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He did not actually disarm the IEDs himself. “We patrolled with the regular infantry on whatever combat missions they had.”īut as a combat engineer, Jones’s primary responsibility was finding IEDs before they could do damage to his comrades. “People were shooting at us and we were shooting back,” Jones said. There Rob and his fellow Marines found the action was a as hot as it had been cold in Iraq. His unit was soon shifted to Sangin, a district in the eastern portion of Helmand Province. In April 2010 he arrived in the city of Delaram in Western Afghanistan. Then he got word that his unit would deploy again, this time to Afghanistan. All the while he continued attending weekend sessions of his Marine reserve unit. He worked a regular job on a traffic safety maintenance crew. “It had been very dangerous there a few years before, but by the time we got there it was relatively calm,” Jones said.Īt the end of that tour, Jones rotated back to the states and took up residence in Blacksburg, VA, home of his alma mater. From January through August 2008, Jones’s unit was posted near the city of Habbaniyah in Al-Anbar Province, about 55 miles west of Baghdad, Iraq. There was no chance he would stay in the States while his Marine buddies were going into a war zone.

At one point, he planned to go to officer’s school, but when he finished his undergraduate work at Tech, he learned his unit was being deployed to Iraq. He completed basic training while he was still in college then became a member of the Fourth Combat Engineer Battalion, Bravo Division, a reserve unit based in Baltimore, MD. But by the time he finished college, Jones was in the Marine reserves.