While Bush,Jr vacations: Death Visits a Marine Unit, Once Called Lucky
Sid9
By JOHN KIFNER
and JAMES DAO
Published: August 7, 2005
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Aug. 6 - Until January, they saw one another only
occasionally, meeting for one weekend a month at the low-slung reserve
center near the airport here and then going on drills for two weeks in the
summer.
Some were recent high school graduates, a few were college men, several were
police officers. Most of the Marine Reservists from Lima Company were just
getting their start in life. But for the young men from Columbus, those
lives were changed almost overnight.
Their unit was called up in January. In February they were training in
California. And by March, the members of Lima Company were part of the
1,000-strong Third Battalion, 25th Marines, Fourth Marine Division - 3/25 in
military lingo - and engaged in full-scale war.
Their first few weeks in Iraq were so uneventful that the company of about
160 marines took on the name "Lucky Lima."
But when death came, it came in abundance. The first wave was during a
series of dangerous missions in May. And then on Wednesday, a horrific
roadside explosion took the lives of 14 marines, including an entire squad
of 10 from Lima Company.
"These are my boys," said Gunnery Sgt. Larry Bowman, who was their platoon
sergeant. He was wounded in the same area where five of the company's
marines were killed in May. "I trained with them since January," Sergeant
Bowman said. "Every one of them was like my sons, every single one. I was
responsible for them. I still feel that responsibility."
The members of Lima Company are emblematic of the citizen soldiers who are
bearing much of the weight of the fighting in Iraq. They were plucked from
their daily routines as college students, office workers and parents and in
a matter of months were facing down a rapidly shifting insurgency. Back at
home, their relatives and friends are left deeply torn about the war and its
toll on their families. For a battalion that has suffered much in a short
time, this week was the most agonizing. In addition to those killed by the
explosion on Wednesday, six marines killed in an ambush on Monday were
attached to the 3/25. In all, 47 men attached to the battalion have died
since May, said Lt. Col. Kevin Rush, who leads a headquarters element of the
Third Battalion in Brook Park, a suburb of Cleveland.
Twenty-three of the dead marines belonged to Lima Company, said Master Sgt.
Stephen Walter, a Columbus police sergeant.
Colonel Rush said, "Lima Company is a rifle company, mainly young marines."
He added: "They are the tip of the spear. And when you are at the tip, you
are at the most dangerous part."
Stressed by the demands of the war, the military has had to rely heavily on
reserve components like the 3/25. Reservists make up about 35 percent of the
American forces in Iraq, and the Marine Corps, which is the smallest
fighting service, is particularly hard-pressed.
Some regular units, like the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, which was first
over the berm in March 2003 and took the first fatality, are on their third
tour in Iraq. A little more than 23,000 of the 138,000 American troops in
Iraq are marines, but they have had more than a quarter of the roughly 1,820
casualties.
The marines are not fighting the way they were meant to. They are designed
not as an army of occupation, but as a hard-hitting, light attack force that
can seize and hold a beachhead until heavier forces arrive.
Their main transport in the desert is an amphibious vehicle they call an
Amtrack. It resembles a boat with tanklike treads, lightly armored so it
will not sink, and not designed to travel long distances on land. The
marines killed Wednesday were riding in one of the vehicles when it hit
three antitank mines stacked one on top of the other.
From Home to War
When they were called up, Lima Company, with some added reservists to bring
it to an authorized strength of 160 troops, and the rest of the 3/25 went to
the sprawling Marine base at Twentynine Palms, Calif., for refresher
infantry training. In March, they landed in Iraq, deployed with the regulars
of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force, fighting the nastiest battles in
Anbar Province, trying to root out insurgents and block their ratlines from
Syria.
In May, units of the Third Battalion joined major operations along what has
been dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail of Iraq: a lawless corridor in western
Anbar that American commanders believe is used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a
leader of Al Qaeda, to infiltrate fighters and supplies from Syria into Iraq
along the Euphrates River.
From May 7 to May 15, the Americans undertook Operation Matador, sending a
1,000-man force backed by attack helicopters and fighter jets to go door to
door in restive Sunni villages, believing Mr. Zarqawi might be hiding
nearby. Two weeks later, the marines led a second sweep, known as Operation
New Market, named after a Civil War battle revered by graduates of the
Virginia Military Institute, in the same region.
Military commanders declared the operations a success, saying the marines
killed more than 125 insurgents and captured weapons caches containing
machine guns, mortar rounds and bomb-making materials. But it came at a
cost: 9 marines died, 8 from Lima Company, and 40 more were wounded.
Moreover, the marines were often frustrated in their hunt for insurgents who
seemed to disappear into the desert, prompting some Americans to describe
the sweeps as "whack-a-mole," after the arcade game involving a hammer and
mechanical rodents that pop in and out of holes.
T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel who has written a book on
insurgencies, said the American military does not have enough troops to
control a sprawling desert where an increasingly adept insurgent force flows
in and out with impunity.
