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thedrifter
12-29-07, 06:34 AM
Published: Saturday December 29, 2007
ELJON MARQUEZ
POSTSCRIPT FROM IRAQ

Navy corpsman ready to go to Iraq again

For 44 days in 2003, The Pueblo Chieftain published a series of daily stories that profiled Pueblo soldiers who were serving with the U.S. military in the war in Iraq.

Nearly five years later, we have revisited seven of those soldiers. Here are their stories:

Final in a series
By KAREN VIGIL
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. inspired Eljon Marquez to serve in the military.

Marquez had put a year at the University of Southern Colorado behind him following his 2000 graduation from East High School.

Then, the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001.

Marquez responded by joining the Navy. He wanted to help protect Americans and keep any more harm from coming to the United States.

He wound up a hospital corpsman attached to a Marine infantry unit.

Most of Marquez's service in Iraq - the time he most fondly remembers - was assisting in operating rooms and helping diagnose illnesses.

"I really miss being with the Marines," Marquez said recently from San Diego, where he is based. "That was the best part of my career. I wouldn't mind going back to do that. We would devise a plan when we could prescribe medicine. We'd do all the write-ups. We'd see the patient. The doc would read all the notes. He would just bottom-line it. "

These days, Marquez still is called a hospital corpsman. His job is to daily buy surgical equipment for the Naval Medical Center San Diego, the branch's most elite hospital for sailors and Marines.

"I do all the purchasing for the main operating room. I usually juggle between eight and nine budgets, so I handle cumulatively over an annual $15 million budget," Marquez said in a telephone interview. "I'm kind of like my own boss. I report to the department head."

Marquez said he's still happy in the medical field.

His first tour of duty in the Middle East was in Kuwait from February to September in 2003. His second deployment in 2004 took him to Iraq. He returned to Iraq the next year.

Before Marquez initially left the U.S., he'd undergone a series of fast-track training - boot camp, hospital corpsman school, combat field school and surgical technologist school.

As he looks to his seventh year in the service, Marquez has set his sights on a Naval school.

He figures both he and his wife, Cheryll, who works on a Navy surgical team, probably will be "lifers," as they raise their 3-year-old daughter, Emily. Marquez's son, Angel Pena, 7, lives in Denver.

"My plan is to take an advancement exam - that's how we pick up rank - go to school where they teach surgical techs and become an instructor. Then I'll pick up my M-16, and go back to Great Lakes, Ill., as a recruit division commander (the Navy's version of an Army drill sergeant) and teach my own recruits," Marquez said.

If duty calls Marquez back to Iraq, he's ready to go. He said he's figured all along that the war would take years longer than most thought.

"I have to do what I have to do. And my impression is the job is not done yet," he said.

"If I have to go back to help get the job done, then I have to go back to help get the job done."

Ellie