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ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. (WJHL)- Marine Corps Veteran Andy Wetzel said he’s always wanted to help others.
“Serving my country, other than serving the Lord, there’s no greater privilege in this world,” said Wetzel.
Wetzel started as an infantryman and worked his way up. He spent two tours in Iraq.
“We had perimeter security around al-Asad Air Base. And we’re also responsible for all the convoys that came in and out of the base,” Wetzel said. “We were at the Jordan border a lot picking up supplies; Baghdad, Ramadi, so we were traveling a lot. We were running basically a convoy a night.”
He was there as a sergeant in 2004 and as a company gunnery sergeant in 2009. Both times he was responsible for groups of men.
“In ’04, we had very little. We had to do a lot on our own to take care of ourselves, a lot of borrowing, a lot of begging, things like that. Our living conditions were safe but they weren’t elaborate by any means,” said Wetzel. “When we went back in 2009, they had a Burger King and a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the base. So that kind of gives you the transition of how things worked out in those few years.”
All of the men in Wetzel’s group made it home both times.
“I was responsible for a lot of guys. Forty-six in ’04 and the whole company really in 2009. Being the company gunnery sergeant, I wasn’t tactically involved, but I was in charge of all their supplies, making sure they had everything they needed to accomplish all their missions,” he said. “It was absolutely the most important thing. I mean, it’s no different than a job I do here at the fire department that when I show up in the morning, my job is to keep these guys safe and make sure they come back home to their families the next morning. And that was that was pretty much my job there, too.”
Wetzel is now one of three battalion chiefs of the Elizabethton Fire Department.
“The discipline. The, again, the understanding of training, the understanding of the importance of taking care of your men, all those things. I hope I brought to the fire department,” Wetzel said. “There’s nowhere that I found that had the camaraderie and the brotherhood and men taking care of men like I had in the military. This is the closest thing that I found to that was coming to the fire service.”
The lessons learned in the Marines helped prepare him to lead crews at three different fire stations.
“The focus had to be razor sharp. You had to understand everything that was going on,” he said. “Your preparation prior to leaving the wire on a convoy or something like that was paramount to make sure we had our bases covered with anything that could possibly happen outside that wire.”
In the Wetzel family, serving the country doesn’t stop with him. His three sons are also in the Marine Corps.
“It’s obviously a lot of pride in them following in my footsteps,” Weltzel said. “My dad was a tanker in the Army and my grandfather was in the Army Air Corps during World War Two. So there’s a lineage of service in our family. “
Wetzel is also the Commander for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2166 and the Veterans War Memorial Committee in Elizabethton.
