.
He always wanted to be in the mili
tary, though didn’t know what branch.
For about a decade he aimed for the
Marine Corps, but his time in Junior
Reserve Officer Training Corps in high
school taught him that he’d be more at
home following his father, who served
as a combat engineer, into the Army.
Looking at early enlistment as an
upperclassman at Winder High, his
choices of role in the Army were whit
tled down to four: infantry, supply, truck
driver, combat journalist.
“My mom wanted me to be a combat
journalist,” Walley said, chuckling, “but
there’s no way I was about to go get
shot at and not have a firearm to shoot
back.”
He wanted a combat role — wanted to
“be in the fight somehow,” he added.
“The best way to do it was infantry. So I
picked infantry.”
He wanted not just to serve but to
fight because of 9/11. Though he was
just a fourth grader, he remembers the
“absolute chaos” of the day terrorists
flew two jets into the World Trade
Center, killing 2,977, and a third into
the Pentagon, killing 125.
“I remember talking to my parents
later that day, starting to understand
what just happened,” Walley said, think
ing back to 2001, “but you’re still a kid.
I don’t think I started to fully understand
the concept of America being attacked
until probably high school.”
Young children don’t think much of
the world beyond the confines of their
neighborhoods, he said. Your parents
know it all, the world works in a fixed,
routine way and the bad guys out there
are relegated to bedtime frights and TV.
But Walley got older, and he learned
what being attacked meant for a nation
that went from enjoying the Peace
Dividend to being the victim of the
deadliest terrorist attack on the planet.
“You learn that you’re not the only
one in this world,” he said.
Ready for war
The food was good in Kyrgyzstan,
one of the stops along the way from Fort
Bragg to the Kandahar Airfield in south
ern Afghanistan.
Eating, waiting and sitting through
briefing after briefing — jokes about
Microsoft PowerPoint forever rumble
through the ranks of the Army — punc
tuated Walley’s days between February
and March 2012.
But into March, he was in the thick of
Operation Enduring Freedom, leaving
the huge airfield for a tiny station at Pan
Kalay. On the way, he would get his first
taste of combat in the form of a few tiny
tinking sounds while on board a
Chinook bound for the outpost.
“We got shot at by a guy in the middle
of the desert. He was shooting at us with
an AK. That guy, they lit him up. He
was dust. He was nothing,” Walley said.
“That’s when it hit me. All I heard was
like little tinks, that’s it. But after you
look out in the field and see this guy and
see him get disintegrated, you realize,
‘Oh. This is real. This is no longer on
paper. This is no longer a game. This is
real s-t.’”
He would first enter combat while on
patrol at Pan Kalay, a station of about
100 American soldiers and members of
Afghanistan’s national army.
“I can’t really remember times where
we went outside the wire and didn’t get
in a firefight,” he said. “The way we did
our rotation was three days on, three
days off. We would have three days of
going on patrol, and those first three
patrols — those stuck out to me the
most.
“After that, you forget what number it
is. It just all starts to become a big blur.”
Zhari
Walley lost his right leg, his left arm
and almost his life because of a bicycle.
June 6, 2012, started as a normal day
— or a routine day, as there wasn’t
much normal to go around for soldiers
in the Zhari district near Kandahar.
Unlike Pan Kalay, Zhari was just a
checkpoint not much larger than a foot
ball field. It was home to about 30 sol
diers.
Two days before — Walley’s 19th
birthday — a higher-up in the Taliban
had been captured by his platoon within
the 82nd Airborne Division. Agitated by
the loss, the terrorist group was expect
ed to step up activity in the region.
“(We were) going out, going to
observe new areas, looking for IED
caches, weapon caches, just really get
ting to know the terrain like it’s the back
of your hand,” Walley said. “We just call
it presence patrols, going out and show
ing face.”
Navigating new territory in
Afghanistan is a stressful, slow process.
And out front goes the mine sweeper.
He’s “worried about looking at the
ground checking for IEDs, that’s their
job,” Walley said. “There’s a guy behind
him, the team leader ... that would clear
the ground with poker chips. You know
if you need to move in and out of an
area, you go along the poker chips
because you’re not going to step near an
IED.”
On June 6, Walley’s platoon pushed to
the north of the compound where the
Taliban commander had been captured,
crawling over grape rows in the country
side when they happened upon a group
of four men in what had been estab
lished by U.S. forces as a kill zone.
