thedrifter
05-01-07, 07:12 AM
From Emory to Iraq
For the last five years, an Emory student has struggled to balance his college life with his duty as a U.S. Marine.
By: Carolyn Englar
Posted: 5/1/07
Sprawled on the floor, his head propped up on a pile of pillows, 12-year-old Dave sits inches away from the television, absorbed by the Vietnam War movie "Full Metal Jacket." As scenes of torture, death and abuse flash across the screen, his father turns to him and says, "Promise me you will never join the Marines."
At the time, his father's request is surprising to the pre-teen. After all, Dave's father was Ivy League-educated and his family lives in a wealthy suburb of Boston - hardly the background of a future United States Marine.
But 12 years later, Dave, who is three semesters away from graduating from Emory, sports a tattoo that reads USMC on his left shoulder. He has just returned from his second tour of the War in Iraq. "My first name is no longer David," he wrote in an e-mail during his first tour of Iraq. "It is Corporal."
Spurred by his own patriotic fervor, Dave enlisted in the Marine Reserves in June 2001, not expecting to fight in a war. Three months later, on Sept. 11, 2001, three planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Two years later, the U.S. military fired the opening shots of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The initial stages of the fight to liberate an oppressed country seemed promising. After all, in May 2003, President George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and unfurled a banner proclaiming, "Mission Accomplished."
Four years later, more than 3,300 soldiers have died. The War in Iraq has left more than a mass of dead bodies in its wake: It has destroyed the hope and idealism of a generation of young soldiers. "Life means nothing to anyone, on either side," says Dave, whose full name can't be used because it could hinder his military career. "We did what we were trained to do. In the process you stop caring about other people."
Dave's affluent background is unique for a soldier, but his experience in Iraq is not. He is one of 1.5 million men and women who have served in Iraq over the course of the last four years. Dave's story is partially representative, but also personal, beginning in his privileged childhood and including his years at Emory, his uneventful first tour of duty, the death of his father, his fruitless second tour and culminating in his desire to return for a third tour.
But for a young Dave, the War in Iraq is still a decade away.
As a teenager, Dave fought another losing battle: living up to his father's exacting standards. Dave's father graduated from Harvard and completed a two-year program at Dartmouth Medical School and he expected his son to achieve similar success. As a result, while some of Dave's friends were playing outdoors in elementary school, he was learning about survival and discipline in his Boy Scout troop. While Dave's friends were hanging out at the movie theater on a Friday night, Dave was holed up in his room, pulling all-nighters to get high marks at his elite private high school.
Dave's competitive GPA suggested he would spend the four years after high school bunkered down in the library of an elite private school, not military bases in Iraq. Dave was accepted early decision to Emory in the fall of 2000. He told his family he loved the school for its warm climate, but he secretly viewed Emory as another escape from his home life. After all, attending school in Atlanta would place Dave more than 1,000 miles away from Massachusetts. His parents fully expected to send him off to college at the end of the summer of 2001.
But one day, during the second semester of his senior year of high school, he came home from school and told his parents he wanted to join the military. At first, his parents were shocked. This was the same person who, as a child, felt badly for days after he hit a squirrel with a slingshot. Dave was never able to pull the legs of a daddy long legs spider or torture a frog like others his age.
After Dave's parents realized he was serious about joining the Marines, they tried to dissuade him. His mother Pamela says that she felt Dave's individualism would make it hard for him to fit into the conformist culture of the military.
But Dave felt it would be even harder to fit into a competitive academic environment. He decided that the unsightly competition for high grades and a six-figure income wasn't for him. "I was removing myself from that whole pool," Dave says. "It was almost a way of avoiding failure."
His parents expected his desire to join the military to pass, but Dave remained insistent. His mother recalls how he would corner her at her desk and try to persuade her that joining the Marines was a good idea.
Dave tried to explain that he felt a civic duty to enlist in the military. "I never did buy into the classic mindset from the privileged world I grew up in that our children have too much potential to be dying in wars," he says. "I would have tenfold the moral authority to voice my opinions against the war, rather than a long-haired, vegan, stereotypical hippie waving anti-war signs in front of the White House."
Dave also wanted to join the Marines to defy - and impress - his father. "I realize now that I was deeply insecure about not living up to the expectations he had for his first-born son, and I subconsciously decided to rebel against everything he had become," Dave says.
Ignoring the protestations of his parents, Dave signed up for the Marine Reserves and entered boot camp in 2001, only three days after graduating from high school.
After just a few months in boot camp, Dave's transformation from an academic-minded high school student into a Marine was under way. He was more disciplined, focused and intense. "I found I came back and especially that first week … someone would be looking at me funny and I just wanted to kill them," he says.
