Loved ones recall Iraq bombing as one-year anniversary approaches

[thedrifter]

Loved ones recall Iraq bombing as one-year anniversary approaches
By: DARRIN MORTENSON - Staff Writer

This time last year, the families of about a thousand Marines from one Camp Pendleton infantry battalion were ticking off the final days of their loved ones' seven-month deployment to one of the deadliest regions of Iraq when tragedy struck.

For Fallbrook resident Amanda McCarthy, the 21-year-old wife of Cpl. Joseph McCarthy, the final stretch had been a tense, tiring wait alone at their Fallbrook apartment. She hoped their life together could finally begin once Joe returned from the war.

April Ornelas, 19, also had her hopes and dreams pinned on one of the Marines who was supposed to be home soon.

Lance Cpl. Derek Gardner, who lived with her and her family in their Mission Viejo home for nine months before he deployed, had proposed to her at Christmas, and the two had agreed to start talking about wedding dates once he returned.

But both young women would have their dreams crushed and their lives changed on Sept. 6, 2004, when a suicide bomber accelerated beside a Marine convoy rolling down a highway near faraway Fallujah.

The bomb-laden pickup truck exploded in a huge fireball next to the seven-ton truck driven by Gardner, reducing the vehicle to a smoldering mess of twisted metal.

Seven Marines, including Gardner and McCarthy, were killed in the bombing, one of the deadliest single attacks against Marines to date.

As the first anniversary of that painful day approaches, Amanda and April say they struggle each day to reshape their lives and honor the memory of their beloved Marines, even as they are surrounded by growing doubts and opposition to the war that took their lovers' lives.

"Someone has been waiting ... six months for him to come home. And your entire future is right there ahead of you. Everybody is counting on this person to come home," Amanda said on the patio of her small apartment in Fallbrook last week. "And then they don't come home."

High school sweethearts

Amanda said she met Joe at their high school in St. Johns, a small town of 3,500 residents in the Apache country of northeastern Arizona, as Joe was preparing to head off to boot camp in San Diego.

After Joe deployed with the forces that invaded Iraq, they married and settled in Fallbrook, where he again got ordered to war.

Amanda said she remembers their last embrace at the edge of a parade deck on Camp Pendleton as they looked over the rows of gear ready to be loaded on the buses early the morning of March 1, 2004.

"We were just standing there looking at them and I was thinking 'Oh my gosh, what am I going to do for seven months without him?'" she said.

"I never once expected that he wouldn't be coming home," she said, pulling her long black hair from her face to stare out from her mahogany eyes.

Even when she received little word from Joe during the intense fighting that wracked Fallujah in their first few months apart, certain clues let her know that the ugliness of war hadn't sapped his most endearing qualities.

A picture of him in the North County Times bending down to hand candy to Iraqi children thrilled her, she said.

"He wrote and told me that he was the Willy Wonka of Fallujah," she said, referring to his newly acquired nickname.

As the deployment wound down in late summer, Amanda said she was excited and busy planning ways to welcome him home.

"Living wasn't going to start till he came home. It's like your entire world will get better when he comes home," she said.

"I remember asking him about what he wanted to eat when he got home," she said of their last phone conversation on Aug. 30. "And I remember he was like, 'Don't do anything, don't do any decorations, don't do any of that stuff. All I want are kisses. I just want kisses.'"

'I hardly ever dream about him being dead'

A week later, on Sept. 6, there was a knock at her door: A Navy chaplain and two Marines in dress uniforms to tell her that Joe and the six other Marines had died.

"I just remember sobbing ... being in shock, not understanding, not being able to comprehend that he was killed," she said.

A year after his death ----- a somber anniversary to be marked on Tuesday ---- Amanda McCarthy still surrounds herself with memories of her husband, Joe.

Her apartment is decked out with wedding photos and memorabilia, snapshots of their happy beginnings and tokens of their dreams.

"It's very comforting to me. Even though he's gone, your love just doesn't end right there. It can't," she said.

"I always dream about us buying a house, or having our kids, or that sort of thing. I hardly ever dream about him being dead," she said. "There is so much more to his life than just his death and being just another Marine that was killed over there."

Although she is now working as a dental assistant, a career she said she enjoys, Amanda said the project that gets her through the days is raising money for a nonprofit organization that was recently named for Joe.

The Cpl. Joe McCarthy Toys for Kids Foundation is run by volunteers who help needy children in St. Johns.

"We wanted to do something for the kids, without a doubt," she said. "He said it was all about the future, and obviously the kids are the future.

"His life should be remembered. That's why we want to make this foundation work. His dream goes on, basically. We can share his spirit with other people with that," she said.

"I'm trying to live my life in a way that I think he'd be proud of me."

A fiancee mourns

Like Amanda, on this week last September, 19-year-old Mission Viejo resident April Ornelas was eager to begin the life she had dreamed of once her Marine returned from the war.

But the violent death of her Marine fiance, Lance Cpl. Derek Gardner, was a nightmare presaged by a dream she had the night before.

In her dream, she and her best friend and Derek and his best friend embraced and then separated. They were smiling and happy.

"It was like he was saying good-bye," she said, remembering the dream she had a year ago when her dreams of a life with Derek were stolen by war.

The two met a Sears store in Laguna Hills, where April worked in the men's department and Derek shopped for a pair of work pants.

