Mark Binelli - Scott Olsen: Casualty of the Occupation | Rolling Stone
The projectile that struck Olsen fractured his skull and left him in critical condition. More crucially for the narrative, Olsen turned out to be a 24-year-old ex-Marine who’d survived two tours of duty in Iraq. For a movement supposedly without leaders, this sort of compelling personal story was enough to make him an overnight icon, the perfect almost-martyr. Though he couldn’t even speak for days, a shaky video of other protesters carrying him to safety got endless replays. In the footage, you can hear people around him screaming, “Medic! Medic!” as if a MASH unit might be somewhere nearby, and see Olsen himself, who looks absurdly young, staring up wide-eyed, but unable to speak, as someone shouts, “What’s your name?” As the bedlam churns around him, Olsen slowly reaches up and touches his bleeding head.
“When I heard he was a Marine, I was expecting some six-foot-four guy,” the Bay Area journalist Edwin Dobb, who has been covering Occupy Oakland, told me. “But he could pass for a junior in high school.”