Although Dave's boot camp experience brought to the surface his locked-up aggression, it also helped him earn the approval from his father he so strongly desired. Dave's father Michael couldn't have been more excited for - or proud of - his first-born son. Michael sported so much Marine garb that some people assumed he was a military veteran himself. He would strike up conversations with complete strangers just to slip in that his eldest son was a Marine fighting in Iraq.
Says Dave, "When I graduated from boot camp, he was the proudest son of a *****. It was the proudest he'd ever been."
For a few years after boot camp, Dave's military career was put on hold. In the fall of 2002, he began his freshman year at Emory, setting up an unusual trajectory for the next five years: He would be shuttling back and forth between one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the country and Iraq.
In many ways, Dave was a typical freshman. He managed to do well in class despite partying hard and drinking heavily. He joined a fraternity and was even arrested for public intoxication. Kate DeLeon ('06C), a close friend of Dave's, says he was equally at ease drinking with his fraternity brothers in a bar or having an intellectual conversation with his classmates in the library. Even though DeLeon knew Dave had recently completed military training, she struggled to imagine him as a soldier. "I think of him as like a little kid, which is a strange image to go with someone who's at war," she says.
Even though the carefree nature of freshman year was a welcome relief from the rigors of boot camp, the aggression that played a role in making Dave a soldier was occasionally unleashed. One night in the library, Dave punched a guy in the nose after he played a cruel prank on Dave's friend the night before.
Still, Dave's jovial, loyal nature counterbalanced these outbursts in the eyes of his peers. When his friend Jakub Woloszyn ('06C) was broke and couldn't pay for his car to be towed, Dave fronted him the money. "If there was ever any trouble, Dave would already be on your side right behind you, whether you were in the right or the wrong," says Woloszyn, who met Dave during their freshman year.
But as tensions in Iraq escalated, Dave knew he wouldn't be partying with his college friends for long. Sure enough, in the summer of 2004, he was deployed to Iraq. Although Dave was sad to leave his friends at Emory, he was excited to go to war. "At that time, I had this very fanciful idea of war," he says. "I thought I was part of something great, something meaningful."
While in Iraq, Dave made an effort to engage with Iraqi civilians as well as fellow Marines. He e-mailed friends and family requesting toy donations for Iraqi children. He amused Iraqi shop owners with his attempts to speak Arabic. "It was like one, big study abroad experience," Dave says.
But as the length of his stay in Iraq increased, so did his skepticism. Even if he was a Marine, Dave was still an academic who was inclined to question the status quo. As a result, Dave quickly developed the reputation of the "liberal, Yankee college boy." This label alienated him from his fellow Marines and hampered his military career - his superiors were sometimes reluctant to give him important assignments. "If I was a typical conservative Texan, I would've been put on a mission in a second," says Dave.
"He's definitely not typical of the enlisted personnel," says Nicholas Fotion, an Emory philosophy professor who specializes in military ethics. "In the military, especially the lower ranks … they don't necessarily look kindly at college boys." Fotion says the typical Marine lives in a rural area in the South or the Midwest, holds politically conservative views and comes from a lower-middle-class, or even a lower-class, economic background.
But the differences between Dave and the other Marines didn't stop there. Dave says he felt more empathy for the Iraqi people than some of his platoon mates. One day, a burst of gunfire rang out within the confines of Dave's military base, only a stone's throw away from an Iraqi city. A white car had been spotted passing by the base, and many of the Marines wanted to respond to the gunfire by destroying the car. Dave told them that since no one had been hurt by the gunfire, they shouldn't retaliate. He also reminded them that it was illegal to shoot at someone unless they were sure that the person had been responsible for the gunfire. Dave says that three soldiers gathered around him and said, "That's the kind of attitude that's going to get people killed."
But by the winter of 2004, Dave had more pressing concerns than policing his fellow Marines - his father had developed a brain tumor. Dave's relationship with his father had been slowly improving, making the news all the more jarring.
The military gave Dave the option to return home, and for someone struggling to fit in with his fellow troops, the choice seemed to be clear. But Dave decided to stay in Iraq. "It was this cold, calculated thought process," Dave says. "[But I figured] I wasn't going to go back home and perform brain surgery on my father." Dave says he felt could do more by staying in Iraq and bolstering his platoon.
When Dave finished his first tour of duty in spring 2005, he finally returned home and was shocked by what he saw. His father, a man who had once played Ivy League football, could now barely walk and speak. After spending a week at home with his family, Dave was sent to Georgia to fulfill his military obligations. Before he could return home again, his father had died.
