He Displayed Guts To The Corps

Christopher Caillavet


The Marines have a few things to say about what it takes to hack it in the Corps.

Duty. Honor. Commitment.

Those words meant nothing at all to a young Marco Martinez, and he would be the first to tell you.

As a high schooler and gang member in Las Cruces, N.M., Martinez busied himself with drugs, guns, petty crime and beating people up.

"Fortunately, I never got incarcerated," the 26-year-old Marine veteran told IBD. "But all of my friends ended up incarcerated or dead."

Defying the odds -- and the teachers who told him he would amount to nothing -- Martinez traded his life of ducking bullets in the streets of Las Cruces for one of service in the defense of his country.

For his actions in the Iraq War, he was awarded the Navy Cross, one of America's highest honors.

It's an improbable story, one that Martinez vividly tells in his warts-and-all memoir, "Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero."

Even as a child, he dreamed of war. The only son of an Army Ranger dad and homemaker mom, Martinez spent his early years around bases in Texas and New Mexico.

In "Hard Corps," he recalled that "the military bug had bitten me unusually young and unusually hard." He memorized aircraft types and idolized Rambo.

The Martinez home was a loving one. But as the brother of younger, triplet sisters, "I was sort of left to my own devices," Martinez said.

Soon that meant joining a gang at school. A tattoo across his torso reads Mi Vida Loca, for "my crazy life." And crazy it was: ritual beatings, high-speed chases, once staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Then one day Martinez saw a Hispanic Marine recruiter walking the halls of his high school, "a guy of the same heritage who looked like he could snap me in two but who wasn't a gangster."

Martinez had an epiphany, as he puts it, and joined up.

To most Americans, steeped in the mythology of "Full Metal Jacket" and such, the thought of boot camp is enough to rule out the service. And as tough as you think basic training is, it's tougher, Martinez says. "Nothing can prepare you for what you experience once you get to San Diego," he said. "I've seen grown men cry in boot camp."

As bad as it sounds, Martinez says it's all part of the "breaking down" process by which you're molded into a Marine.

For much of his first full year as a Marine -- that would be 2001 -- Martinez had plenty of time to eat, sleep and carouse. After rifleman training at Camp Pendleton's School of Infantry in California, he found himself stationed in Okinawa, Japan. His 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, grew antsy, itching for combat.

Then came Sept. 11 of that year. With the terrorist attacks, Martinez was sure he would be off to war. Or at least he hoped. "You go infantry for one reason: to defend our great nation," he wrote in "Hard Corps."

The call went out to prepare for war in Afghanistan, home of the brutal Taliban regime. Martinez threw himself into intense physical training once again, only this time with a renewed sense of purpose.

And he waited. Then the news came: A different battalion would hit Afghanistan. In a matter of months, the Taliban was toppled.

For 2002-03, the focus turned to Iraq. Now it was time for Cpl. Martinez to earn his keep. He and his fellow Marines shipped out to the Persian Gulf to await further orders.

Martinez's battalion lay in wait in the Kuwaiti desert until the order came to move into southern Iraq. "Within 15 minutes we were attacked by Iraqi tanks," he said. "Saddam's plan was to attack us in the south to slow us down."

Coalition forces simply stepped on it. The push northward that spring of 2003 was a surreal scene of "burning tanks, burning bodies, burning machine-gun emplacements," Martinez recalled.

The third morning of the invasion, Martinez killed his first two enemy fighters -- guerrillas, wearing no uniforms, sniping at the Marines from buildings in a ramshackle town.

After Martinez and his mates reached Baghdad, things livened up considerably. In Tarmiya, a Tigris River city north of the capital, they encountered Fedayeen Saddam fighters. These were elite forces loyal to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, jihadists who "want to die in combat," according to Martinez.

The Marine squad sprang from its armored vehicle into a maelstrom of gunfire and rockets. Martinez could feel "the heat and the snaps of the rounds passing my ears."

A grenade exploded. Shrapnel tore through the leg of a comrade, Cpl. Timothy Tardif. With his M-16, Martinez shot the grenade thrower as he tried to run away.

The Fedayeen ambush continued with shots coming from a building. According to his Navy Cross citation, Martinez launched a captured enemy rocket into the building, then "single-handedly assaulted the building and killed four enemy soldiers with a grenade and his rifle."

Martinez would receive the Navy Cross -- the second highest naval award after the Medal of Honor -- in May 2004 for his bravery in warding off the enemy and letting the wounded Tardif be evacuated.

The rest of Martinez's tour was marked by eye-opening discoveries: stashes of khat (a stimulating leaf chewed by jihadists to set their minds ablaze), photos of what looked to be gruesome medical experiments on newborn and infant children, and the infamous mass graves of Saddam opponents.

Honorably discharged as a sergeant and living in Southern California, Martinez works full time in nuclear security and attends community college. He plans to transfer soon to San Diego State University, where he will study business.

Life is good for Marco Martinez, far from the war zone of Iraq. But there is a ringing in his ears that never stops. It's a living reminder of his experience in combat and of a war that goes on. He still considers himself fortunate.

"Others left limbs and lives on the battlefield," he wrote. "Loud blaring in one's ears is a tiny price to pay."

Ellie