One Marine's story

By JOHN M. CRISP
Monday, April 16, 2007

I'm not well acquainted with the security guards who patrol the college where I work. But they're conscientious and polite and they never complain when they have to open a building for you on a weekend. And they must do a good job because the campus crime rate is very low.

But when one of them mentioned one Sunday that he had resigned from the Marine Corps after 15 years, we talked.

I'll call him Jorge, partly because privacy allows him to speak more freely, and partly because he's a representative of a group that deserves recognition, the sizable contingent of Hispanics who serve in the U.S. Marines.

I've met some of them here in South Texas. Often they're not burly, tough-looking guys like you might expect. Many are modest in build and unimposing, more like bullfighters than boxers. But they're good Marines, tough, wiry and dependable. More than 30,000 serve in the Corps, representing a higher percentage by ethnicity than in any other service. At least 13 Hispanic Marines have been awarded the Medal of Honor.

Jorge says that after a childhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, his 15 years in the Corps revealed an exotic new world. He toured the usual Corps way stations: San Diego, Camp Pendleton, Twenty-Nine Palms, Okinawa. Then eventually Somalia, Hawaii, Guam, Bahrain, Dubai, Thailand, Bali, Australia. He became a construction chief and served in a specialty platoon. He says that the Corps was good to him, helping him in a number of practical ways and giving him confidence. In return, he was a good Marine. Along the way, he married and had two children.

But every Marine is a rifleman. Marines who had been to Iraq told him, "Staff Sergeant, it's not worth it." He knew at least four who left the Corps after 15 years. But he had to see for himself. In September 2004, he joined a "good unit," the one that had taken down the statue of Saddam Hussein. In January 2005, his unit flew to Saudi Arabia, and then traveled by truck on a cold desert night to Fallujah. The battle was over by then, and the city was "nothing but a parking lot." The Marines watched video clips of the deaths of Iraqis and the destruction of mosques, set to music.

A tense eight months followed. IEDs exploded occasionally, but fortunately his unit had only one casualty, a Marine sniper mistaken at night for an Iraqi and intentionally run down by a Humvee. Jorge saw plenty of Iraqi bodies, though, some of them children without arms or legs. And one day he met a guy working security for Halliburton who was making $11,000 per month.

Jorge says he had a profound insight one day on guard duty. Surveying the sand and rock around him, he suddenly asked himself, "What the hell are we doing here?"

He says that he hates to be cynical, but we're asking for something in Iraq that's not going to happen. Iraqis would smile at him, but, referring to his own "humble beginnings," he says that he recognizes a fake smile when he sees one. To them the United States is just another occupying force, the latest of many, and there's no trust in their smiles or their eyes. We're not winning their "hearts and minds." And, after all, he says, the war is all about oil.

Back in the States, Jorge left the Corps, just five years short of a lifetime half-pay pension. He resigned for various reasons and with considerable ambivalence. He wants to try something different.

With a wife and two small children, he understands that every deployment in a combat zone is a roll of the dice; next time he might not be so lucky. And while his loyalty to the Corps and his country is undiminished, he's got other responsibilities now that he can't afford to neglect, at least not for a war like this one.

I asked him if he thought that the lives lost in Iraq had been "wasted," referring to the unfortunate term used recently by Barack Obama and John McCain.

"No," he said, "'Wasted' is too harsh. Let's just say 'misused.' "

(John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail: jcrisp@delmar.edu. For more news and information, visit www.scrippsnews.com.)