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Marines, Family Members Honor 10th Anniversary Of Iraq War Battle

Marines, Family Members Honor 10th Anniversary Of Iraq War Battle

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

CAMP PENDLETON — To the outside world, the names mean nothing.

But to Marines who fought in Ramadi, Iraq, and to the families of the fallen, the names will forever be redolent of service and sacrifice: the Snakepit, Hurricane Point, Junction City, Blue Diamond, the government center and Charlie Med, the field hospital where dead and dying Marines were brought.

Several hundred Marines and family members gathered Sunday morning at Camp Pendleton to mention the locations of outposts and firefights and to remember the Marines who fought and died in Ramadi, a battle that began 10 years ago Sunday.

Saddam Hussein had been deposed a year earlier and the Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Regiment had deployed to Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, in March 2004.

The mission of the 2/4 was supposed to be “security and stability”: to aid in Iraq’s transition to democracy, maybe to start sports teams for the young and help in the construction of schools and health centers.

Instead, Ramadi soon “transformed to full-blown urban combat,” Lt. Col. Rob Weiler, who was with the 2/4 in 2004, told the gathering. “We fought alone but not afraid,” Weiler said, his voice breaking with emotion.

On April 6, 2004, the first day of fighting, 12 Marines were killed. By September of that year, 34 Marines and a Navy corpsman had been killed and 269 Marines had been wounded.

There would be further skirmishes in Ramadi in succeeding years but never again would the insurgents attempt an all-out assault. The Marines of the 2/4, a battalion known as the Magnificent Bastards, had done their job, Marine brass said.

“I walked the streets of Ramadi in 2006 without a flak jacket or helmet because of the work done by the Magnificent Bastards in 2004,” said Maj. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, now commanding general of the 1st Marine Division.

No Marine battalion in the Iraq war suffered as many casualties as the 2/4 during that deployment, Nicholson said.

Among those at the ceremony were a former 2/4 Marine in a wheelchair, a former 2/4 Marine with a prosthetic arm and a former 2/4 Navy corpsman accompanied by his service dog, a tan Labrador-poodle mix.

Former 2/4 corpsman Mario Borrego, 42, said the dog, Sierra, helps him in overcoming physical injuries and the anxieties of post-traumatic stress disorder. “We go everywhere,” he said.

After the speeches, family members inspected the memorials to the fallen, the dog tags and inverted rifles. Former and active-duty Marines who served together gathered to talk about their shared experiences and remember the sound of constant gunfire.

“There was horror, but also joking and playing around,” said Greg Clemens, 35, who was a corporal, a gunner on a Humvee and now is a college student studying psychology. “You did what you had to do to keep your sanity.”

Ten family members of Lance Cpl. Emilian Sanchez, who was 20 when he was killed, came from their tribal home in the Santa Ana Pueblo of New Mexico. Military service, particularly the Marine Corps, is a deep tradition with the tribe.

“We get by each day, it’s slow,” said Berna Sanchez, Emilian’s sister. “We know we will see him in the next world but it is still hard. We miss him so.”

The final chapter of the fight for Ramadi has not been written. With the U.S. gone, insurgents are attempting to retake Ramadi and nearby Fallujah. Whether Iraqi forces will prevail is unclear.

“In your heart, you hope that the Marines’ fight was worth it,” said Joey Sanchez, 45, Emilian’s brother. “Maybe it won’t be today or tomorrow, but you hope that finally, someday, it will all turn out well.”

Dianne Layfield, 63, of Fremont, Calif., whose son, Lance Cpl. Travis Layfield, 19, was killed on the first day of fighting, was among those family members who had encouraged the Marine Corps to hold a commemoration on the 10th anniversary.

“The pain never goes away; I cry almost everyday: a song or something will remind me of Travis,” she said. “I will never let them be forgotten.”

AFP Photo/ Sabah Arar

Sept. 11 And ‘A New Birth Of Freedom’

WASHINGTON — After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind. As a nation, we have looked back for too long. We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong. The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided, and less certain of itself.

Reflections on the meaning of the horror and the years that followed are inevitably inflected by our own political or philosophical leanings. It’s a critique that no doubt applies to my thoughts as well. We see what we choose to see and use the event as we want to use it.

This does nothing to honor those who died and those who sacrificed to prevent even more suffering. In the future, the anniversary will best be reserved as a simple day of remembrance in which all of us humbly offer our respect for the anguish and the heroism of those individuals and their families.

But if we continue to place 9/11 at the center of our national consciousness, we will keep making the same mistakes. Our nation’s future depended on far more than the outcome of a vaguely defined “war on terrorism,” and still does. Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies, and never were.

We asked for great sacrifice over the last decade from the very small portion of our population who wear the country’s uniform, particularly the men and women of the Army and the Marine Corps. We should honor them, too. And, yes, we should pay tribute to those in the intelligence services, the FBI, and our police forces who have done such painstaking work to thwart another attack.

It was often said that terrorism could not be dealt with through “police work,” as if the difficult and unheralded labor involved was not grand or bold enough to satisfy our longing for clarity in what was largely a struggle in the shadows.

Forgive me, but I find it hard to forget former President George W. Bush’s 2004 response to Sen. John Kerry’s comment that “the war on terror is less of a military operation, and far more of an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement operation.”

Bush retorted: “I disagree — strongly disagree. … After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got.” What The Washington Post called “an era of endless war” is what we got, too.

Bush, of course, understood the importance of “intelligence gathering” and “law enforcement.” His administration presided over a great deal of both, and his supporters spoke, with justice, of his success in staving off further acts of terror. Yet he could not resist the temptation to turn on Kerry’s statement of the obvious. Thus was an event that initially united the nation used, over and over, to aggravate our political disharmony. This is also why we must put it behind us.

In the flood of anniversary commentary, notice how often the term “the lost decade” has been invoked. We know now, as we should have known all along, that American strength always depends first on our strength at home — on a vibrant, innovative, and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements.

This is not “isolationism.” It is a common sense that was pushed aside by the talk of “glory” and “honor,” by utopian schemes to transform the world by abruptly reordering the Middle East — and by our fears. While we worried that we would be destroyed by terrorists, we ignored the larger danger of weakening ourselves by forgetting what made us great.

We have no alternative from now on but to look forward and not back. This does not dishonor the fallen heroes, and Lincoln explained why at Gettysburg. “We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground,” he said. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” The best we could do, Lincoln declared, was to commit ourselves to “a new birth of freedom.” This is still our calling.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group