He’s just about the age of a recent UCLA graduate ““
young, with most of his life still ahead of him. But he says war
has aged him. “I’m 23, but I feel 30,” says Mario
Leonidas, a Marine reserve, slouched low on a couch in the San
Fernando Valley home where he grew up. Leonidas is not used to
being called a reserve; he only ended his tours of duty in June.
Before being considered inactive, he experienced a good deal of
activity ““ first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. Maybe a bit
too much, he admits. He’s relieved to be home, he says, but
doesn’t know how he got there safely or whether he deserves
it. The world of academia is miles removed from a combat zone, but
the soldiers with whom Leonidas served ““ 18, 19, 20 years of
age ““ could have also been students sitting in a college
lecture hall.
Military life before Baghdad When he joined the
U.S. Marine Corps in 2000, Leonidas had no expectation of ever
going to war. “I didn’t want to go to college at the
time; I thought college would be boring … I wanted a real
challenge,” he said, explaining why he joined the military.
“I didn’t plan on any of the war stuff happening … it
came as a surprise to a lot of us.” Before the war, Leonidas
had spent time in Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and a base in
Okinawa, Japan. He underwent intensive training, broke an ankle,
endured frost bite, tolerated the angry bark of his commanding
officers, and imposed a similar bark on the lower ranks ““ all
routine procedure. A large part of military life is imposing
discipline on lower-ranked soldiers, Leonidas said. “You got
to be harsh, we won’t go so far as hazing, but, you are a
Marine, you don’t want to be a pansy,” he said. He
added that soon they became like his brothers, and sometimes like
his children who he wanted to protect when they were dodging
bullets together months later. “I felt like a parent
sometimes. Yelling at them was like yelling at a kid … sometimes
they’d start crying,” Leonidas said, adding that he
still keeps in touch with many of them. If he hadn’t been
deployed to the Middle Eastern deserts in February 2003, his
military career may have followed a path similar to that of Kevin
Gonzalez, also a former Marine and a second-year undeclared student
at UCLA. His tour was just ending when the United States declared
war. Gonzalez, 25, joined the military in 1997 mainly because he
wanted to travel. And as a Marine security guard, Gonzalez traveled
from Belgium and Egypt to Finland, Turkey and Niger. His most
memorable experiences come out of his travels, Gonzalez said. He
was “able to understand people, and not just American people,
different cultures ““ talking with them, drinking with them,
you learn a lot. It’s not just America in this world,”
he said. Leonidas’ world travels gave him a very different
experience.
“All hell broke loose” There were
often hints that something was going to happen, but the troops
never knew exactly what, Leonidas said, adding that still,
they’d “try not to think about it too much.”
“(Commanding officers) would give us little signs,” he
said. “”˜Enjoy your Christmas,’ they’d say,
“˜You might be going somewhere.'” A couple of
weeks after his Christmas break, he was deployed. After sailing the
Atlantic Ocean, Leonidas and the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines unit
braved sandstorms in the Iraqi/Kuwait border until they got orders
from President Bush to go into Baghdad. Before troops could reach
Iraq’s capital city, U.S. forces had to clear the path
through the streets of An Nasiriyah. To date, the battle for An
Nasiriyah is one of the costliest battles the war has seen. The
morning of March 23, 2003 witnessed the ambush of the Army’s
507th Maintenance Company, to which Jessica Lynch and her fellow
prisoners belonged. The Marines unit had been scheduled to follow
the Army that afternoon and experienced similar devastation.
“Most Americans were horrified at the news of the ambush and
the sight of young American soldiers being questioned by their
Iraqi captors. Jessica and her fellow prisoners were the lucky
ones. Eleven soldiers died in the ambush that morning, and eighteen
Marines lost their lives that afternoon,” wrote scholar and
war researcher Richard Lowry in an account of the battle for a book
he is writing on Nasiriyah. Leonidas said he moved through the
day’s events as if he were in a movie. His Marine division
was split into three companies: Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. He
belonged to Charlie. The Marines’ mission was to secure the
bridges in the city, Lowry writes. Being slowed by the previous
Army ambush and having taken some wrong turns, both Alpha and Bravo
companies pushed through to the city behind Charlie Company and
secured the first bridge, leaving Charlie Company to secure the
second. The company pushed into the city without adequate armor,
Leonidas said, and was met with fierce enemy fire all around them.
Iraqis with white clothing began approaching their vehicles.
“Men, women, and maybe children … the whole city is
shooting at us,” Leonidas said. “That’s when all
hell broke loose.” Minutes later, Leonidas and his colleagues
were dodging enemy mortar rounds, and then more alarmingly,
friendly fire from U.S. air support. First, he said he was grateful
to see the support, but soon Leonidas ducked for cover when he
realized American forces were shooting at him. To this day, he
doesn’t understand how the confusion occurred. There’s
nothing in the Iraqi army that looks like the Marine tanks, he
said, and referred to other indicators like pink panels and
American flags with which the tanks are equipped to avoid friendly
fire. He tries to sigh it off, but recalls the death of his
friends. “Eighteen people died that day. Eight good friends
died,” he said. “That pilot … killed a lot of good
people.”
Collecting the dead The aftermath of battle is
the worst, Leonidas says. That’s when you collect the dead.
