thedrifter
11-19-06, 06:57 PM
Charlie Company: Home
Back From Fallujah, Looking For Normal
By JESSE HAMILTON
The Hartford Courant
November 19 2006
SOUTHINGTON -- Here, the Marines seem younger, the years scrubbed from their faces, no trace of Fallujah on immaculate dress uniforms.
Like Rip Van Winkle's nap in reverse, the weary men of Charlie Company closed their eyes in Iraq and awoke a few weeks later in a sparkling Connecticut ballroom - well-dressed warriors returned to their prom days.
At the annual Marine Corps birthday ball, they fetch drinks for dates in formal gowns, and they joke with their buddies, and the evening glows. But it's not so easy to trade their war for lighter hearts. Not all have lowered their weapons or dropped their armor since returning to Connecticut in late October. Fallujah is still fresh, and it's hard for some to believe they have made it home.
The Marines' celebration is a surface thing, like the fancy uniforms dripping with new medals. Under that surface still breathes that ruined city in the desert and the marks it left on the Plainville-based troops from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 25th Marines.
Beneath the left sleeve of Lance Cpl. Lino Torres' dress blues, a fresh tattoo on reddened skin - four names of men who won't grow any older. Beneath Lance Cpl. James Lauber's right pant leg, the stitched wreckage of his leg, dotted with angry scars. Beneath almost 23 years worth of medals on 1st Sgt. Ben Grainger's chest, a heart condition that almost separated him from his men. Almost.
And from beneath the lifted glasses, the shouted stories and the dance music, four names surface again and again. Christopher B. Cosgrove III. Kurt Dechen. Brian Letendre. And Jordan Pierson. Talk never strays far from the four who didn't survive Iraq.
Every Marine left something in Fallujah. Every Marine brought something home.
TORRES
Lino Torres has killed. And he's seen friends killed.
The tall, lanky lance corporal from Bridgeport, who has a young face and an unhurried way, wanted so badly to go to war. He signed on with Charlie Company, knowing it was on its way. So Torres and the rest of Charlie Company landed in the middle of Fallujah, where fewer than 200 Marines were all that stood between an increasingly vicious insurgency and the weak city government that had been cobbled together.
The Marines soon knew the streets as well as their own New England neighborhoods. They trod the dust and sewage. They examined roadside garbage for hidden bombs. They smashed down doors and searched for the enemy, who looked like everybody else.
Torres and the others found war to be messy and confusing. He saw a squad mate shot through the neck by a sniper nobody could find. He had to gun down a man trying to throw a grenade at his Humvee. He learned that the only people he could count on were the other Marines.
After half a year in one of the most violent cities in Iraq, he was no longer sure what he was doing there.
Torres was proud to be a Marine, but by then he had no more use for this war or for the people of Fallujah. They didn't seem to want the Americans around, even if all they were trying to do was keep the peace. Torres used to debate the point with Christopher B. Cosgrove III from New Jersey, who was always the Iraqis' defender.
Finally, October came, and replacement Marines from another unit filtered into their vehicle checkpoint, where Torres and others had been stationed on the northern edge of the city. Torres was among the first to leave, and he couldn't wait. He said his goodbyes to friends - like Cosgrove - who were staying behind a while to show the new guys the ropes. "I looked at him right in the eyes 10 minutes before it happened."
Cosgrove, whose curiosity about the Iraqis was matched by his kindness toward them, died in the car bomb blast that shattered his vehicle search area.
"The guy who loved the people - that's the guy that the people kill," Torres says.
Torres saw Cosgrove's body soon after. He won't forget it or the fury he felt toward the Iraqi soldier who was supposed to do a first screening of the car. He looked but couldn't find the man. If he had, he wonders if he would have killed him.
The 21-year-old signed up for war, and he's glad he went. But, he says: "I'm sure we did a good job, but a good job for what?"
