Local Marine recovering from injuries by By Lindsey Ziliak, Kokomo Tribune
On July 5, 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Zach Nelson was searching for improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan when the mine detection vehicle he was in hit a boulder in the road and flipped “violently.”
“They had been down this path many, many times,” his mother, Melinda Nelson of Kokomo said on a recent afternoon. “There were never any boulders there before.”
Family friend Jim Irwin said insurgents had put the rock there. It was flanked by IEDs on either side.
The vehicle’s driver had no choice but to go over the boulder.
Irwin said Lance Cpl. Nelson was in the most vulnerable spot in the vehicle. He was the gunner. He was standing up outside the vehicle and facing backward.
“He couldn’t even see it coming,” Irwin said.
When the vehicle started to roll, Nelson’s fellow Marines tried to pull him inside to protect him, but he still took the brunt of the impact, his mother said.
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