A man of words and deeds

[thedrifter]

Posted on Sun, Nov. 12, 2006
A man of words and deeds

"I live to serve my country, to walk the walls of freedom and guard the gates of liberty. I would die to protect the life of anyone of my countrymen without a moment of hesitation. But I don’t see this conflict as falling under those parameters."

By Leila Fadel
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

October 12, 2004 The 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment fell into an insurgent trap on this day. A homemade bomb ripped through a Humvee and tore apart the body of Cpl. Ian Zook.

Cpl. Andrew Van Wey held Zook's charred, convulsing torso before the legless body was placed in a bag.

For the briefest moment, Andrew was scared, but fear leads to mistakes, so he channeled his feelings into rage.

The regiment returned to its base in the desert Iraqi town of Husaybah along the Syrian border. Adrenaline still pumping through him, Andrew unloaded his weapon, lit a cigarette and picked up a pen.

On the battlefield, he fought as a warrior; at the base, he wrote with the gift of a poet.

Words would save his sanity.

Bad times have befallen the Marines on the all but forgotten outpost of Husaybah. I will say, with disgust and bitterness, that the enemy has won the day...

I looked at Zook, he was dead, and I think he had been for sometime. The blast blew his soul right to heaven in an instant. Killed him so fast that his brain didn't have time to tell his body that it was dead...We dragged him back towards the truck...We looked for his legs, they must have been disintegrated and were no where to be found....

He was a true warrior, and died a horrible and quick death, the same as many young warriors before him; the same end that any one of us could have expected...

He stuffed the letter into an envelope, sealed it, addressed it and sent it away.

Andrew, 26, joined the Marines when he was 18.

He was raised to believe that he owed a debt to society, which may be why he and four of his five brothers were or are Marines -- at 15, the youngest can't enlist

After 9-11, Andrew fought in Afghanistan for a "righteous cause."

"We were the absolute personification of a wrath of a nation," he said.

He was discharged in 2002, recalled for six months and was discharged again in 2003.

His younger brother Roy, 21, was deployed to Iraq in 2004. Around that time, the Marines asked Andrew to fight in Iraq.

He agreed, telling his family he was going to battle to protect his brother, though when the time came he wasn't there.

Seven months in Iraq left him broken.

In Iraq, he decided who would live or die, but he wasn't sure who the enemy was.

"You're wielded the power of life and death," he said. "Power usually reserved for God."

In the volatile town of Husaybah along the Euphrates River, he killed strangers and lost friends for a cause he now says he doesn't understand.

"I fought for the Marine Corps," he mumbled.

He was hated by the Iraqi people for being a Marine, a symbol of the war.

He hated them in return. His was a vengeful contempt fueled by the mortar attacks that awoke him every morning, the homemade bombs left for the Marines to trip, and the sniper fire that punctuated their every move.

He's a Fort Worth police officer now, but the war still follows him.

"I don't remember how I was before the war," he said while sitting in his Fort Worth apartment one day. "That man was destroyed 10 times over."

The book A Rumor of War lay on the coffee table, the memoir of a young, idealistic Marine shattered by the atrocities of the Vietnam War.

"War is inherently an evil thing," he said. "You just hate."

He understands the fury that could fuel an incident like Haditha, where a squad of Marines is accused of killing 24 Iraq civilians on Nov. 19, 2005, after a roadside bomb killed a lance corporal in their unit.

There are only so many friends you can watch die before you snap, he said.

Andrew came to that brink the day one of his men, Casey Owens, lost both legs in an ambush returning from the mission to pick up a Marine who had been killed.

Andrew plugged up the bleeding hole in Owens' neck and likely saved his life.

I wanted to shoot, but the only option would have been indiscriminately spraying the town with lead. That is not my way; I am a warrior, not a savage.

If I could make a beast of myself, then things would be a lot different. Something beyond rage had control of me, but not completely.

I kept a small thread of humanity, and so I could not pull the trigger. I will not allow myself to murder in a fit of wrath. But I did want to. I was tempted by the smell of blood, and I wanted it to touch my lips. To quench my thirst.

The first letter was unexpected.