Torres was eager to return home, and he had good reason - a 7-month-old reason, his first child, named after him. When he arrived at the homecoming in Hartford last month, he saw Lino Jr. for the first time. His wife, Kethlene, and family watched Torres that night, looking for his tears of relief, but he disappointed them. "I was just waiting for something, and I got nothing," Kethlene says.
She and the others keep watching him closely, still, wondering how he will be different, how the war changed him. He keeps disappointing them. At her mother's home, in the first weeks of their new life as a family, Kethlene wonders if he's ever going to show any emotion.
"I'm just calm," he says, in a scene playing elsewhere, too, with the other Marines and their families. The families have waited so long for these reunions and for the truth of what Fallujah was. But many Marines would rather not get into it. They waited a long time themselves, just to be normal again.
Torres says, "I fit right back in to what I left." But that's not quite right. When he left, he wasn't a father. Now, after a barrage of impromptu diaper-changing and bottle-feeding lessons, he's learning how to be one. He holds Lino Jr., with his head of brown curls, in his lap. "It's pretty much just all about him now," he says.
He got a bigger car, and they are looking for their own place. He's also looking for a real career, maybe in law enforcement. Until then, he just got work as a recruiter, finding new Marines.
When Torres is not planning his future, he sits in the window and looks out at the street. "Right now, it feels good just seeing rain coming down."
He's watched the news, too. He sees Baghdad there, all the time. But where is Fallujah? Where is Ramadi and the rest of al-Anbar province? Where is Charlie Company's ugly corner of the war?
A few weeks ago, he was anxious to get away from the other Marines he'd been living so closely with for months. They all were. Now, he misses them. His wife wants him to talk about Iraq, but he doesn't see the point. She's a civilian. "I don't talk about it, because she's not going to understand."
You had to be there.
LAUBER
The young boy barely seemed to aim when he delivered his package, side-armed, tossing it through the air. But the aim was true, bouncing it off Lance Cpl. James Lauber's chest and down through the Humvee turret hole. Lauber yelled "Grenade!" and his squad mates bailed out of the vehicle. Lauber tried to climb free, up through the hole, snatching his legs out.
But it happened so fast. The grenade blast tore through the Humvee interior, where Lauber's right leg still dangled. And that August day marked the end of his tour in Iraq - maybe the end of his Marine Corps life.
The 20-year-old from Waterbury is a third-generation Marine, the third James Lauber in his family to wear the globe and anchor.
"I'm not 100 percent sure I can still do the job," he says on the rear deck of his family's house, the spot where the young Marine - equal parts cocky and genuine - smokes and thinks. There's a lot of pain still in the leg. Under red-brown scars, the muscles are laced with maybe 200 metal shards, "like confetti." X-rays like star charts.
The day he got hit, he thought he was going to die. But he lived, and was among the few who came home before the deployment's end. He lived, but it didn't feel like living.
"Coming home meant nothing to me. I felt like I wasn't home until they were home." He had his second chance at life, but he couldn't start it until the rest of Charlie Company was safe.
So he sat on the deck and smoked.
In that limbo time, it was almost hard to believe he had been to war. "It feels like a dream that it happened. It's so distant." But he heard every sharp sound, every car backfiring. When he went to get his driver's license renewed and there was a shooting range next door, he was unnerved by the sound of the gunfire.
And he waited, going from a wheelchair to two crutches, then to one crutch. He pushed his recovery hard. He switched from the crutch to a cane he found in his grandmother's basement.
He felt guilty for not being in Fallujah. He felt he must have done something wrong if he'd been hurt. While the guys in Charlie Company wanted out of Iraq, he wished he could be with them.
"I don't feel like I finished something. It feels like there's something left to do."
Lauber is a believer. Like many of the Marines, he associates their fight in Fallujah with keeping their families and friends back home safer from terrorists. "We do it the best we can."
On Oct. 25, Charlie Company landed at Westover Air Reserve Base in Massachusetts. Lauber was there, leaning on his cane. He said it was the best day of his life.
