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thedrifter
08-11-03, 05:50 AM
Homecoming Blues
Marines returning from war readjust to life at home

By Graham Rayman
Staff Correspondent

August 10, 2003, 8:03 PM EDT


Camp Lejeune, N.C. -- For the Marines of the 8th Engineer Support Battalion, the return home was not all yellow ribbons and parades.

There was the expected joy and relief as they returned in June and July from their six-month mission in Kuwait and Iraq. But in the days and weeks that followed, other, more difficult issues arose.

Even though the engineering unit, which built several temporary bridges for troops, armor and supply trucks, did not experience much combat during the push into Iraq, the weeks of hyper-vigilance, heavy workload and loss of sleep took a toll.

Cpl. Joseph Marshall, for example, said he didn't sleep well for two weeks. "I'd be walking around and all of a sudden it felt like everything had pushed forward and I'd get kind of dizzy," he said. "For two weeks I felt like any second I would wake up and be in a tent somewhere in the damn desert. You were there so long and your body was so used to going, going, going, and not eating good and not drinking water and not sleeping."

In addition to sleep difficulty, relationships came under strain, and some Marines have had trouble readjusting to a slower but more formal base environment.

Marshall, 24, said he dreamed about dead bodies he saw at the Saddam Canal, a short but intense firefight in the second week of the war, and a subsequent incident in which Marines shot up a car full of civilians, who had misunderstood orders to stop. (Amazingly, none of the bullets hit any occupants.)

He recalled a recent morning in the Lejeune barracks when a fellow Marine woke up yelling for his rifle. "I'm like, 'Hey, you don't have it anymore, you don't got to worry about it'," he said. "He was up, he just wasn't in his mind. It took some talking to to get him to calm down."

"I never even dreamed I would be going to war when I joined the Marine Corps, so I'm just happy to be back and happy to be alive," said Lance Cpl. Jamie Geitgey, 23.

Even Gunnery Sgt. Mark Wendling, 44, a veteran of minefield maintenance in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, embassy guard duty in the early days of the Liberian civil war and the first Persian Gulf conflict, had some adjusting to do when he returned, his wife Katherine said.

"We were at a fireworks show, and there were bottle rockets going off, and I looked at him and said, 'Are you OK?" and he said 'Yes, I can get through this'," she said. "It brought back a memory. I don't even know what that memory was. It's not something you ask about unless they are already discussing it."

Shawn Griffin, 31, said of her husband Staff Sgt. George Griffin, 30: "He wanted to go all the time when he got back. That was his way of not dealing with it. Eventually we went to our pastor, but I still worry he's not talking about it enough."

Many of the Marines lost weight because of the constant exertion, the times when supply lines thinned and instances of intestinal illness. Gunnery Sgt. Mark Friedel, 40, dropped 35 pounds from his normal weight of 235. "I joked to my friends here, 'I found a new wonder diet. It's called war.' "

Others were taken aback by the speed of their departure from Iraq. The unit zig-zagged some 930 miles on their desert odyssey into Iraq, but needed only 350 miles on highways to return to Kuwait, and then they flew a commercial jet back to the States.

"It was like nothing; I was, 'Like man, what'd we do?'" Sgt. Michael Leisure said.

There are also things they can now laugh about -- like the time they set a campsite well after dark unaware that an artillery battery was adjacent to them, until it opened up without warning.

Or the dog-hunting league they formed with elaborate rules and points system at an abandoned air base near Al Kut to discourage roaming packs of feral mutts. In the end, only one dog actually was shot.

Beyond the personal adjustments, the familial ones almost seem more difficult. The unit has had its share of divorces and breakups.

Annette Highers, wife of First Sgt. Patrick Highers and an emergency room worker, said couples typically experience tension because each spouse feels they have sacrificed a great deal.

"The wife says 'I've been paying the bills and taking care of the kids for six months solid and I need a break, you take over,'" she said. "The husband says, 'Wait a minute, I was just in a war. I need a break.' It escalates from there."

For the younger couples, the time apart is most difficult. Few are adept at handling the separation, the finances and infants all at once.

"We had wives who showed up [at the base] within a couple months of the guy having to leave," said Leisure's wife, Katherine. "Those are the ones that I felt the sorriest for. They had no furniture, they had no clue what it was to be married and now they had to handle it all themselves."

The steady drumbeat of American deaths -- 121 since President George W. Bush declared that major combat was over May 1 -- and questions about pre-war claims by the Bush administration have not been ignored here.

"If the president and the generals can't figure out how to stop it [the ambushes], I don't have the answer, but somebody needs to figure out an answer quick, otherwise we're just going to continue to get killed over there one or two at a time," Friedel said.

Katherine Wendling found she could not separate her emotions for her husband from the political debate. "In my office, I remember, people would blame it on oil, and I would say, 'You cannot talk about oil, when my husband is over there, the father of my children, defending your country,'" she said. "I would leave. I would go into my office and boo-hoo."

Unlike the swampy stereotype of a Marine base, Lejeune, located in Jacksonville, N.C., actually resembles a university campus. The base, which houses 37,000 active duty Marines, is so large that it takes nearly 15 minutes to drive from the main gate to headquarters.

Life at base can be mind-numbing. The stakes are lower, and loads of paperwork accompanies every task. Dozens of minor regulations, which went un-enforced in Iraq, are once again in place. It is against the rules, for example, for Marines to smoke, drink, or talk on a cell phone while walking.

The energy left over from the war is channeled into the nightlife of the town. In a scene duplicated for decades, every night, the bars, pool halls and strip clubs are crowded with Marines tossing back copious amounts of beer. At Lejeune, Marines may bring beer into their dorm-like barracks rooms. In a private moment, one sergeant bemoaned a Marine in the battalion who seemed to be "trying to make up for all the beer he missed while in Kuwait and Iraq."

As a result, a major concern on base is drunken driving and speeding. Base commanders have placed several wrecked cars around the base as reminders of the pitfalls that exist even at home.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usback0811,0,1521359.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

Sempers,

Roger
:marine: