Death Visits a Marine Unit, Once Called Lucky

[USMCRET6391]

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. 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, who was their platoon sergeant, 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 heads a headquarters element of the Third Battalion in Brook Park, a suburb of Cleveland.

Twenty-three of the dead marines belonged to Lima Company, Master Sgt. Stephen Walter, a Columbus police sergeant, said.

"Lima Company is a rifle company, mainly young marines," Colonel Rush said. "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 in the two operations.

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 company 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, also was 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 candidate 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 when he was growing up.

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.

Just six days earlier, two other men from Lima Company were killed in combat: Cpl. Andre L. Williams, 23, of Galloway, Ohio, and Lance Cpl. Christopher P. Lyons, 24, of Shelby, Ohio.

When the company headed for Iraq, Corporal Watkins said, he and the other 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 like 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

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, a 67-year-old retired police officer from Cleveland. "The answer is let the Iraqis take care of themselves."

But many relatives of marines said that anything short of completing "the mission" - that is, establishing democracy in Iraq - would dishonor the memories of fallen marines. 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, Lance Cpl. Daniel N. Deyarmin Jr., a sniper with the 3/25 who was killed on 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 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 was killed on May 8, said he considered it his duty to fight, making his opinion of it irrelevant. A member of the Air National Guard, 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 after Corporal Derga. 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."