GRAINGER
Four dead. Thirty-one combat wounds. The last infantry company that 1st Sgt. Ben Grainger would ever serve with was torn up. But, he'll tell you, that's what Marines do. They go where things are bad, and sometimes they don't come back whole. And if Grainger explains it in his tight-lipped, back-of-the-throat drawl, people will listen.
In Fallujah, the first sergeant barely slept. He did his hectic job by day, and often night, handling administrative duties between patrols and frantic evacuations of the wounded. And when all that was through, he sat in his office in the shabby, four-story building that was Charlie Company's home. In the office, barricaded with sandbags that couldn't keep the dust out, he sat at his computer and typed e-mails to his Marines' families.
Their appetite was voracious for his words, for the briefest connection. So Grainger became Charlie Company for them.
But on many nights, he needed to clear another hour or two. There was his quasi-religion, Americantology, to take care of. He and a group of Marines would sit on their roof in the dark and listen to his collection of ultra-patriot music, mixed with some rock and country - tunes he felt spoke to their situation. Guns N' Roses. Bob Seger. Lots of Toby Keith. The Marine Corps hymn and "The Star-Spangled Banner."
It was his ode to America. It was also his answer to the mosque loudspeakers that filled the rooftops and streets with prayer several times a day.
Two weeks ago, he and his wife, Patricia, heard another recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner." It was in Boston, at a memorial service for the dead, where they watched the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chris Landro, deliver a halting speech.
"These men made the ultimate sacrifice in a place far from home for a people they did not know," Landro said. He cleared his throat during the speech, again and again, but sometimes his voice didn't work.
Back at his house in Enfield, Grainger is caught between the past and future. Almost 23 years in the Marine Corps is about up. He made a deal with Patricia. No more war. The southern man lost a bet with his Connecticut wife: Super Bowl XXXVIII, his Carolina Panthers vs. the New England Patriots, to decide where they would live. So they moved with their two young sons to Enfield, where for the first time in his nomadic, active-duty life, he'll stay for good.
So he wears the civilian clothes his wife buys. He wonders what he'll do for a living after he gets out of the military soon. He even wonders what kind of haircut he'll get after two decades of short-cropped Marine utility. Meanwhile, he's a dad again, picking the boys up at school, taking them to their soccer games, setting up the house for Halloween and battling "insurgent" squirrels at the bird feeders.
This is Life, Part 2. His wife says he seems more mellow than she's ever known him to be. She approves. "Take it slow," she tells him.
Grainger won't be the larger-than-life first sergeant anymore, except to the men and their families who will always see him that way. And his 40-year-old body has already given him a reality check. A tiny hole between the chambers of his heart. It got him shipped out of Fallujah to Germany for tests. But Grainger made his escape and returned to his company for the rest of the deployment. Getting shipped home wasn't an option.
Like the other wives, girlfriends, mothers and fathers, Patricia Grainger - a former Navy corpsman herself - wonders what toll Iraq took on her husband.
He doesn't deny that the war is still with him. "You don't just come back home and it didn't happen," he says.
But the experience isn't fully written. How can you know how to manage memories of the war if the end of the story hasn't come? Will Iraq emerge someday, a stable and free country? Will it descend into a chaos of warlords and cheap lives?
While America's leaders debate and plot the conclusion to the war in Iraq, the Marines of Charlie Company hope the future justifies their past.
"If it turns out to be a success, it's all worth it; it's all great," Grainger says. If not:
"We just wasted a whole year of our lives. And four bodies."
PIERSON
After Charlie Company's return, there were Marines around the Pierson home in Milford again.
They came, not sure what to say. They came because they owed Jordan - the corporal, the two-time Purple Heart recipient, the friend. They filled in the blanks for Eric and Beverley, Jordan's parents, and for Ethan, the little brother.
After the hectic days of the memorial service and burial, a bitter resignation settled into the house. There was still much to do to burn the 21-year-old's name into the memory of his town. Scholarships. A memorial park behind their house. "It doesn't really seem to slow down," Eric Pierson said.
As far as Jordan's eternal marker at America's most famous cemetery, there's trouble with that, too. The headstone at Arlington National Cemetery had the wrong name. John instead of Jordan.
A few misplaced letters, a little mistake. But it doesn't seem little to the family of the Marine killed by a sniper's bullet in Fallujah. They want to visit the grave the day after Thanksgiving. They want Ethan to see Jordan's name there.
Jordan's squad mates embraced it as a new mission, but it's uncertain the new stone will be ready this year.
The Piersons are heartened to see how their son affected his friends, how it seems they'll be living memorials to Jordan. The young men's grief takes some of the sting from their own. The family might not know what Jordan accomplished in Iraq, but they can see what he's meant to those he was with.
Eric and Beverley Pierson didn't attend the homecoming for Charlie Company. Nor did they want to go to the ball. It didn't seem right. Eric Pierson said, "They are really meant to be joyous celebrations for those folks who did return."
THE BALL
Whether the families of the dead are here or not, the four men are not far. Their names are in half of the war stories the Marines tell each other as they move from table to table, clutching friends' shoulders and taking pictures with each other under the Southington ballroom's brass chandeliers.
No party can repair what Iraq took from Charlie Company, but at least the men are surrounded by those who know where they've been. For one more night, no explanation will be necessary.
The 231st birthday party for the Marine Corps comes with its requisite ceremonies and speeches. As soon as the last word is spoken into the microphone, a sea of dress uniforms crashes toward the open bars.
The party really begins, and the Marines shed some of their discomfort now that the formality has eased. They eat thick slabs of meat and begin to make plans to invade the bars of Connecticut later, with their dress uniforms and their swagger.
The men who were wounded attract halos of Marines, shaking their hands, saying the same things: Hey, man. You look great. Glad you made it.
And they have made it, all the Marines here. They have been to war and back. Some of their wounds are easy to see. Some aren't. But the young men can't help laughing and smiling tonight.
They are together, and they are alive.
Contact Jesse Hamilton at jhamilton@courant.com.
Ellie
Back From Fallujah, Looking For Normal
By JESSE HAMILTON
The Hartford Courant
November 19 2006
SOUTHINGTON -- Here, the Marines seem younger, the years scrubbed from their faces, no trace of Fallujah on immaculate dress uniforms.
Like Rip Van Winkle's nap in reverse, the weary men of Charlie Company closed their eyes in Iraq and awoke a few weeks later in a sparkling Connecticut ballroom - well-dressed warriors returned to their prom days.
At the annual Marine Corps birthday ball, they fetch drinks for dates in formal gowns, and they joke with their buddies, and the evening glows. But it's not so easy to trade their war for lighter hearts. Not all have lowered their weapons or dropped their armor since returning to Connecticut in late October. Fallujah is still fresh, and it's hard for some to believe they have made it home.
The Marines' celebration is a surface thing, like the fancy uniforms dripping with new medals. Under that surface still breathes that ruined city in the desert and the marks it left on the Plainville-based troops from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 25th Marines.
Beneath the left sleeve of Lance Cpl. Lino Torres' dress blues, a fresh tattoo on reddened skin - four names of men who won't grow any older. Beneath Lance Cpl. James Lauber's right pant leg, the stitched wreckage of his leg, dotted with angry scars. Beneath almost 23 years worth of medals on 1st Sgt. Ben Grainger's chest, a heart condition that almost separated him from his men. Almost.
And from beneath the lifted glasses, the shouted stories and the dance music, four names surface again and again. Christopher B. Cosgrove III. Kurt Dechen. Brian Letendre. And Jordan Pierson. Talk never strays far from the four who didn't survive Iraq.
Every Marine left something in Fallujah. Every Marine brought something home.
TORRES
Lino Torres has killed. And he's seen friends killed.
The tall, lanky lance corporal from Bridgeport, who has a young face and an unhurried way, wanted so badly to go to war. He signed on with Charlie Company, knowing it was on its way. So Torres and the rest of Charlie Company landed in the middle of Fallujah, where fewer than 200 Marines were all that stood between an increasingly vicious insurgency and the weak city government that had been cobbled together.
The Marines soon knew the streets as well as their own New England neighborhoods. They trod the dust and sewage. They examined roadside garbage for hidden bombs. They smashed down doors and searched for the enemy, who looked like everybody else.
Torres and the others found war to be messy and confusing. He saw a squad mate shot through the neck by a sniper nobody could find. He had to gun down a man trying to throw a grenade at his Humvee. He learned that the only people he could count on were the other Marines.
After half a year in one of the most violent cities in Iraq, he was no longer sure what he was doing there.
Torres was proud to be a Marine, but by then he had no more use for this war or for the people of Fallujah. They didn't seem to want the Americans around, even if all they were trying to do was keep the peace. Torres used to debate the point with Christopher B. Cosgrove III from New Jersey, who was always the Iraqis' defender.
Finally, October came, and replacement Marines from another unit filtered into their vehicle checkpoint, where Torres and others had been stationed on the northern edge of the city. Torres was among the first to leave, and he couldn't wait. He said his goodbyes to friends - like Cosgrove - who were staying behind a while to show the new guys the ropes. "I looked at him right in the eyes 10 minutes before it happened."
Cosgrove, whose curiosity about the Iraqis was matched by his kindness toward them, died in the car bomb blast that shattered his vehicle search area.
"The guy who loved the people - that's the guy that the people kill," Torres says.
Torres saw Cosgrove's body soon after. He won't forget it or the fury he felt toward the Iraqi soldier who was supposed to do a first screening of the car. He looked but couldn't find the man. If he had, he wonders if he would have killed him.
The 21-year-old signed up for war, and he's glad he went. But, he says: "I'm sure we did a good job, but a good job for what?"
Torres was eager to return home, and he had good reason - a 7-month-old reason, his first child, named after him. When he arrived at the homecoming in Hartford last month, he saw Lino Jr. for the first time. His wife, Kethlene, and family watched Torres that night, looking for his tears of relief, but he disappointed them. "I was just waiting for something, and I got nothing," Kethlene says.
She and the others keep watching him closely, still, wondering how he will be different, how the war changed him. He keeps disappointing them. At her mother's home, in the first weeks of their new life as a family, Kethlene wonders if he's ever going to show any emotion.
"I'm just calm," he says, in a scene playing elsewhere, too, with the other Marines and their families. The families have waited so long for these reunions and for the truth of what Fallujah was. But many Marines would rather not get into it. They waited a long time themselves, just to be normal again.
Torres says, "I fit right back in to what I left." But that's not quite right. When he left, he wasn't a father. Now, after a barrage of impromptu diaper-changing and bottle-feeding lessons, he's learning how to be one. He holds Lino Jr., with his head of brown curls, in his lap. "It's pretty much just all about him now," he says.
He got a bigger car, and they are looking for their own place. He's also looking for a real career, maybe in law enforcement. Until then, he just got work as a recruiter, finding new Marines.
When Torres is not planning his future, he sits in the window and looks out at the street. "Right now, it feels good just seeing rain coming down."
He's watched the news, too. He sees Baghdad there, all the time. But where is Fallujah? Where is Ramadi and the rest of al-Anbar province? Where is Charlie Company's ugly corner of the war?
A few weeks ago, he was anxious to get away from the other Marines he'd been living so closely with for months. They all were. Now, he misses them. His wife wants him to talk about Iraq, but he doesn't see the point. She's a civilian. "I don't talk about it, because she's not going to understand."
You had to be there.
LAUBER
The young boy barely seemed to aim when he delivered his package, side-armed, tossing it through the air. But the aim was true, bouncing it off Lance Cpl. James Lauber's chest and down through the Humvee turret hole. Lauber yelled "Grenade!" and his squad mates bailed out of the vehicle. Lauber tried to climb free, up through the hole, snatching his legs out.
But it happened so fast. The grenade blast tore through the Humvee interior, where Lauber's right leg still dangled. And that August day marked the end of his tour in Iraq - maybe the end of his Marine Corps life.
The 20-year-old from Waterbury is a third-generation Marine, the third James Lauber in his family to wear the globe and anchor.
"I'm not 100 percent sure I can still do the job," he says on the rear deck of his family's house, the spot where the young Marine - equal parts cocky and genuine - smokes and thinks. There's a lot of pain still in the leg. Under red-brown scars, the muscles are laced with maybe 200 metal shards, "like confetti." X-rays like star charts.
The day he got hit, he thought he was going to die. But he lived, and was among the few who came home before the deployment's end. He lived, but it didn't feel like living.
"Coming home meant nothing to me. I felt like I wasn't home until they were home." He had his second chance at life, but he couldn't start it until the rest of Charlie Company was safe.
So he sat on the deck and smoked.
In that limbo time, it was almost hard to believe he had been to war. "It feels like a dream that it happened. It's so distant." But he heard every sharp sound, every car backfiring. When he went to get his driver's license renewed and there was a shooting range next door, he was unnerved by the sound of the gunfire.
And he waited, going from a wheelchair to two crutches, then to one crutch. He pushed his recovery hard. He switched from the crutch to a cane he found in his grandmother's basement.
He felt guilty for not being in Fallujah. He felt he must have done something wrong if he'd been hurt. While the guys in Charlie Company wanted out of Iraq, he wished he could be with them.
"I don't feel like I finished something. It feels like there's something left to do."
Lauber is a believer. Like many of the Marines, he associates their fight in Fallujah with keeping their families and friends back home safer from terrorists. "We do it the best we can."
On Oct. 25, Charlie Company landed at Westover Air Reserve Base in Massachusetts. Lauber was there, leaning on his cane. He said it was the best day of his life.
GRAINGER
Four dead. Thirty-one combat wounds. The last infantry company that 1st Sgt. Ben Grainger would ever serve with was torn up. But, he'll tell you, that's what Marines do. They go where things are bad, and sometimes they don't come back whole. And if Grainger explains it in his tight-lipped, back-of-the-throat drawl, people will listen.
In Fallujah, the first sergeant barely slept. He did his hectic job by day, and often night, handling administrative duties between patrols and frantic evacuations of the wounded. And when all that was through, he sat in his office in the shabby, four-story building that was Charlie Company's home. In the office, barricaded with sandbags that couldn't keep the dust out, he sat at his computer and typed e-mails to his Marines' families.
Their appetite was voracious for his words, for the briefest connection. So Grainger became Charlie Company for them.
But on many nights, he needed to clear another hour or two. There was his quasi-religion, Americantology, to take care of. He and a group of Marines would sit on their roof in the dark and listen to his collection of ultra-patriot music, mixed with some rock and country - tunes he felt spoke to their situation. Guns N' Roses. Bob Seger. Lots of Toby Keith. The Marine Corps hymn and "The Star-Spangled Banner."
It was his ode to America. It was also his answer to the mosque loudspeakers that filled the rooftops and streets with prayer several times a day.
Two weeks ago, he and his wife, Patricia, heard another recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner." It was in Boston, at a memorial service for the dead, where they watched the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chris Landro, deliver a halting speech.
"These men made the ultimate sacrifice in a place far from home for a people they did not know," Landro said. He cleared his throat during the speech, again and again, but sometimes his voice didn't work.
Back at his house in Enfield, Grainger is caught between the past and future. Almost 23 years in the Marine Corps is about up. He made a deal with Patricia. No more war. The southern man lost a bet with his Connecticut wife: Super Bowl XXXVIII, his Carolina Panthers vs. the New England Patriots, to decide where they would live. So they moved with their two young sons to Enfield, where for the first time in his nomadic, active-duty life, he'll stay for good.
