By Tom Hale
You may have met Sergeant Amanda Eason in Episode 82 published on Nov. 11, 2015. She related her story about April 20, 2010 when her convoy was ambushed in Afghanistan.
The armored truck she was driving took two direct IED hits with the equivalent of 120 pounds of dynamite. Her staff sergeant was wounded in the attack and had to be air evaced under fire.
Her patrol could not be rescued until early the next morning after spending a harrowing night listening to enemy bullets ping off the vehicles.
On Memorial Day 2010 she, along with four fellow Marines, was awarded the Purple Heart. She suffers permanent hearing loss in one ear and some peripheral vision loss in one eye.
This was the Caribou High School graduate’s eighth full marathon that she has run including the Marine Corps Marathon and the New York Marathon a week later.
When asked about the Caribou course she said, “It’s OK for as hilly as the course was. I’ll take it but it wasn’t my best but it wasn’t my worst time.”
Eason was especially pleased that her younger brother Matt Trombley ran a half-marathon today. Matt resides in Bangor and is the executive director of critical care, long term, and rehab at a Bangor Nursing Home.
Eason was accompanied north by her 20-month-old daughter Elizabeth. You may recall her husband Geoffrey, who works in the motorsports industry, currently maintaining F.H. Furr’s personal collection of Mopars.
The Eason family resides in Quantico, Virginia. Amanda is the daughter of Cindy and Jeff Trombley of Woodland. Semper Fi Marine!
Tom Hale of New Sweden wrote 14 years as freelancer for the Bangor Daily News covering motorsports in Maine. Now blogging and concentrating on human interest stories about people and places in His Up North Motorsports (http://upnorthmotorsports.bangordailynews.com/) feature in the BDN.
