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Marine receives happy homecoming
By BOB McCLURE
| Article published on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 |
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| Everett Dickson stands outside his parents’ home in Seminole. |
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SEMINOLE – When U.S. Marine Sgt. Everett Dickson pulled into the driveway of his family’s Seminole home on June 24, he was greeted by a colorful banner above the garage door welcoming him home.
The bright-red banner with gold letters was compliments of his parents, Cathy and Ken Dickson of 7795 115th St.
Dickson, 29, recently ended a five-year hitch in the Marine Corps that took him to Iraq and Afghanistan as a loadmaster on a KC-130 aircraft.
“We refueled aircraft in flight,” he said, “and we dropped cool stuff like threatening notes and leaflets.”
Dickson, a 1998 graduate of Seminole High School where he was a member of the swimming team, served seven months at Al Asad Air Base, west of Iraq and eight months at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan.
“Iraq was like a vacation compared to Afghanistan,” he said. “We got rocket attacks nightly in Afghanistan. That’s when it got kind of hairy.”
He said Taliban insurgents used dry ice as a method to delay ignition of the rockets.
“They would be a long way away whenever the rockets launched, so we never had a good chance to get them,” he said. “We were supposed to be a secure base but somebody inside was giving them information on how to adjust to targets until they finally hit them. One time they attacked an area where I worked but it was on a day that we didn’t have any air traffic and I wasn’t there.”
Quite often he was part of missions to deliver supplies or pickup people in remote areas of Afghanistan. Often the crew had to put the plane down in areas where only short, dirt air strips existed.
Dickson’s job was to guard the rear cargo door while the plane was on the ground and it wasn’t uncommon for unexpected intruders to get within a kill zone.
“The hardest thing to accept was that there were kids coming up trying to kill us,” he said.
Dickson joined the Marines in 2004 when it appeared nothing was going right for him career-wise. He had graduated from St. Petersburg College with an associate’s degree but something was missing. The Marine Corps filled the void.
“It’s one of the greatest experiences I’ve gone through,” Dickson said. “All the hardships and deployments and all the simple things in life you learn you can live without. Plus, I haven’t met a better set of friends.”
His next goal is to earn an aerospace engineering degree at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. He begins classes in late July and hopes to earn both bachelor’s and master’s degrees there.
From there he hopes to land a job with the Department of Defense.
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Article published on Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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