War is an abstraction to those of us who have never seen combat. We pause to imagine the destruction, to ponder the meaning of victory and of loss. Between the latest front-page battle reports and pixelated images of flag-draped caskets, we push the thoughts to the backs of our minds as we go about our fortunate lives, the “Support Our Troops” decals righteously displayed on our minivans and SUVs. The idea of war is too vast and elusive to grasp – unless we know those who know, and know what they know.
A soldier in combat can usually hear the sound of a mortar that’s been fired in his direction, the swoosh of the cast-iron rocket as it flies closer and closer through the air. The sound gives a soldier a few short seconds to dive for cover.
U.S.Marine Sgt. Ryan Shogren didn’t hear a thing.
It was the morning of October 8 in the Iraqi city of Yusufiyah, 30 miles from Baghdad. Shogren, a 32-year-old Brookfield cop with a smile like actor Ed Harris, had returned from patrol with his platoon of Marines, most of them reservists from Wisconsin. As they neared their base, they got word that a possible suicide car bomber was heading their way.
Shogren and Staff Sgt. Michael Connolly, a graduate of Pius High School, took a dozen Marines to the roof of an abandoned police station for a better vantage point and better line of fire.
Shogren ordered the men into position.
“Everybody’s good to go,” he said, standing next to Connolly.
As the words left his mouth, Shogren, in slow motion, saw a mortar round land 15 feet from where he stood. He saw it explode, sending a vile black cloud of debris and shrapnel toward him. He saw himself falling backward.
“I’m dead,” he said to himself.
This is what happens in war. Rockets explode and bullets fly. Little is predictable.
Shogren remained conscious and through the mayhem saw Connolly on his back clutching his face, blood streaming down. He saw another Marine, Lance Cpl. Joel Correa, holding the shredded skin of his thighs.
Instinctively, Shogren thought of his men. Got to help the wounded. But when he tried to stand, a searing pain shot through his leg and knocked him back onto the rooftop.
He rolled onto his stomach and tried to call out. But words wouldn’t come. The flesh that was once his chin and lip hung loose from his face. He felt his tongue dangling in two pieces. Teeth spilled from his mouth.
Shrapnel had sliced open the right side of his face. More shrapnel mangled his right leg below the knee and peppered his left thigh and left bicep. Still more shrapnel fractured his right femur and twisted his kneecap sideways 90 degrees.
In seconds, a corpsman rushed to his side. In minutes, fellow Marines cleared a landing zone and a helicopter evacuated the three men from battle. Within an hour, corpsmen wheeled Shogren, Connolly and Correa into the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad.
All survived the mortar attack. All but Shogren returned to duty in Yusufiyah. The reservist underwent surgery after surgery in Baghdad and then in Germany. And then, to his great disappointment, the Marine Corps sent him home.
On June 1, the U.S. military activated 180Marine reservists from Fox Company for duty in Iraq. All but about 20 were from southeastern Wisconsin, 60 alone from metro Milwaukee.
Marine reservists normally complete a six-year hitch, serving one weekend each month and two consecutive weeks of training each year. But the war in Iraq put reservists of all military branches on alert.
Fox is an infantry company. No tanks, no helicopters, no artillery. Just grunts on foot. In their civilian lives, they work as cops and construction workers, teachers and engineers, tradesmen and professionals. The commanding officer, Maj. Morgan Mann, is a salesman with Cisco Systems in Chicago. Company Capt. Jeff Scott (pictured on the cover) is a supply procurement specialist with GEHealthcare in Waukesha. At least 50 are college students.Their average age is 22.
If you break it down, Fox Company is part of the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, headquartered in Chicago. The 2/24 is part of the 4th Marine Division. Today, more than 10,000 Marine reservists have been mobilized for active duty. An estimated 153,000 U.S.troops are serving in Iraq, and the count is rising.
But lost in the numbers and organizational charts is the impenetrable bond between the men of Fox Company. Those who are wounded plead to be returned to their units in the battlefield. Those who are killed in action are mourned like lost brothers.
Fox Company flew to Camp Pendleton in southern California on June 8 for three months of training. They learned skills in urban fighting, how to hunt down guerrillas in city buildings, room by room. They trained in martial arts, how to do battle with hands and feet. They trained in “weapons of opportunity” – how to use helmets, canteens, anything at hand to attack the enemy.
Each Marine was issued the following tools of war: camouflaged utility uniform, combat boots with dog tag laced into the left boot, Kevlar helmet and flak jacket with groin protector and throat protector, protective jacket inserts to stop shrapnel, first-aid kit with a blood-clotting agent and one-handed tourniquet, night-vision device, binoculars, earplugs, sunglasses and goggles, an M-16A2 service rifle or M-249 automatic machine gun, a 9-millimeter pistol and an 8-inch bayonet.
The company shipped out on September 14. Their rotation would last seven months. Their mission would be to root out and destroy the insurgents that have caused havoc for Iraqi citizens and coalition forces since the U.S.-led invasion began. Or, as the Marines bluntly put it, to kill all of the bad guys.
The province of North Babil isdirectly south of Baghdad. It has been described by American military commanders as “the nerve center of the Sunni insurgency,” “the throat of Baghdad” and “the triangle of death.” This rich farmland between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers was once the heart of Saddam Hussein’s military-industrial complex. Under Hussein’s rule, this was the home of government-owned estates of military officers and tribes loyal to the leadership of Hussein and the Baath Party. It was the base for Republican Guard units, munitions factories and weapons research plants. Located here was the now infamous Al Qa Qaa explosive storage complex, where 377 tons of munitions went missing sometime after U.S.troops seized Baghdad in April 2003.