Andrew had left Betsy Simnacher's journalism classroom at North Lake College in 2004. The sullen, quiet student told her he was withdrawing to go to war. She gave him the credit for her class anyway.

She ripped open the envelope and read the letter as if it were pages of a book.

The Hummer was intact, save for a missing hood and a jagged hole, roughly five inches in diameter, located on the left wheel well. The gash tore into the vehicle's firewall and penetrated straight through to the driver's side of the cab.

Further signs of carnage could be seen with a glance at the driver's seat. Aside from the steering wheel being twisted and bent upward, it was clearly evident that there was a fire...

Across the inside walls and ceiling were hunks of various human tissues baked in place. Crusted puddles of dried blood mired the seats...

Such was the fate of one of my young Marines, a few days shy of 21. A Chinese rocket met its mark, a lucky shot, they say. Not so lucky for my comrade.

They had fought over words.

She wanted quick, simple news stories.

He wanted poetic words that some don't understand.

This prose was perfect.

She rushed to her computer and typed it in so she could remember. Every subsequent letter she received, she tucked away so that she could return his words to him.

She wasn't surprised when he came home and enrolled in the Fort Worth Police Academy. In one letter, he wrote, "I guess all I can do is be a bullet sponge."

In July of last year, Cindy Sheehan was camped outside the president's ranch in Crawford demanding to talk to him about the death of her son. Nearby were veterans against war and across the way were war supporters.

Andrew had attained the rank of sergeant by the time he was discharged.

He had been back from Iraq for about four months and was having a difficult time readjusting.

In Fort Worth, he had watched people line up for gas or pick up coffee at Starbucks with no indication that they knew that across the ocean a group of young people, who had barely lived, were killing and dying for them.

"They get these freedoms by chance, by the virtue of being born at the right place and the right time," he said. "Let us all reap these repercussions together."

He always prided himself on being a man, but after Iraq the little things moved him to tears: anti-war stickers on a car, a song on the radio.

The yellow ribbons with "Support Our Troops" didn't mean much to him.

What did a ribbon do to support him thousands of miles away with poorly armored vehicles and a town of unidentifiable enemies, he asked.

"I wanted to see Americans professing these freedoms they say they so dearly hold. I wanted to see them," he said. "I needed to do this to help me."

In Crawford, he talked to veterans against war and was shunned by war supporters for speaking to anti-war activists. Some of the veterans against war were from the era of Vietnam.

A war Andrew said he saw being repeated in Iraq.

"I fear the death of liberty sometimes," he said.

Roy, who was home on leave, called him in anger when he learned Andrew was in Crawford.

"How dare you say you speak for me," Roy told Andrew.

Andrew answered that he had earned the right to be in Crawford. He'd fought the American war, he is fiercely proud of being a Marine, but Iraq had wounded him.

"I had pretty much lost a lot of faith in America," he said.

When Andrew returned from Crawford, he wrote an e-mail to his father, Rex.

I am not brainwashed, you made me too smart for that nonsense, so it is partially your fault. But I am a simple-minded man, I support the troops...

Support our troops, bring them home, stop allowing them to be exploited by the holy, hypocritical bureaucracy we miscall democracy...The truth being that I was sent to my death for less than righteous causes. Maybe if I would have died a horrible death in the streets of Husaybah you would see what I see now...

I live to serve my country, to walk the walls of freedom and guard the gates of liberty. I would die to protect the life of anyone of my countrymen without a moment of hesitation. But I don't see this conflict as falling under those parameters.

June 9, 2006 Andrew had been back in Texas for just over a year when the call came about Roy.

The Marines notified Roy's wife that he had been wounded.

She called Roy's father, who told Andrew before rushing to the church where his mother, Martha Van Wey, was making sopapillas for a church banquet.

By the time he arrived, she was crying in the center of a circle of prayer.

The mother of Roy's best friend, a Navy corpsman, had told her.

Roy was traveling in a convoy from one base to another in Anbar province when a blast struck the Humvee carrying him and three other men. The vehicle shot 10 feet into the air. Roy doesn't remember how he got out; others told him that he was already on the ground when the vehicle slammed back on the road.

The other men in the vehicle -- two Marines and a Navy corpsman -- were killed.

