Valley Marines home from Iraq - Veterans spearheaded Baghdad drive

http://www.avpress.com/n/tusty1.hts ^ | September 23, 2003 | DENNIS ANDERSON

[BenLurkin]

To the mother, the grandmother, even a couple of the menfolk, the verdict was unanimous: "They're just babies!" But while it might seem so to look at them, and while it might seem so to a mother's heart, the dozen or so young men gathered around the barbecue were anything but babies. They'd taken wounded. They'd seen death and dealt it out. They had carried the burden of men in war.

The banner hanging above the garage announced their return from Iraq.

"Welcome Home 1-4": This welcome home message was crafted for Marines, infantry grunts of the 1st Marine Division, 4th Regiment, the Marine outfit that spearheaded the drive on Baghdad.

"We're glad to be home, but I feel naked without my weapon," said Matt Misiek, a mortarman.

"They're locked up in the armory," Eddie Lopez added.

Matt and Eddie, Jeff Roberson and Jacob Wilkes, lance corporals all, each were nursing a Corona with lime, listening to a little R&B and taking in the sunset on the front lawn of the home of John and Karen Perez.

Karen Perez organized the big welcome, hamburgers on the grill, grilled chicken, salsa and the other trimmings for her Navy son, Corpsman "Doc" Lonnie Lewis and the Marine buddies he took care of all the way from Camp Coyote in Kuwait to Baghdad and back.

Marines don't think of medical corpsmen assigned by the Navy as sailors. They just call them "Doc."

"There have been (Navy) corpsmen with Marines in every campaign, Iwo Jima, Okinawa," Lewis said.

Lewis, 24, joined the Navy a couple of years ago to get his life "right" and planned to be a rescue swimmer. But assignment to medical training dropped him right in where he had wanted to be a few years earlier, with the Marines.

"We handle everything from common colds to someone losing a leg," Lewis said.

And all those situations came up on the road to Baghdad.

"I am just glad that they're home safe," said Lewis' grandmother, Ella Mae Chavez.

Lewis and his buddies, a dozen or so from his platoon in the 4th Regiment, returned to the States a week or so ago, touching down at March Air Force Base in Riverside aboard the chartered plane that delivered them to a bus which would carry them back to home base at Camp Pendleton.

To watch them chow down on the burgers and chicken, to see them bust a few dance moves with the girlfriends was to see a few minutes of what young men in America look like anywhere.

Roberson, a small rockets expert, watched the world with an easygoing smile. Matt the mortarman sported enough biceps and tattoos to weigh in for a "Braveheart" sequel, and Lopez and Wilkes looked as if the recruiter just ran in and grabbed them from senior year in high school.

"They are babies!" Karen Perez insisted.

But Lewis, the corpsman with stuff in his bag to handle anything from a headache to a head wound, knew different.

"We've been through the stages, you know, the stages of dealing with death."

Up on the Kuwaiti border before crossing the Line of Departure, or LOD, there was denial. Was this really happening?

"Then we crossed the line and drove into the desert for a couple of days, and we didn't run into anything and we asked ourselves, 'Is this what war is like?' "

They were traveling in "Amtrack" armored vehicles that bear no resemblance at all to a passenger train.

Reality set in when a couple of their "tracks" got separated, and they found themselves facing some Iraqi T-62 tanks on line.

"Then," Matt Misiek said, "it's kind of like, 'Well it's been good to know you, and this may be it.' "

But that wasn't it. They kept moving up the road to Baghdad, and then saw the results of their work, the bodies, scorched, broken, gone from this life.

"And then it's like, 'poor bastard,' " Lopez said, "and then you realize, it's better them than us."

Facing the turbulent aftermath of major combat, the Marines found they could make friends, but it was never easy to spot fresh enemies in the crowd.

Securing areas south of Baghdad, cities with now faintly familiar names like Hilla and Najaf, the Marines established authority but worked to establish trust and mutual respect as well. It's worth noting Marines in the "Blue Diamond Republic," so named for the 1st Marine Division, and the area of Iraq that it secured, have suffered no combat casualties since May 1, the end of major combat.

"The Army kept getting ambushed in a place they called 'Ambush Alley.' They kept getting ambushed there. They called us back to secure the area, and we got ambushed, but just one time," Lopez recalled.

Lewis' mother and grandmother felt the anxious fear of missing the family's anointed son, and both registered different levels of opposition and doubt about the war. Lewis, in an eloquent letter to his mother, shared his own thoughts about what the military intended out there and how they believed their responsibility was to serve and protect Americans at home by fighting far away.

But that was not the stuff of Saturday night. Saturday night was for a little music, a soft evening breeze without the crack and boom of weapons fire, a few beers and a reasonable assurance of safety.

John Perez, doing what he could, popped up a couple of the familiar dome tents in the back yard. Everyone from "One-Four" knows how to sleep in a tent.

For Lonnie Lewis, his departure from the life less ordinary has taken him into a bigger view of the world he serves, as a healer and a warrior.

"We were in a bar the other night, and some guy comes up and wants to fight. Maybe in another time, I'd have fought him. But you know, from what I have seen, that was so small, so unimportant. I told the guy, 'Hey, I don't want to fight you. Just go and enjoy yourself tonight.' Life is larger than that."

[BenLurkin]

"HOME AGAIN - Above, from top left, Navy Corpsman Ryan De La Cruz and Marines Chuck Overturf, Jacob Wilkes, Everett Brown, Joshua Crocker and James Bennett, and from bottom left, Navy Corpsman Lonnie Lewis and Marines Eddie Lopez, Jeffrey Roberson and Matt Misiek chant "hoo rah" as they are welcomed home after being stationed in Iraq and Kuwait for eight months. Below, Family and friends, gather at the Lancaster home of John and Karen Perez to celebrate the troops' arrival Saturday afternoon. "JENNIFER X. HERNANDEZ/Valley Press

[opbuzz]

Get some, men!

Glad to have you back.

Semper Fi

[Bedford Forrest]

"It's worth noting Marines in the "Blue Diamond Republic," so named for the 1st Marine Division, and the area of Iraq that it secured, have suffered no combat casualties since May 1, the end of major combat"

Could it be that the Army, led by dwarfish perfumed sycophants like Clark & Shinseki, was less resistant to the traitorous impregnations of the Klintonista vermin than was the United States Marine Corps?

[blastdad51]

Welcome home, you did good, May God bless you and all our brave men and women in uniform.

[McGavin999]

They ARE babies, they are OUR babies and God we're proud of them.

[MEG33]

Well said!Amen!

[fourdeuce82d]

Matt Misiek, a mortarman

"who, like all mortarmen, is handome, radiates an almost preternatural intelligence, and whose knuckles aren't callused from dragging the ground like a line doggie..."

Good job guys- 82d. BUMP