“We pop up out of the grape row and
start questioning them. One guy takes
off on a bike,” Walley said. “I just spoke
a little, tiny amount of Poshtun —
enough to yell at people and get by. You
could tell they were lying.”
Through a translator, the men were
told to clear the area or potentially be
killed if they were seen again.
The man on the bike
“Now, we’re worried on this guy on
the bike that had just taken off,” he said.
The soldiers followed his trail to a
two-story structure with bars on the
windows, an unusual find for that area
of rural Afghanistan.
“It was an L-shaped compound. It was
two floors. To get up to the top floor,
there was a hill,” Walley said. “That’s
where the road was. What we were
going to do to get this guy on the bike
was get one team on one side of the
road and wait for another team on the
other side of the road.”
They called in a helicopter that would
cut off the man fleeing on his bicycle
and, hopefully, flush him back toward
the waiting soldiers. In the meantime,
they cleared the structure and found a
dull knife and burn marks on the floor
— clear signs that IEDs were being
made in the building.
“All my Spidey senses are going off.
Something is wrong,” he said.
Others in his platoon searching the
structure had just passed into the main
chamber, the longest room of the
L-shaped structure.
“I look in the door, the long part of
the L they just went into, and there’s a
wire hanging out of the wall,” he said.
“Nobody had noticed it. My heart sank
— at that point, you feel like puking.”
There was a bomb planted somewhere
in the building.
His team rushed out of the compound.
At the same time, they got word the
helicopter they called in cut off their tar
get on the bicycle early and they had
only a few minutes to prepare to snatch
him on his way back.
All the while, they didn’t know where
the IED was.
With no time to set up an ambush for
their target on the roadway, Walley
looked for the signal from his leader to
improvise.
“With that amount of time, you had
literally seconds to react,” he said. “I
remember hearing the bike, and I just
looked across at my squad leader. All he
did was nod at me. There was no time.”
A capture, at this point, felt out of the
question. There was too much at risk —
a bomb in the area, no time to prepare
for a transport and enemy fighters likely
in the area.
“I’ll be God honest, in my head I was
just going to shoot him,” he said. “If
something goes bad, it could go really
bad and it could be all three of our lives
done.”
After the signal from his leader,
Walley cut wide on the building, doing
his best to avoid the edges of the struc
ture where insurgents were known to
plant IEDs. He rounded the corner to
catch the target as he followed the road
down its descent from the top of the
structure to the bottom.
See Walley 17A
OBITUARIES
Maureen Chrisman
Justice "Gracie"
Maureen
Chrisman
Justice
“Gracie,” age
75, died on
Tuesday, June
18, 2019, at her
home in Port
Wentworth, j us tj C e
GA. Her strong
will to live, unwavering faith in
God, and the love and prayers of
family, friends and many sup
porters carried her through 38
rounds of grueling
Chemotherapy; she died, just as
she lived, with dignity and grace.
A Memorial Mass celebrat
ing her life will be held on
Saturday, July 27, 2019, at 11
a.m. at Christ the Redeemer
Catholic Church, 991 Kilough
Church Rd., Dawsonville,
Georgia.
In lieu of flowers, please
make donations in her name, to
the American Cancer Society.
Dawson County News
July 3, 2019
DEATH NOTICES
Darlene Farrell Bost
Darlene Farrell Bost, 77, of
Roswell, died June 23, 2019.
McDonald and Son Funeral
Home of Cumming was in
charge of the arrangements.
Jacob Tanner Branson
Jacob Tanner Branson, 20, of
Dawsonville, died June 26,
2019.Bearden Funeral Home of
Dawsonville was in charge of
the arrangements.
Deloana Turner Griffin
Deloana Turner Griffin, of
Adairsville, died June 23, 2019.
McDonald and Son Funeral
Home of Cumming was in
charge of the arrangements.
Thomas H. Owen
Thomas H. Owen, 86, of
Dawsonville, died June 28,
2019. Bearden Funeral Home
of Dawsonville was in charge
of the arrangements.
Billy Ray Tweed
Billy Ray Tweed, 92, of
Dawsonville, died June 28,
2019. Bearden Funeral Home
of Dawsonville was in charge
of the arrangements.
Betty Sue Williamson
Betty Sue Williamson, 83, of
Cumming, died June 27, 2019.
Ingram Funeral Home and
Crematory of Cumming was in
charge of the arrangements.
^ Daws o n C o u nty N e ws
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