That’s when it sinks in. He lost a close friend from El
Monte, Calif., he said, a friend that had been with him the last
four years. His friend had a wife and a new baby. He was a
“proud dad.” First, Leonidas said he wonders how he
survived. Then, comes the guilt. “You start blaming yourself
… why couldn’t it have been you?” he would ask. But
then, the next round of combat begins and he is forced to move on.
Later, he told the story of meeting the family of a dead soldier,
another close friend who had a wife and two kids. “I hugged
her and walked away with a knot in my throat. I tried to say
I’m sorry, but it came out so awkwardly,” he said.
Sometimes, he said he takes his anger out in battle. He and his
friends had a “little theory”: “(Commanders) make
our lives miserable, so that when we fight we let our anger out on
the enemy.” When asked how he chooses which people to shoot,
he said: “You shoot at who shoots at you. You see a threat,
you shoot at it.”
Making a routine of war The daily routine for
soldiers during war includes digging holes, functioning under the
effects of sleep deprivation, and suppressing hunger. Soldiers are
constantly digging two-person holes, he says. Soldiers typically
partner up and keep watch. They sleep in one-hour shifts. Some
days, they don’t sleep. Riddled with fatigue, he sometimes
had hallucinations. Leonidas says he never got more than two
straight hours of sleep during his stay in Iraq. Once, he and his
unit unknowingly dug holes in an unmarked cemetery They slept in
graves with bone remnants. That’s probably what caused the
outbreak of dysentery, he speculates. Soldiers started vomiting,
defecating, feeling faint. It typically lasted three to four days,
he says. He also never took a shower during his stay in Iraq. Once,
he bathed in the Euphrates River, but he says he doesn’t know
how clean he became with the amount of dirt he saw in the river. He
had two uniforms, but only wore one. He wanted to save the clean
one to wear when he went back home. There wouldn’t have been
any point in getting both of them dirty, he said. Through all the
hardships in a day of warfare, there was one daily occasion that
all troops looked forward to: mail call. “God, I loved
mail,” Leonidas said, beaming. He even appreciated cards from
kindergartners, he said. Any type of mail was good: gift packages,
letters from home, notes from strangers. It was something to look
forward to that kept them motivated. Their motivation to survive
also came from wanting to be with their families, Leonidas said,
and wanting to be there for each other.
Politics of war Two months after returning home
from Iraq, he was called to go to Afghanistan. “Oh great, not
again,” he had said. Leonidas trained a “new batch of
kids” and headed to a country already filled with U.S.
forces. Most of what his unit did in Afghanistan is confidential,
he said, though he did mention he searched for high-ranking
al-Qaeda officials and was involved in a drill-turned-disaster that
almost cost the life of the Afghan president. But compared to Iraq,
Afghanistan was “a cake walk,” Leonidas said. After
months of being in war, Leonidas’ return gave him the
opportunity to chime in on the war debate. On June 14, he returned
to civilian life ““ and confronted a polarized society nearing
an important election. Faced with the politics of war, Leonidas
expresses his opinions candidly. During his time in the city of Ash
Shatra, Iraq, Leonidas and his unit acted as a police force,
cracking down on crime, doing patrols around the city and giving
food to Iraqi kids. In those two weeks, Leonidas says he saw a lot
of suffering ““ children blown up by mines, women treated like
“dirt.” For these people, Leonidas believes the war is
justified. “I think we should’ve gone, maybe the reason
wasn’t right, but those people needed it. … The average
person needed someone to help them out,” he said. Still, he
holds a little resentment against Bush. At the onset, most of the
troops supported Bush, Leonidas said, then qualifying his
statement: “We didn’t think too much of him, but we did
support him.” Later, some of the troops became skeptical of
Bush’s character. Leonidas says he will vote for Sen. John
Kerry, D-Mass., come November because he “felt like there was
some deception with Iraq.” “I didn’t see any
weapons of mass destruction ““ only empty warehouses,”
he said. He also didn’t see anybody he believed to be linked
to al-Qaeda in Iraq, he said. He added that he worries that if Bush
is reelected, he may declare war somewhere else. But this
doesn’t mean he’s happy voting for Kerry. “(Its)
the lesser of two evils … For the most part, I think its time for
a change.” Another sensitive issue for both Leonidas and
Marine-turned-student Gonzalez are anti-war protesters.
“You’re putting your life on the line for these
people,” Gonzalez said, adding that he wouldn’t
confront the protesters unless they were directing their protests
at him. In the same sense, Leonidas said he has a message for
protestors: “I’d like them to go into Iraq before we
went in there ““ people’s hands getting cut off, people
getting killed left and right. You can’t miraculously change
people over night. (The protesters) don’t understand
that.”
Accepting the choices With everything said and
done, Leonidas said he is beginning to realize there’s a
reason for everything. He didn’t choose college, but respects
those who did. Maybe he’ll try it in the future, he says. He
even enrolled for class at Pierce Community College that begins in
November. Gonzalez said going to school after the military provides
for a vastly different experience, but Leonidas said he accepts
these differences. “What everybody else did here, going to
college … it doesn’t make you less of an American,”
he said. Sometimes, he regrets his choices and wishes he could go
back. But a lot of good happened too, he said. “I know I
can’t change it.”