An uncomfortable silence
Uncertainty over corpsman’s confinement, future makes wife’s wait wearisome

By Gidget Fuentes
Times staff writer

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — The two Navy hospital corpsmen have spent less than half of their 22-month marriage together at home.

During his first seven-month combat tour in Iraq, she worked on base and juggled the care of their newborn daughter with shore duty responsibilities. Field training filled most of the precious months between deployments.

But his recent return home, halfway through his second tour in Iraq with his Camp Pendleton-based infantry battalion, isn’t one to celebrate.


Since May 12, he and 11 Marines with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, have been held in confinement over allegations that they killed an Iraqi man April 26 in the village of Hamdaniya and set up his body so it seemed he was an insurgent.

Jeremiah “Jay” Sullivan III, a former Navy lawyer representing the corpsman, said his treatment in the brig at Pendleton is worse than what some terrorists get.

“Even in supermax [a federal high-security prison], people get to exercise,” Sullivan said June 5, noting that the sailor remains shackled during the hourlong exercise period, while a brig guard keeps one hand on the sailor’s waist belt.

While the Marine Corps announced June 16 that the level of restraint used had been lowered, the confinement of the corpsman is still difficult for his wife.

“I don’t know much,” said Heather, a third-class corpsman like her husband, who spoke June 12 to Marine Corps Times on the condition her last name not be used.

On May 24, the 12 men with 3/5’s Kilo Company were shipped back to Camp Pendleton. The corpsman and seven Marines were placed in solitary confinement in the base brig and four others were restricted to the base.

Neither her husband nor the others have been charged with any crime, although several attorneys representing the jailed men say they expect possible charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy.

At the brig, each one is kept in a 10-foot-high room with a mattress and bed and a stainless-steel sink, toilet and storage locker. For an hour each day, they are allowed to go into a recreational yard, where they can get exercise. But the opportunity to stretch their legs had been limited, defense attorneys say, because the men remained shackled and at hand’s reach from a brig guard.

Preliminary findings led officials to impose the “maximum” restraint, said 2nd Lt. Lawton King, a 1st Marine Division spokesman. “When service members leave their cell, they are fully restrained with handcuffs attached to a leather belt and leg cuffs while being escorted by a correctional specialist as a safety precaution.”

On June 16, military officials lowered the level of restraint from maximum to “medium-in” restraint in pretrial custody, which does not require shackles to be worn, King said.

The Hamdaniya case comes on the heels of a Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe into alleged war crimes in Hadithah, Iraq, by another Marine infantry battalion. The cases have thrust her husband and the others into a firestorm of atrocity allegations fueled by scathing comments from several congressmen and unnamed Pentagon officials, as well as expressions of concern from military brass, including the top Marine Corps officer.

Defense attorneys say they haven’t received any official information about the investigation. Sullivan wants Congress to investigate leaks of the investigation, which have painted the squad as murderers. The men “are being tried on the five o’clock news, and that’s wrong,” he said.

A frantic wait

It’s been a nightmarish spring for Heather and her husband, who first met while stationed in San Diego.

During her husband’s second deployment, the couple spoke often, “just about every day,” Heather said, sometimes conversing from the field via satellite phone. She e-mailed him family photos and videos of her and their daughter.

But last month, Heather worried for a week after she didn’t hear from him around their anniversary date.

“The day before [our] anniversary — May 17 — he called me and said he was going to call me that night,” Heather said.

But she didn’t hear from him for a week.

She tried to e-mail him but only got a reply from one of their friends, who told her that her husband was shifted to another base. She didn’t know what to make of that.

What she didn’t know at the time was that he had been sent to the main base in Fallujah, where he was initially confined to quarters May 12. Two weeks later, he was flown back to the States. His arrival at Camp Pendleton was a huge surprise to her.

“He called me from somebody’s cell phone, and I actually got to spend four hours with him,” Heather said. “He said he had to check in at the battalion aid station, she said, and “he was supposed to call me [later] that day, to pick me up at work.”

But that call never came. Instead, the next words from him came in a collect call he made to her from the base brig.

The conversation was short, lasting maybe two minutes, and he told her to “get a lawyer.”

The next day, she made her first visit to see him at the brig. It was rough. Separated by a Plexiglas window, they couldn’t hug or kiss.

“It was definitely hard,” she said. “He did assure me that everything would be OK.”

His confinement and uncertainty about his fate are stressful. Heather said she received little information about her husband’s plight, and she has few people to turn to for help, mostly “my family, and that’s it,” she said.

Her grandmother and her sister have helped with her daughter’s care, but for now, she’s on her own. She has set up a Web site and the “Patriot Defense Fund” to help raise money for legal fees and awareness about the circumstances of her husband’s confinement.

Dreams of a medical career

Heather, who was influenced by a mother who had served in the Marines, had dreams of becoming a doctor. It was an aspiration shared by her husband, a 20-year-old who grew up in the nation’s heartland. He was going through Field Medical Service School, and she was training as a lab technician.

“He wanted to be a doctor, and he thought the Navy would be the best start,” Heather said.

He landed orders and assignment as a “green side” corpsman, serving as the “doc” to Marine infantrymen at a time when the battalion was gearing up to deploy into the combat zone in Iraq.

Heather didn’t know what to expect during that first 2004-05 deployment.

“We were both so young and new to the military. We really weren’t sure what would happen,” she said. “He wasn’t really sure what he would do over there.”

She learned she was pregnant two weeks after he left, and she told him the good news by telephone. “It was very hard,” she said.

The couple spoke about every two weeks.

“They were busy a lot” of the time, she said.

At first, Heather didn’t worry too much.

“He was very motivated,” she said. “As the deployment went along, he saw more things” as the battalion fought in combat operations.

“He saw two people die in his arms,” she added. “That was a big stressor for him.”

Even after a combat wound from shrapnel that hit his buttocks, he kept his focus.

“He was so motivated. He loved being with the Marines,” she said.

Heather was 8½ months pregnant when he came home, and the couple had to prepare to become parents.

“He acted a bit different, I guess, maybe the stress of Iraq,” she said.

But their daughter’s arrival helped shift his focus away from the horrors of combat.

She said something had changed in her husband during that first deployment. A “laid-back” guy, a “people person” who talks to anybody, she said, he said little about Iraq and his combat experiences.

He has returned early from a second deployment, and Heather said she is relieved he’s home and safe. But she also said she’s fearful of what his immediate future will bring.

Ellie