Two days later, he arrived in San Antonio, his family waiting.

The first day Andrew visited his wounded brother, he was hit by the oppressive heat of an intensive care room in the burn unit of Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The intense heat did what the damaged skin could no longer do: regulate Roy's body temperature.

Roy stared up at him from the hospital bed. The war barely spared him. He was burned over 70 percent of his body. The skin was still smooth on his chest in the shape of the vest of the body armor he wore. He spoke through a voice box.

The rage that Andrew had sworn would stay in Iraq returned.

After five minutes Andrew couldn't breathe, his stomach in knots. He went to the computer in the lounge of the guest house near the hospital to purge this anger with words. He wrote an e-mail to a group of friends.

I stand and look at my baby brother. With his eyes half closed, he looks dead. Part of his nose is gone. His lips hardly cover his teeth, giving his face the sardonic grin of a skull. He looks as though he hangs on an imaginary crucifix; his arms stretched out and forming a "T" with his body. My prince, my savior, my baby brother.

He clicked "send."

Andrew couldn't rid himself of the guilt and the rage. While he was patrolling the streets of east Fort Worth as a rookie cop, dealing with teenage love quarrels turned violent, gang shootings and apartment break-ins, his brother was nearly killed.

"Why wasn't I there," he asked his parents. "Why wasn't I there to protect him?"

His father answered. "The only difference it would have made is we'd be burying one son and at the hospital with the other."

Roy's recovery has been relatively quick; he gets around in a wheelchair and can walk short distances with a straight back. He is in and out of surgery and lives in a guest house of the Brooke Army Medical Center.

But he made it home to church for a visit in October.

Martha was hurt by the stares her son got at a restaurant in Arlington and a Wal-Mart in Waxahachie during his visit. Nobody thanked him for his sacrifice.

"All of these men are going to go home someday, and their home is not ready to receive them with the gratitude they deserve," she said.

Everywhere Martha goes, she carries her "deck of cards" as she calls the wallet-size photos of her sons in uniform. She lined them up on a table recently at a Taco Cabana in San Antonio, where she has been living and caring for her son.

At home in Ferris, their high school graduation pictures hang on what the family calls "the wall." Their military portraits hang below, reflecting their mother's pride.

"I never asked them, 'Why did you do that?'" she said.

She smiles, and her eyes close as her face lights up with pride.

In Iraq, she would send them packages that the other Marines would covet: mango- and pineapple-flavored candies and tequila lollipops. Her boys took a picture together after Roy went to Andrew's base on the harrowing trip on a convoy from Al Qaim to Husaybah to deliver supplies. Andrew hated it when he risked the trip; it was routinely ambushed. It was her Christmas gift with the words "We love you mom."

Andrew once wrote a request to a television show for a makeover for his mom. "She should get a medal for her service to our country. She makes Marines."

War protesters anger her. Her sons have given so much.

"I wish they would just go away," she said. "I don't want my sons' fight to be in vain. I'm very proud of what they did, for protecting people here. It's backwards -- I'm supposed to protect my kids, but my kids are protecting me."

Before Roy, she had escaped the reality of her sons being Marines.

Then her "world crashed."

Now she spends her waking moments waiting on her son.

"You cannot be prepared," Martha said.

She knows that whatever her sons fought for in Iraq must be completed. They've sacrificed so much.

In her purse is a pin that says "Marine mom" emblazoned on an American and Marine flag.

On her van, a heart -- half red and half camouflage -- is stuck on the back window: "Half my heart is in Iraq," it says.

Her sons are home now.

"I want them to accomplish what their mission was and for God to give them strength."

Martha had one baby and Andrew growing inside her when her first husband was murdered in a back alley of Dallas. After Andrew's birth, she worked in a plastics factory, struggling to support her boys.

Things changed when she spoke to a gangly man in a supermarket aisle in Grand Prairie. She'd met him once before at the plastics factory. He worked in maintenance.

Rex Van Wey said hello as he held his 2-year-old daughter's hand.

He recalls looking at Martha and thinking, She is so beautiful.

She said hi back, Andrew in her arms and her oldest son, Joe, grasping her hand.

She'd bought too many groceries to carry on the walk home. He offered her a ride.