"It's like gang warfare," he said. "Periodically, the police sweep a drug
market. Then the police go home and there are murders in broad daylight."
In May, Lima Company, which traces its military lineage back to a unit that
fought one of the toughest battles on Iwo Jima in World War II, installed a
pink granite boulder adorned with the Corps' eagle, globe and anchor, to
record the names of its marines who died in Iraq.
Now, yet another sweep, Operation Quick Strike, is under way in Anbar,
involving about 1,000 marines and Iraqi soldiers around the city of
Haqlaniya. The 20 marines attached to the 3/25 who died this week were
operating in the same area.
Members of a Community
Unlike regular troops who come from all over the United States and serve on
bases relatively isolated from the rest of the population, reserve units are
more intimately entwined with local communities - training, working and
often living in the same town. Lima Company, for example, includes Lance
Cpl. J. D. Coleman, son of Mayor Michael Coleman of Columbus.
So the deaths on Wednesday hit Ohio hard.
Sgt. Justin F. Hoffman, 27, a graduate of Ohio State, liked motorcycles and
enlisted in the Reserves in his third year of college. His father, Robert
Hoffman, was a marine, too.
A Marine rifle platoon is made up of three squads, usually 10 men each, and
Sergeant Hoffman was the squad leader, the next senior noncommissioned
officer to Sergeant Bowman.
Lance Cpl. Timothy M. Bell Jr., 22, was also fond of motorcycles. His
father, Tim, described him as "the last of the John Waynes, only tougher."
His family said he had wanted to be a marine since age 6.
Lance Cpl. Eric J. Bernholz, 23, was a devoted member of the Grove City
Church of the Nazarene, and poured his energy into acting in its plays and
coaching church youth sports. He graduated from Grove City High School and
sometimes talked of wanting to become a firefighter.
Lance Cpl. Michael J. Cifuentes, 25, proposed to his college girlfriend,
Tara Reynolds, by showing her a bunch of photographs that included one in
which he held a sign asking her to marry him. They planned to do just that
when he got back in the fall. A graduate of Miami University in Oxford,
Ohio, he had been a substitute school teacher.
Lance Cpl. Christopher J. Dyer, 19, played the viola and was a champion
diver, graduating with honors from Princeton High School near Cincinnati
last year. He planned to enroll at Ohio State when he returned.
Cpl. David Kenneth J. Kreuter, 26, was married and looking forward to seeing
his son Christopher, who was born on June 14, for the first time. He had a
bachelor's degree in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati.
Other marines said he had been offered a chance at Officer Candidates
School.
Lance Cpl. Aaron H. Reed, 21, a lean distance runner on cross-country and
track teams, was the president of the class of '01 at Southeastern High
School in Chillicothe, where job opportunities are few and the military is a
popular option. He has a brother serving in Afghanistan.
Lance Cpl. William B. Wightman, 22, came from the small farming community of
Sabina and joined the Marines after graduating from the local high school,
where he was a fullback and captain of the football team and was also on the
basketball and track teams. He played with G.I. Joe dolls as a child and
told his family that was what he wanted to be when he grew up.
In contrast, Lance Cpl. Edward A. Schroeder II, 22, was prohibited by his
mother, a high school teacher of distinctly liberal views, from playing with
toy guns as a boy.
The squad was rounded out with the addition of a marine from a Reserve
reconnaissance company, Lance Cpl. Nicholas William B. Bloem, 20. Once he
was with the unit they considered him one of their own.
"He was as much Lima as anybody else," said Cpl. Chad Watkins, 22, another
member of the Third Platoon who was also wounded in May and sent home.
The explosion also killed four men attached to the 3/25: Lance Cpl. Grant B.
Fraser, 22, of Anchorage, Alaska; Sgt. Bradley J. Harper, 25, of Dresden,
Ohio; Cpl. David S. Stewart, 24, of Bogalusa, La.; and Lance Cpl. Kevin G.
Waruinge, 22, of Tampa, Fla.
Six days earlier, two other Ohioans from Lima Company died in combat: Cpl.
Andre L. Williams, 23, of Galloway; and Lance Cpl. Christopher P. Lyons, 24,
of Shelby.
When the company headed for Iraq, Corporal Watkins said, the marines were
excited. "The attitude for the most part was we were anxious to get over
there and do what we had trained to do," he said.
Sergeant Bowman, 35, served 12 years on active duty, then became an Ohio
state trooper. But he missed the Marines and signed up with the Reserves
when it looked as if they would be sent to Iraq.
Despite the danger, he said, the days could get monotonous. It was easy to
become complacent. "It was knocking on doors, all we did really was to go
out and search homes, looking for explosives, which we would find
routinely," he said.
And, routinely, they were peppered with mortars and small arms fire by
insurgents who would then melt away. They were also frequently engaged by
packs of wild dogs.
For much of the time, the men were barracked between operations in rooms
built into a Soviet-made dam that created a reservoir. "It was really weird,
surreal," Sergeant Bowman remembered. "There were thousands of these white
birds. It was beautiful except for the occasional mortar."