So he wears the civilian clothes his wife buys. He wonders what he'll do for a living after he gets out of the military soon. He even wonders what kind of haircut he'll get after two decades of short-cropped Marine utility. Meanwhile, he's a dad again, picking the boys up at school, taking them to their soccer games, setting up the house for Halloween and battling "insurgent" squirrels at the bird feeders.
This is Life, Part 2. His wife says he seems more mellow than she's ever known him to be. She approves. "Take it slow," she tells him.
Grainger won't be the larger-than-life first sergeant anymore, except to the men and their families who will always see him that way. And his 40-year-old body has already given him a reality check. A tiny hole between the chambers of his heart. It got him shipped out of Fallujah to Germany for tests. But Grainger made his escape and returned to his company for the rest of the deployment. Getting shipped home wasn't an option.
Like the other wives, girlfriends, mothers and fathers, Patricia Grainger - a former Navy corpsman herself - wonders what toll Iraq took on her husband.
He doesn't deny that the war is still with him. "You don't just come back home and it didn't happen," he says.
But the experience isn't fully written. How can you know how to manage memories of the war if the end of the story hasn't come? Will Iraq emerge someday, a stable and free country? Will it descend into a chaos of warlords and cheap lives?
While America's leaders debate and plot the conclusion to the war in Iraq, the Marines of Charlie Company hope the future justifies their past.
"If it turns out to be a success, it's all worth it; it's all great," Grainger says. If not:
"We just wasted a whole year of our lives. And four bodies."
PIERSON
After Charlie Company's return, there were Marines around the Pierson home in Milford again.
They came, not sure what to say. They came because they owed Jordan - the corporal, the two-time Purple Heart recipient, the friend. They filled in the blanks for Eric and Beverley, Jordan's parents, and for Ethan, the little brother.
After the hectic days of the memorial service and burial, a bitter resignation settled into the house. There was still much to do to burn the 21-year-old's name into the memory of his town. Scholarships. A memorial park behind their house. "It doesn't really seem to slow down," Eric Pierson said.
As far as Jordan's eternal marker at America's most famous cemetery, there's trouble with that, too. The headstone at Arlington National Cemetery had the wrong name. John instead of Jordan.
A few misplaced letters, a little mistake. But it doesn't seem little to the family of the Marine killed by a sniper's bullet in Fallujah. They want to visit the grave the day after Thanksgiving. They want Ethan to see Jordan's name there.
Jordan's squad mates embraced it as a new mission, but it's uncertain the new stone will be ready this year.
The Piersons are heartened to see how their son affected his friends, how it seems they'll be living memorials to Jordan. The young men's grief takes some of the sting from their own. The family might not know what Jordan accomplished in Iraq, but they can see what he's meant to those he was with.
Eric and Beverley Pierson didn't attend the homecoming for Charlie Company. Nor did they want to go to the ball. It didn't seem right. Eric Pierson said, "They are really meant to be joyous celebrations for those folks who did return."
THE BALL
Whether the families of the dead are here or not, the four men are not far. Their names are in half of the war stories the Marines tell each other as they move from table to table, clutching friends' shoulders and taking pictures with each other under the Southington ballroom's brass chandeliers.
No party can repair what Iraq took from Charlie Company, but at least the men are surrounded by those who know where they've been. For one more night, no explanation will be necessary.
The 231st birthday party for the Marine Corps comes with its requisite ceremonies and speeches. As soon as the last word is spoken into the microphone, a sea of dress uniforms crashes toward the open bars.
The party really begins, and the Marines shed some of their discomfort now that the formality has eased. They eat thick slabs of meat and begin to make plans to invade the bars of Connecticut later, with their dress uniforms and their swagger.
The men who were wounded attract halos of Marines, shaking their hands, saying the same things: Hey, man. You look great. Glad you made it.
And they have made it, all the Marines here. They have been to war and back. Some of their wounds are easy to see. Some aren't. But the young men can't help laughing and smiling tonight.
They are together, and they are alive.
Contact Jesse Hamilton at jhamilton@courant.com.
Ellie