After weeks of talking on the telephone and one date, Rex proposed.

He was a nice man. She told him she wasn't in love with him, but she would marry him. He needed someone to care for his daughter, Aimee, and she needed someone to care for her and her boys.

"God took two broken people and made one whole family," Rex said.

Love came later.

The couple raised their children as brothers and sisters; no half- or stepsiblings live in the Van Wey house.

Martha bought two sewing machines and did piecework to help support the family. Rex got raises and promotions regularly.

They bought a small piece of land in Ferris, and the family moved from Grand Prairie. In this town of about 2,300 people, the Van Wey family grew.

The couple had three boys together. They took in Martha's nephew when his mother died, and Rex Van Wey's stepsister's granddaughter when that family fell on hard times. They didn't have much, but they would always give.

Their boys were hesitant about burdening them with the cost of college, Rex Van Wey said. They felt that they owed something to society for all that they had. Rex and Martha vote in every general election, and Rex was in the Army.

One by one, their boys joined the Marines.

The couple are working to take their youngest, Jesse, 15, on a different path: college.

"We've paid a little more of the debt than others," Martha said. "I joke with the recruiters. I say, 'Don't even look at him.'"

In the mornings, before his afternoon police shift in east Fort Worth, Andrew Van Wey wakes up, rubs the sleep from his eyes, pours himself a cup of coffee and sits cross-legged on his bedroom floor.

Three of the four walls of the room are lined with stacks of paper, hundreds of letters he wrote in Iraq.

When Andrew came back from Iraq, friends and family began returning his letters and urging him to tell his story.

The letters are a source of flashbacks and pain, but they are also the story of the fallen men, the camaraderie, the rage, the futility, the grind and the heroism he saw there, he said. He organizes and reorganizes by date, subject, future chapter and miscellaneous.

He reads and rereads, shuffles them around and transcribes them onto his computer. He's finished about 40,000 words.

In the midst of violence, these words were his therapy; now they are a portal to the past, a portal to the rage he tried to leave in Iraq.

In one letter, he wrote:

"The world's finest." The Marines. Being pushed through a meat grinder. Not fighting as much as dying. For what?

His fallen comrades shouldn't be forgotten. That question -- "Was it worth it?" -- should not be ignored.

But these words sting, and he had sent them away for a reason.

Inside, the conflict roils.

"You trade hate for guilt, and guilt for self-loathing," he said.

The lights are always on in his apartment.

When he sleeps, he shoots the enemy, an enemy that won't die. Screams wake him, and he realizes he is safe. Then he remembers so many others didn't make it, so many others are still fighting.

Why is he alive, he asks himself.

On a recent day, a slide show on the computer behind him flashed images of Iraq as he talked about the war in his apartment. Photographs are captioned "in memory of." A makeshift memorial with two sandbags, a weapon, a helmet and beaten combat boots pops up, and Andrew stares at the picture.

"It was the best we could do," he said.

For a time Andrew considered going back to Iraq as a mercenary. He didn't know how to live here.

Then he met Shelby Landers, 29, an investigator for Child Protective Services. She showed up on a call about a child who might have been sexually abused. They met in a Home Depot parking lot near the site to coordinate. After she'd checked out the family, she got back in her car, and he gave her his number.

"Call me," he said.

Hesitantly, she did.

They clicked on the first date, and she's slowly teaching him to live life again.

"She made me feel like it was OK to be normal," he said. Maybe like his parents' relationship, this would fix what was broken.

They do laundry together in her Fort Worth house; they watch television shows and movies together.

In the second week of their relationship, she went with him to see Roy.

He needed her support, and she gave it to him. In return, he gave her his; in his presence, she felt "calm and protected."

One day she returned from work, unlocked her door and found a note on the kitchen table.

"She was an angel without wings and I was but a gypsy king."

She ripped the page from the notebook and taped it to the refrigerator.

If you want to help

The Roy Van Wey Fund is at the Commercial State Bank at 200 Interstate 45 in Ferris.

You can go to the bank or mail a check to P.O. Box 415, Ferris, TX 75125
Leila Fadel, 817-685-3806 lfadel@star-telegram.com

Ellie