REDDING, CA, USA
U.S. Marines
CPL, I CO, 3D BN, 1ST MAR, 1ST MAR DIV, CAMP PENDLETON, CA
BASTION ROE2, AFGHANISTAN 09/09/2007
USMC Corporal Travis Woods had already completed a tour of duty in Iraq before he went to Afghanistan. Corporal Woods passed away on September 9, 2007 at the Military hospital in Bastion, Germany, due to injuries suffered in an attack in Northern Helmand Afghanistan. He was assigned to I Company, 3d Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, California. He was twenty-one years old.
Travis moved to Shasta County, CA from Mt. Shasta when he was five years old. He was a 2004 graduate of Foothill High School. He loved BMX bikes, snowboarding, and surfing.
The story of Woods’ heroism while on patrol in Northern Afghanistan was revealed by a fellow Marine official as 300 supporters, friends and family members came to honor Travis. As rifle rounds rained down and rocket propelled grenades exploded around him, U.S. Marine Cpl. Travis Woods disregarded his own life to administer first aid to a fallen comrade. Travis had kept to himself the tale of saving the life of a fellow Marine sometime in the weeks before he was killed. Even his closest friend didn’t know the story that earned Woods a Navy Commendation medal with “Combat V” for valor. The medal was passed to his mother, Stacey Woods.
A friend, who joined the Corps with Travis while they were still students at Foothill High School in Palo Cedro, was among the friends and loved ones who told stories about the Marine during the memorial service. Wearing his Marine dress uniform, Travis’s friend told of Travis’s exploits, which included slipping a friend laxatives and scaring the daylights out of one of his sister’s dates. His friend’s father, assistant chief of the California Highway Patrol’s northern division, presented the Woods’ family a folded California flag on behalf of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Maj. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, commanding general of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command announced that Travis’s name would be the first Marine name to be inscribed on a memorial wall at the Marine’s new special operations headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. “These are hard men and women doing a hard job at a hard time,” Hejlik said.
Friends remembered that Travis was funny and fun and always kind of a risk-taker said a friend. But after high school, he turned into this real man.
Travis Woods is survived by his mother and his father, Paul, as well as a sister, Tessa, 18, and a brother, Jake, 14.
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