PROGRESS 2024 Veteran Spotlight – Craig Bullion
Bullion played college baseball and had a stint as a Franklin County Sheriff’s Office corrections officer, but something wasn’t clicking. He said he had considered enlisting before and even taken some steps that direction, but it hadn’t seemed to come together. A pivotal moment, however, cemented his decision to join up: watching his younger brother graduate from boot camp. “I just knew,” Bullion said. From that moment, he was Marine Corps-bound.
Someone who wasn’t too keen on that decision was Bullion’s mother. He said she was one of the biggest obstacles to him enlisting. “That feeling for her never left until it was done and there was nothing she could do about it,” Bullion said. She tried to prevent Bullion, as well as his younger brother Hunter Hulsey, from enlisting with great fervor – to the point that she intimidated recruiters away from the house by sitting on the front porch with a shotgun.
But Bullion said when she saw the love her sons had for the Marine Corps, and their determination, she was the biggest supporter they had.
After some paperwork hold-ups with his enlistment process, Bullion’s first stop in his military journey was his own boot camp experience. “It was a definitely a shock,” he said. One notable element was the younger age of most of his fellow recruits, many of them straight out of high school. “I had taken other avenues in life early on … So here I am, showing up as an ‘old guy’ at 21, so it definitely was little bit of a challenge.”
In the overall analysis, though, age turned out not to be that much of a dividing factor. “Everybody gets treated exactly the same, and they’re going to break you down physically and mentally to be able to mold you and make into the Marine they need you to be, not who you think you are,” Bullion said.
The 2005 Russellville grad spent 13 weeks learning the ropes at Parris Island, S.C. He said it was the little things that helped make the challenging experience easier to bear: the Spanish moss reminding him of his mother, or some good music – especially George Strait’s “Troubador” – playing on the radio during the bus ride to church on a Sunday morning.
Marine Combat Training followed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, with in-depth instruction on different weapons systems and operational strategies. At Camp Geiger, a Lejeune satellite facility, Bullion learned more of the specifics of serving in embarkation logistics – a role he said his recruiter talked him into. As an embarkation specialist, Bullion’s role was to prepare supplies and equipment for transportation – from making load plans, to inventorying materials, down to every minute detail to ensure smooth sailing from departure to arrival.
Bullion was assigned to HMLA 467, a helicopter squadron, at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina. He had to dive right in to his assignment, managing embarkation logistics with four Marines under his charge. “Usually, the job I was doing there would be a Marine who would have been there for three to five years,” Bullion said – but as senior personnel were tapped for this mission or that one, Bullion was ultimately left to essentially serve as a staffing CO, despite his youth. He didn’t let it bother him. “At that point in my life and in my career, I had drive, I had discipline, and I had the confidence,” Bullion said. “I was OK with being that guy.”
At one point Bullion’s unit was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. It was Bullion’s time to shine as embarkation specialist, and he said he spent long hours working on the logistics to prepare to ship out. About 12 hours out, however, their deployment was canceled; the squadron’s three-blade copters were not as agile as the newer four-blade models, and the decision was made to send a different group instead.
“It was a gut shock. Everybody was a little upset about it,” said Bullion. “When I enlisted, I had full knowledge and hopes that I was going to get deployed and was going to go fight for my country. That’s what I wanted to do.” They would have been in Helmand province for an anticipated nine months.
Although he missed his chance at combat, Bullion did get to put his embarkation logistics skills to work in the summer of 2012 with a deployment to Guatemala. His squadron took part in an still-ongoing anti-drug trafficking operation, called Operation Martillo, which began in January 2012. “It was the first named operation since Operation Enduring Freedom,” said Bullion – which began in 2001.
Getting ready to deploy to Guatemala was a major operation in and of itself. The three-month trip involved loading up C5 and C17 cargo planes with 75 tons of equipment, supplies and personnel. Bullion had to plan for every group’s necessary supplies and plan out the best way to pack it all – including the five helicopters they broke down for transport. “You have to develop a load plan, and if you don’t have that load plan set up correctly, you’re going to have that plane lopsided,” Bullion said. It took months of planning and preparation to coordinate.
In cooperation with the Coast Guard, the Marines flew night flights to try to locate vessels that were moving drugs across the Guatemalan border, monitoring coastline armed with packets of intel to guide their surveillance.
Getting all their supplies and equipment back home was a little easier, given it followed a similar plan as the outgoing trip, but one added factor was making sure all U.S. property was clean of any foreign contaminants that might impede their return to the states. Bullion said he earned the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for his efforts in Guatemala.
When he tour of duty was coming to an end, Bullion had some personal life things going on that drove his decision not to re-enlist. He said that’s one of his biggest regrets in life. “I fell in love with everything about it,” he said. “There’s nothing I’m more proud of than that I earned the title of Marine and served my country.”
After serving as a Russellville Police deputy for eight years, Bullion recently took a job with the Russellville Electric Department, a job which he said is less stressful and gives him more time with family.
Bullion and his wife Angela have two daughters and a son, ages 21, 17 and 12, and one grandchild.