After some family trouble, Derek moved in with April and her family and lived with them for nine months, during which time he received orders to deploy to Iraq early the next year. On Christmas, he asked April to marry him once he returned.

April described him as "funny," "mellow," and "in control."

Her mother said he "had a tough-guy personality but a big heart."

"We grew to love him in the short time he spent with us," April's mom said in tears as she reflected on the son she almost had. "We got to see the young man he was becoming."

'Just remember that I love you'

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[thedrifter]

The periodic letters she received and few phone calls she got from him in Iraq described close calls during the fighting in Fallujah and an increasing homesickness as the deployment dragged on through the summer.

Their last conversation, on Sept. 5, was cut short. She said she was griping about this and that ---- stressing over things she knows now were unimportant.

Short on time, Derek cut to the chase.

"He was just like 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever ... Just remember that I love you,'" she said. "And then the phone cut out. And that was it."

She said she added money to his phone card account, and expected a call, but none would come.

When the phone did ring, it was Derek's mother, calling to tell April the sad news.

"She didn't even have to say it," April said. "She just said, 'Derek ...' and I was like 'Uh, uh!' and I just started freaking out. I remember I just kept saying 'No! No!'"

April described the time immediately after Derek's death as "a big blur."

Not quite family

She said she remembers having to grow up quickly, dealing with his belongings, his truck and helping his family decide what to do with his body once it returned from Iraq.

She and family members scattered his ashes in the ocean off Dana Point, and friends helped April raise money for a memorial bench that now sits on the grounds of the San Clemente City Hall, where she said she can sit and reflect while she looks out over the sea.

She said it was during the period of the funeral and memorials that the seeds of her anger with the military were sowed.

As a fiance, not a wife, she said she was forgotten. She had to fight to be included in ceremonies, and had to argue to receive his medals or a folded flag like a wife or mother would receive.

"I was going to marry him. It didn't matter whether I was going to marry him now or later, the point is that I was the most predominant person in his life," she said.

'You can't stop living'

When the rest of Derek's unit and buddies returned from Fallujah in October, she and her mother were there to greet them.

"To see what you were missing was very, very painful," her mother said. "But it was part of the process ---- part of the healing process.

"She cried herself to sleep that night," her mother said. "But you have to do that, you have to get through that process before you can move on. And at 19, you can't stop living your life."

April said she has done her best to do what she says Derek would have wanted: live life and move on.

She said she is dating again ---- another Marine ---- and remains close to Derek's friends and their girlfriends and wives.

School, she said, has given her a place to talk about the war and Derek's death. She said she often contributes to discussions about the war in her classes at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, and finds herself increasingly arguing against the war.

Anger tapped at 'one year'

Her feelings on the war are a point where April Ornelas and Amanda McCarthy differ a year after their loved ones died on that Iraqi road.

April said the recent public protests by Cindy Sheehan, a California woman who lost a son in Iraq and has for weeks staged a live-in near President Bush's Texas ranch, allowed her to feel more comfortable questioning the war without defiling her fiance's memory.

"I felt like somebody was finally standing up and saying 'No! I'm putting my foot down!'" she said. "Didn't she do it about a year after her son died? I think a year is about the time when you are like, 'OK. I've kept quiet. I've only said it to my closest friends ... I've tread lightly.'

"But now, it's been a year and I want answers; I want revenge. No, I'm mad. No, I'm angry... and I'm angry enough to say something about it.

"It's been building, I'm just so angry that it had to happen," she said, weeping as she let out pent up feelings.

"I feel angry that I was deprived of something I thought was perfect. He brought me flowers," she said through her sobs. "He showed me how a real man was supposed to treat a woman.

"I've never been able to say to people, 'I'm ****ed.' I'm so mad at (President) Bush. I'm so mad at the military. I'm so mad that (Bush) has the audacity to say, 'I understand what you're going through.'

"No, you don't! You don't understand what I'm going through. You couldn't possibly understand what I'm going through. There is no way you can feel the way I feel."

Ways to cope and question

April and Amanda said they recognize that there has been a shift in public sentiment about the war and some doubt that the sacrifices of the soldiers and Marines have been worth it.

"I don't want to be disrespectful to other families," April said, raising her voice and straightening up. "I don't want them to think that I don't support the troops and I'm just protesting the war.

"I'm not disrespecting anything he said or did or wanted to do. I completely understand that he wanted to join the Marine Corps. I understand that it was something he loved. But I don't think we should be there. I think it's gone on too long. I think it's getting out of hand."

Amanda McCarthy, however, says questions about the war aren't hers to ask.

She said that if her husband believed in what he was doing, so does she.

"When Joe was over there, he told me that he wished I was there so I could see what was going on. I've always backed helping other people, and for us to change things for the better for the people over there. And I think that Joe felt like he was doing that.

"I back what my husband said about the war, and I will continue to back what my husband said about the war. I feel really sorry that some people feel like it was for nothing, because I know from what my husband told me that it was for a good cause and he believed in what he was doing.

"My anger is directed at the person who did it," she said. "But I'm not angry that my husband went over there because I know it was what he wanted to do. He was proud to do it. He was so proud to be a Marine."

Contact staff writer Darrin Mortenson at (760) 740-5442 or dmortenson@nctimes.com.

Ellie