1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment

Waseca, Minnesota

Killed in Action 28 February 2014,

Helmand Province, Afghanistan

This week, Bronze Squadron honors Corporal Caleb L. Erickson.

Caleb Erickson was the kind of Marine every unit hopes to have. He was the one who stood up when something needed doing — never backing down, and never pushing the hard work off onto someone else. If there was a job nobody wanted, he already had his hands on it before the rest were done complaining about it. That was simply who he was, all the way down.

He was also the one who kept everybody loose. He had a thick Minnesota accent he'd let his brothers rag on all day long, and he'd lean right into it — making himself the butt of the joke just so everyone else was laughing instead of miserable. His Marines called him "Snow Bunny." You could not stay in a bad mood around him for very long.

Caleb was from Waseca, Minnesota. A two-year starter on his high school football team, he graduated in 2012 and joined the Corps just about the second he had his diploma in hand — it was what he had always wanted to do. He became a motor transport mechanic with 1st Battalion, 9th Marines out of Camp Lejeune and deployed to Helmand Province on his first tour.

On 28 February 2014, Caleb was the gunner in the last truck of his convoy when it was struck by a suicide bomber. He was twenty years old, and about two months from coming home.

Here is the part that tells you everything you need to know about him. He had been offered an early trip home. He turned it down. He would not leave early while his brothers were still out there doing the work — the same as he would never let anyone else carry a load he could carry himself. That was Caleb from first to last. Never handing off the hard thing.

He was posthumously promoted to Corporal. Back home, a stretch of Highway 13 running through Waseca is now the Corporal Caleb L. Erickson Memorial Highway. His battalion dedicated an aircraft to him at Camp Leatherneck. And every February his town still raises a glass of "Snow Bunny" in his memory. He is not forgotten.

Caleb Erickson was hard-worker. He cared about the people around him more than he cared about himself. And he was one hell of a Marine.

Rest easy, Marine. We have it from here.

Semper Fidelis.

Till Valhalla brother. The best of us