Expecting to go to Columbia “to chase drug lords around,” Raleigh master officer John Walls, a 21-year-old Marine in 2001, found himself on the edge of inevitable war. 

“When [9/11] happened…it was like sucking the wind out of your lungs,” Walls said. “We all knew that this meant war and we were going to end up doing something and going somewhere.”

Instead of going to Afghanistan, Walls ended up playing a part in one of the War on Terror’s more secret fronts. Operation Enduring Freedom has worked against terrorism, more or less combat related, in the trans-Saharan area, Chad, the Philippines and Djibouti.

Through the eyes of a new husband in his early 20s , Walls described his sights, sounds and feelings as he went to one of the world’s poorest and most dangerous places.

‘[State] wasn’t for me.’

Walls spent only one semester at N.C . State, although it was long enough to meet his wife, Kristie.

“I realized that wasn’t for me, and I went and joined the Marine Corps,” he said.

Kristie and Walls were married on his boot camp leave in early 2001, only a few months before their lives were turned upside down.

On 9/11, Walls had just returned from desert training, a requirement for all troops once a year. He discovered he would soon have to use it, although he didn’t know where.

“We did battalion formation, and our battalion commander, Lt. Col. Miller, told us that the U.S . had been attacked and not to unpack our bags–that we were going to a desert site.”

The sudden war made it hard on the new couple.

“I was a lot more concerned–a lot more worried about his safety,” Kristie said. “There were a lot more sleepless nights.”

Walls was deployed four times within four years.

“In eight months we were deployed pretty quickly to Kosovo for peace keeping, and we went from there to Africa,” Walls said.

“It was very high speed”

The U.S . went to Africa, according to Walls, because Al-Qaeda fleeing Afghanistan hijacked a plane to Djibouti and took the country over.

“[Al-Qaeda] took the international airport over, and we flew in there and took it back and gave it back to the sovereign nation,” he said.

The Djiboutian government gave the U.S . Camp Lemonier who used it as their base of operations in the Horn of Africa, a place they discovered to be crawling with terrorist camps.

“We would go and do raids into Somalia, into Yemen and places like that in 2002 and take terrorists out. Delta Force and Navy Seals did most of the dirty work,” Walls said. “They were doing the precisions strikes—the insurgent strikes—and we were doing backup for them.”

Walls said the strength of the military was surprising.

“It was very high speed. It was a lot of ops, a lot of missions very quickly. We were constantly working. They were doing predator drone strikes into other countries and terrorist training camps,” he said. “It was very, I guess, awe inspiring that we had that much intelligence.”

All of this was secret at first. Walls could not tell his wife where he was at the time. When calling home and operators asked what country they were calling from, they couldn’t say Djibouti.

Kristie said it was frustrating with John not being able to tell her what was going on, but she understood.

“I still don’t know all the details of what he’s done or where he’s been,” she said.

The ‘heart’ of Africa

Walls described Djibouti as a gorgeous place with a pro-American, but extremely poor, populace.

It made him think twice about complaining, he said.

“You know you would see just a whole herd of goats and sheep coming out of the desert with these sheep farmers or goat farmers—and they’ve been out there for days with just a little bottle of water,” Walls said. “I used to think, ‘You won’t see many Americans do that. They’re just not as tough as these people.'”

Walls said when his unit first landed on the beach, he was met with a surprise.

“And I remember it was just hilarious—there were probably 300 kids there—and we were expecting enemy combatants,” he said. “And they’d be ‘Mister, mister! Coca-cola? Cigarette? Cigarette?'”

Contact with locals virtually ceased once they arrived on base, he said. But there were some Djiboutians who came on base to cut hair.

“They would be searched every day, and they would come over onto the base and set a little make-shift barber shop up in this little shed and give us hair cuts for $2 a piece,” Walls said. “They did a great job.”

Pink mist

Walls’s most memorable time in Djibouti came one night after a long day’s patrol.

“I got woke up by my best friend and was told that I had a son. And I got helo-lifted back out of the base and taken to Camp Lemonier and got to make a phone call to my wife, and I got to hear my son cry. And man, it was awesome. But also it was such a low point because I wasn’t there to take care of my family. I wasn’t home.”

The hardships of war didn’t seem to cease for Walls. He witnessed the death of his friend gunnery sergeant Ronald E. Baum in Iraq on May 3, 2004.

“I remember that so vividly—the smell of copper in the air, the sound of gunfire in the background, the smell of sulfur from the weapons going off, the gunpowder burning,” Walls said.

Baum was covering Wall’s men in a firefight with his machine gun.

“He was struck by a mortar that was dropped into the turret that he was in. He just…there was not much at all left of him. There were very few things we could send home in a body bag.”

Initially after the blast, Walls didn’t realize what had happened.

“I saw the mortar strike him and I thought…he was there one minute and then just boom—pink mist,” Walls said. “I remember seeing a good friend of mine and saying ‘Where did he go?’ And I remember Patrick looking at me and saying, ‘Man, he’s dead. He’s gone.'”

Being forced to bottle his grief and lead his men is something that has stuck with Walls. 

“I mean, an hour before he died, me and him were sitting smoking a cigarette together BS’ing about hunting when we got back and about our families,” Walls said. “It was one of the hardest things I have ever dealt with. I still carry his dog tags on my keychain to this day, and there is probably not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him.”

Looking ahead

While today, the U.S . military operations out of Africa are now officially limited to providing security assistance to Djiboutian and French armies and some aid to refugees, Walls said there may again be more going on than the U.S . government is letting on.

“What did we just do in Yemen [Sept. 30]? We just bombed the snot out of [Anwar Awlaki , a U.S . born al-Qaeda cleric]. But we had to have people on the ground to find out where that guy was at. And I think there is a lot of that being launched from the Djibouti base that I guess the U.S . government doesn’t want to talk about right now.”

Walls is out of that business now. After being wounded in Iraq, he came back home in 2005 and became a second-generation police officer, joining the Raleigh force in 2007. Walls and his wife have an 8-year-old son, Caleb, and a new daughter, Sabanna .

Now that he is home, he no longer has to make the difficult choice between serving his country and serving his family.

“I was always torn,” Walls said. “[My family’s safety] was always in the back of my mind. It’s extremely frustrating. I think it is one of the reasons why we have such a high divorce rate in our military now.”

Though no longer in the military, the mission of the Marine Corps will always be in his blood, and Walls feels strongly about what the military was and is doing overseas.

“I was very proud of what we did in [Djibouti]—and still am.”