Dave returned to Emory that summer, but it was clear to his friends that his time in Iraq and his father's death had hardened him. He was no longer the "little kid" DeLeon had known their freshman year. Dave had matured, but in a different way than most of his college peers. He purchased two handguns, one for the top drawer of his dresser and another for the back of his newly purchased pick-up truck. During his first night back at Emory, Woloszyn had to stop Dave back from fighting in a bar. The same evening, Dave also verbally threatened a police officer.
Then, at a birthday party held for him at a friend's apartment, Dave lost control. As some of his Marine friends mingled with his Emory crowd, Dave pounded shots of Southern Comfort and lime. A friend's boyfriend tried to strike up a conversation with Dave, hanging around him for much of the evening. As the alcohol took effect, Dave became irate and aggressive.
Dave's friends were able to stop him before anyone was hurt, but even today, they say they are shaken by his actions that night. "I realized, this isn't what it used to be, this isn't just a frat fight," DeLeon says. "This is anger that I haven't seen before. The stakes were higher. I think a wrench got thrown into that system and his whole reality was different."
Dave realized he needed to change his behavior. He stopped drinking hard liquor and vowed to remain in control of his actions.
But even without the alcohol, Dave still occasionally struggles to subdue his aggressive tendencies. He says he is making a conscious effort to maintain self-control in his civilian life. "The morality I live by now isn't necessarily right," he says. "But in the very least it's reasoned, and controlled and contained."
Still, Dave looked forward to being deployed on his second tour of Iraq in the summer of 2006. But once there, he quickly remembered why life in Iraq could be so challenging. Already a member of an elite Recon unit in the Marines, Dave hoped to continue advancing in the military ranks. But multiple alcohol-related incidents, coupled with Dave's openly liberal views about the war, continued to make him an outsider within his platoon. To his disappointment, he wasn't allowed to carry out many platoon missions, even though he says he was more qualified than many Marines who did.
Even though Dave's contract with the military expires in June 2007, he plans to return to Iraq for a third tour.
After five years in the military, Dave still isn't a typical Marine. He refuses to toe the party line when it comes to politics, and still plans to graduate from Emory. But for what he describes as "self-destructive reasons," Dave's desire to fight in Iraq is stronger than ever. "I want to be a part of what's going on over there," he says. "I can't let it go."
Ellie
For the last five years, an Emory student has struggled to balance his college life with his duty as a U.S. Marine.
By: Carolyn Englar
Posted: 5/1/07
Sprawled on the floor, his head propped up on a pile of pillows, 12-year-old Dave sits inches away from the television, absorbed by the Vietnam War movie "Full Metal Jacket." As scenes of torture, death and abuse flash across the screen, his father turns to him and says, "Promise me you will never join the Marines."
At the time, his father's request is surprising to the pre-teen. After all, Dave's father was Ivy League-educated and his family lives in a wealthy suburb of Boston - hardly the background of a future United States Marine.
But 12 years later, Dave, who is three semesters away from graduating from Emory, sports a tattoo that reads USMC on his left shoulder. He has just returned from his second tour of the War in Iraq. "My first name is no longer David," he wrote in an e-mail during his first tour of Iraq. "It is Corporal."
Spurred by his own patriotic fervor, Dave enlisted in the Marine Reserves in June 2001, not expecting to fight in a war. Three months later, on Sept. 11, 2001, three planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Two years later, the U.S. military fired the opening shots of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The initial stages of the fight to liberate an oppressed country seemed promising. After all, in May 2003, President George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and unfurled a banner proclaiming, "Mission Accomplished."
Four years later, more than 3,300 soldiers have died. The War in Iraq has left more than a mass of dead bodies in its wake: It has destroyed the hope and idealism of a generation of young soldiers. "Life means nothing to anyone, on either side," says Dave, whose full name can't be used because it could hinder his military career. "We did what we were trained to do. In the process you stop caring about other people."
Dave's affluent background is unique for a soldier, but his experience in Iraq is not. He is one of 1.5 million men and women who have served in Iraq over the course of the last four years. Dave's story is partially representative, but also personal, beginning in his privileged childhood and including his years at Emory, his uneventful first tour of duty, the death of his father, his fruitless second tour and culminating in his desire to return for a third tour.
But for a young Dave, the War in Iraq is still a decade away.
As a teenager, Dave fought another losing battle: living up to his father's exacting standards. Dave's father graduated from Harvard and completed a two-year program at Dartmouth Medical School and he expected his son to achieve similar success. As a result, while some of Dave's friends were playing outdoors in elementary school, he was learning about survival and discipline in his Boy Scout troop. While Dave's friends were hanging out at the movie theater on a Friday night, Dave was holed up in his room, pulling all-nighters to get high marks at his elite private high school.