Then came Operation Matador. The marines encountered insurgents barricaded
in fortified houses, and an improvised explosive device incinerated one of
the Amtracks, killing five marines.
The first squad kept itself amused to deal with the stress and the monotony.
One member put apple juice in a container meant for urine samples and
chugged it down in front of a horrified Navy medical corpsman.
Corporal Watkins nearly doubled over with laughter as he recalled one long
trip when most of the men fell asleep inside the Amtrack, their eyes closed,
mouths slack, some drooling. One of the squad put on his gas mask and shook
another awake shouting, "Gas, gas, gas."
"He looked at the other guys and he almost killed himself getting on his gas
mask," Corporal Watkins said.
Mixed Feelings on the War
From rural towns along the Ohio River to the crowded streets of Cleveland,
Ohioans spontaneously lowered flags to half-staff and created makeshift
memorials to commemorate the dead. Poems, crosses and bouquets of roses were
laid at the gates of the battalion's headquarters in Brook Park. Scores of
tiny American flags were placed along the driveway of Lance Cpl. Daniel N.
Deyarmin Jr., in Tallmadge. A restaurant in Willoughby posted a tribute to a
local marine, Lance Cpl. Brian Montgomery, on its street sign. Sandwich
makers at a Cleveland restaurant wore American flag bandannas to pay homage
to them all.
The travails of Lima Company and the rest of the 3/25 have focused national
attention on Ohio, and sharpened debate over the Bush administration's
policies in Iraq.
Even some former marines have begun to question the policies. At a prayer
vigil for the 3/25 in Cleveland on Friday, Frank Faragone, who was a marine
in the 1950's and whose son is a Marine gunnery sergeant today, said the
United States should hasten the transfer of power to Iraqis and bring
American forces home soon.
"Insurgency is tough, you'll never get rid of it," said Mr. Faragone, 67, a
retired police officer from Cleveland. "The answer is let the Iraqis take
care of themselves."
But many relatives of marines said anything short of completing "the
mission" - that is, establishing democracy in Iraq - would dishonor the
memories of the fallen. And they sharply criticized anyone who questioned
the administration's policies.
"Are you going to tell that mother whose son is in a casket that you don't
believe in what they are doing over there?" asked Karen Parker, 43, of
Cleveland, whose son is with the 3/25 in Iraq. "Do you know how that would
hurt them? We don't have that right."
Not all parents of dead marines agreed. Rosemary Palmer, Corporal
Schroeder's mother, has always opposed the war and believes her son was
growing disenchanted with it before he died. She said she knows other
parents who oppose the war but are afraid to speak out, believing their
children will be punished by their commanders.
"How are we honoring them by throwing another 1,800 lives on the pile?"
asked Ms. Palmer, 57, of Cleveland. "Honor them by resolving this war."
The debate has even split some families. Erica Deyarmin said her brother,
Corporal Deyarmin, a sniper with the 3/25 who died Monday, loved the marines
and was deeply proud of what they were doing in Iraq.
"If we turn our backs on them now, he would have died in vain," she said.
But her grandmother, Barbara Davis, 68, said that she felt the war had been
unnecessary and that the ground troops should be pulled out immediately -
words that caused her granddaughter to leave the room.
"I support the troops," she said, recalling the hundreds of pairs of socks
and dozens of care packages she had sent to her grandson's unit. "I just
don't support the policy."
Kristin Earhart of Pickerington, Ohio, the girlfriend of Cpl. Dustin A.
Derga of the 3/25, who died on May 8, said he considered it his duty to
fight, making his opinion of it irrelevant. An Air National Guard member,
Ms. Earhart, 22, said she felt the same way.
"I don't want our boys over there," she said. "But in the same sense,
they're doing a job and they're doing it good."
One of Corporal Derga's best friends, Lance Cpl. Nicholas B. Erdy, also of
the 3/25, died three days later. For Brandon Harmon, 24, a police officer
from Pickerington and a friend of Corporal Derga's, so much death in so few
days had brought the war too close to their small town.
"The national spotlight is on Ohio right now," he said. "We just think that
one company has gone through so much, you just kind of wish that they could
get a break and come home."
--
<=========================================>
Yellow cake? No.
Mobile Biological warfare labs? No.
Aluminum centrifuge tubes? No
Launch rockets at 45 minutes notice NO
Nation Building? No,
The source of terrorism? No.
The source of Islamic fundamentalism? No
A threat to America? No
<=========================================>
Downing street memo intelligence was "fixed"
Paul O'Neill: Bush wanted the Iraq war
Joe Wilson: yellow cake story is untrue.
Richard Clarke: Bush used 9/11; an excuse for war
Marine Gen Zinni opposed the war
Gen Shinseki opposed this war
Deputy judge advocate general of the
Air Force, Maj. Gen. Jack. Rives, said
several of the ``more extreme interrogation
techniques, on their face, amount to
violations of domestic criminal law'' as well
as military law..
"War on Terror" replaced with the phrase,
"A global struggle against violent extremism."