Dave's competitive GPA suggested he would spend the four years after high school bunkered down in the library of an elite private school, not military bases in Iraq. Dave was accepted early decision to Emory in the fall of 2000. He told his family he loved the school for its warm climate, but he secretly viewed Emory as another escape from his home life. After all, attending school in Atlanta would place Dave more than 1,000 miles away from Massachusetts. His parents fully expected to send him off to college at the end of the summer of 2001.
But one day, during the second semester of his senior year of high school, he came home from school and told his parents he wanted to join the military. At first, his parents were shocked. This was the same person who, as a child, felt badly for days after he hit a squirrel with a slingshot. Dave was never able to pull the legs of a daddy long legs spider or torture a frog like others his age.
After Dave's parents realized he was serious about joining the Marines, they tried to dissuade him. His mother Pamela says that she felt Dave's individualism would make it hard for him to fit into the conformist culture of the military.
But Dave felt it would be even harder to fit into a competitive academic environment. He decided that the unsightly competition for high grades and a six-figure income wasn't for him. "I was removing myself from that whole pool," Dave says. "It was almost a way of avoiding failure."
His parents expected his desire to join the military to pass, but Dave remained insistent. His mother recalls how he would corner her at her desk and try to persuade her that joining the Marines was a good idea.
Dave tried to explain that he felt a civic duty to enlist in the military. "I never did buy into the classic mindset from the privileged world I grew up in that our children have too much potential to be dying in wars," he says. "I would have tenfold the moral authority to voice my opinions against the war, rather than a long-haired, vegan, stereotypical hippie waving anti-war signs in front of the White House."
Dave also wanted to join the Marines to defy - and impress - his father. "I realize now that I was deeply insecure about not living up to the expectations he had for his first-born son, and I subconsciously decided to rebel against everything he had become," Dave says.
Ignoring the protestations of his parents, Dave signed up for the Marine Reserves and entered boot camp in 2001, only three days after graduating from high school.
After just a few months in boot camp, Dave's transformation from an academic-minded high school student into a Marine was under way. He was more disciplined, focused and intense. "I found I came back and especially that first week … someone would be looking at me funny and I just wanted to kill them," he says.
Although Dave's boot camp experience brought to the surface his locked-up aggression, it also helped him earn the approval from his father he so strongly desired. Dave's father Michael couldn't have been more excited for - or proud of - his first-born son. Michael sported so much Marine garb that some people assumed he was a military veteran himself. He would strike up conversations with complete strangers just to slip in that his eldest son was a Marine fighting in Iraq.
Says Dave, "When I graduated from boot camp, he was the proudest son of a *****. It was the proudest he'd ever been."
For a few years after boot camp, Dave's military career was put on hold. In the fall of 2002, he began his freshman year at Emory, setting up an unusual trajectory for the next five years: He would be shuttling back and forth between one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the country and Iraq.
In many ways, Dave was a typical freshman. He managed to do well in class despite partying hard and drinking heavily. He joined a fraternity and was even arrested for public intoxication. Kate DeLeon ('06C), a close friend of Dave's, says he was equally at ease drinking with his fraternity brothers in a bar or having an intellectual conversation with his classmates in the library. Even though DeLeon knew Dave had recently completed military training, she struggled to imagine him as a soldier. "I think of him as like a little kid, which is a strange image to go with someone who's at war," she says.
Even though the carefree nature of freshman year was a welcome relief from the rigors of boot camp, the aggression that played a role in making Dave a soldier was occasionally unleashed. One night in the library, Dave punched a guy in the nose after he played a cruel prank on Dave's friend the night before.
Still, Dave's jovial, loyal nature counterbalanced these outbursts in the eyes of his peers. When his friend Jakub Woloszyn ('06C) was broke and couldn't pay for his car to be towed, Dave fronted him the money. "If there was ever any trouble, Dave would already be on your side right behind you, whether you were in the right or the wrong," says Woloszyn, who met Dave during their freshman year.
But as tensions in Iraq escalated, Dave knew he wouldn't be partying with his college friends for long. Sure enough, in the summer of 2004, he was deployed to Iraq. Although Dave was sad to leave his friends at Emory, he was excited to go to war. "At that time, I had this very fanciful idea of war," he says. "I thought I was part of something great, something meaningful."
While in Iraq, Dave made an effort to engage with Iraqi civilians as well as fellow Marines. He e-mailed friends and family requesting toy donations for Iraqi children. He amused Iraqi shop owners with his attempts to speak Arabic. "It was like one, big study abroad experience," Dave says.
But as the length of his stay in Iraq increased, so did his skepticism. Even if he was a Marine, Dave was still an academic who was inclined to question the status quo. As a result, Dave quickly developed the reputation of the "liberal, Yankee college boy." This label alienated him from his fellow Marines and hampered his military career - his superiors were sometimes reluctant to give him important assignments. "If I was a typical conservative Texan, I would've been put on a mission in a second," says Dave.
"He's definitely not typical of the enlisted personnel," says Nicholas Fotion, an Emory philosophy professor who specializes in military ethics. "In the military, especially the lower ranks … they don't necessarily look kindly at college boys." Fotion says the typical Marine lives in a rural area in the South or the Midwest, holds politically conservative views and comes from a lower-middle-class, or even a lower-class, economic background.
But the differences between Dave and the other Marines didn't stop there. Dave says he felt more empathy for the Iraqi people than some of his platoon mates. One day, a burst of gunfire rang out within the confines of Dave's military base, only a stone's throw away from an Iraqi city. A white car had been spotted passing by the base, and many of the Marines wanted to respond to the gunfire by destroying the car. Dave told them that since no one had been hurt by the gunfire, they shouldn't retaliate. He also reminded them that it was illegal to shoot at someone unless they were sure that the person had been responsible for the gunfire. Dave says that three soldiers gathered around him and said, "That's the kind of attitude that's going to get people killed."
But by the winter of 2004, Dave had more pressing concerns than policing his fellow Marines - his father had developed a brain tumor. Dave's relationship with his father had been slowly improving, making the news all the more jarring.
The military gave Dave the option to return home, and for someone struggling to fit in with his fellow troops, the choice seemed to be clear. But Dave decided to stay in Iraq. "It was this cold, calculated thought process," Dave says. "[But I figured] I wasn't going to go back home and perform brain surgery on my father." Dave says he felt could do more by staying in Iraq and bolstering his platoon.
When Dave finished his first tour of duty in spring 2005, he finally returned home and was shocked by what he saw. His father, a man who had once played Ivy League football, could now barely walk and speak. After spending a week at home with his family, Dave was sent to Georgia to fulfill his military obligations. Before he could return home again, his father had died.
Dave returned to Emory that summer, but it was clear to his friends that his time in Iraq and his father's death had hardened him. He was no longer the "little kid" DeLeon had known their freshman year. Dave had matured, but in a different way than most of his college peers. He purchased two handguns, one for the top drawer of his dresser and another for the back of his newly purchased pick-up truck. During his first night back at Emory, Woloszyn had to stop Dave back from fighting in a bar. The same evening, Dave also verbally threatened a police officer.
Then, at a birthday party held for him at a friend's apartment, Dave lost control. As some of his Marine friends mingled with his Emory crowd, Dave pounded shots of Southern Comfort and lime. A friend's boyfriend tried to strike up a conversation with Dave, hanging around him for much of the evening. As the alcohol took effect, Dave became irate and aggressive.
Dave's friends were able to stop him before anyone was hurt, but even today, they say they are shaken by his actions that night. "I realized, this isn't what it used to be, this isn't just a frat fight," DeLeon says. "This is anger that I haven't seen before. The stakes were higher. I think a wrench got thrown into that system and his whole reality was different."
Dave realized he needed to change his behavior. He stopped drinking hard liquor and vowed to remain in control of his actions.
But even without the alcohol, Dave still occasionally struggles to subdue his aggressive tendencies. He says he is making a conscious effort to maintain self-control in his civilian life. "The morality I live by now isn't necessarily right," he says. "But in the very least it's reasoned, and controlled and contained."
Still, Dave looked forward to being deployed on his second tour of Iraq in the summer of 2006. But once there, he quickly remembered why life in Iraq could be so challenging. Already a member of an elite Recon unit in the Marines, Dave hoped to continue advancing in the military ranks. But multiple alcohol-related incidents, coupled with Dave's openly liberal views about the war, continued to make him an outsider within his platoon. To his disappointment, he wasn't allowed to carry out many platoon missions, even though he says he was more qualified than many Marines who did.
Even though Dave's contract with the military expires in June 2007, he plans to return to Iraq for a third tour.
After five years in the military, Dave still isn't a typical Marine. He refuses to toe the party line when it comes to politics, and still plans to graduate from Emory. But for what he describes as "self-destructive reasons," Dave's desire to fight in Iraq is stronger than ever. "I want to be a part of what's going on over there," he says. "I can't let it go."
Ellie