After the fall, Hussein loyalists returned to the area, fixed on regaining power by organizing an armed resistance. They targeted local Iraqis, using force and intimidation to disrupt plans to form a new government and hold elections. U.S.forces, with a short supply of troops, concentrated on the pursuit of Hussein and hot spots such as Mosul and Fallujah. The terrain south of Baghdad remained largely ignored, and rebels established a stronghold.
Fox Company and the rest of the 2/24 arrived in September and set up their operating base in a former chicken factory in the industrial town of Mahmudiyah. They then installed forward patrol bases in nearby towns such as Yusufiyah.
The area quickly became a hot zone. With U.S.troops capturing insurgent-occupied Fallujah in November, rebels fled north to Mosul and south to hideouts in North Babil Province.
“Fox Company was sent out there in October to try to gain control of the area and was met with, and continues to experience, stiff resistance, as the enemy needs this area to organize, recruit, re-fit and re-arm its fighters,” says Maj. Chris Caponi, 36, the battalion’s communications officer.
Rebels continue to mount attacks almost daily, making the area one of the most dangerous in Iraq. As of December 17, of the battalion’s 1,200 Marines deployed last fall, 85 had been wounded and 10 killed in action, including 25 wounded and four killed from Fox Company.
“This fight is every bit as important to quelling the insurgency as recent operations in Fallujah,” says Caponi.
In another life, Caponi lives in Menom-onee Falls with his wife and their three children. His wife teaches at Brookfield Academy and he sells equipment for Badger Material Handling. He joined the Marine Corps in 1988, served active duty in the early ’90s and signed up for the Reserves immediately after. When he heard that the 2/24 needed a communications man, he wouldn’t be denied. Since September, he’s been holed up in a dusty office in the Mahmudiyah chicken factory.
“There’s no other place I want to be right now,” says Caponi.
The population of Yusufiyah is about40,000, roughly the same as New Berlin. Groves of palm trees fill the landscape. One- and two-story buildings flank stone and paved streets. Before the war, the town had a number of munitions plants, a potato factory and a large public market selling eggplant, tomatoes, apples and bananas from local farms. But during the invasion and swelling rebellion, the factories were destroyed and the market deserted. Locals fled to Baghdad. Today, the Iraqi residents have returned to their homes, but unemployment is rampant and many buildings lie in ruins.
Fox Company’s base is in a school that had been abandoned long ago. Desks are stacked on the roof. A helicopter landing zone dominates the schoolyard. It wasn’t until November that Fox Company fitted the makeshift base with electricity and showers. For weeks, Marines washed their sand-crusted skin with baby wipes.
On one side of the base is a former Baath Party headquarters, bombed during the invasion. Nearby is a bombed-out Iraqi National Guard base. A mosque remains open down the street. Nearly every day, clerics deliver a “call for prayer.” Like the beckoning of a church bell, a Muslim prayer is broadcast over a loud speaker, inviting local Iraqis to gather.
Beyond the town are farms and villages. As the Marines describe it, the roads are blacktop and well-traveled by pickups, Mercedes and mule carts. There are no streetlights, no stop signs. Wide irrigation canals stretch into fields of lettuce and corn. Here and there, a dozen houses cluster together to make up small towns, much like the farming communities in Wisconsin but decidedly Third World.
In the months since they arrived in Yusufiyah, Fox Company has slowly gained acceptance from the Iraqi civilians, say the commanders.
“That doesn’t always mean they’re waving flags for us in the streets,” says Capt. Jeff Scott, the GEemployee. “But they’re receptive. They know we’re not a one-hit wonder that’s going to roll in one week and leave the next.”
Scott, 31, is second in command of Fox Company. He lives in Brookfield with his wife and their three young children. He was active duty from 1995 to 2002. But like most of the men under his command, he’s now a reservist, placing his life on hold while he puts in his year of active duty.
Part of Scott’s job is to establish, as he puts it, “civility” in the area. His men work with local tribal and religious leaders, going neighborhood to neighborhood to inform locals on where to vote. They’ve helped residents re-open schools, hook up power and water and clear roadways that had been bombed. Stability has returned.
Still, the local Iraqis keep a distance. “They’re not afraid of us per se, they’re afraid of being seen with us,” says Scott. “The insurgents will target them for reprisal.” Marines meet behind closed doors with local Iraqis to question them about insurgents that might be hiding in the area.
It’s a tedious mission. “The insurgents are able to hide,” says Scott. “They dress like everybody else.” Sometimes they’re farmers or men who joined the insurgency when they were put out of work after the munitions plants closed. Sometimes they’re foreigners. In December, for example, battalion forces captured a Jordanian who intelligence officers believed was the leader of an insurgent cell.
Like cops on patrol, Fox Marines gather information door to door from informants – names and descriptions of possible insurgents. “We’ve captured a lot,” says Scott. “Occasionally, you catch them red-handed” planting a bomb on the side of the road or operating a weapon system.
As of late December, the 2/24 had captured about 300 prisoners, a third from the besieged Yusufiyah area, according to Maj. Caponi. Under military procedure, they can be detained and questioned by the Marines for up to 48 hours. If suspected of illegal activities, they must be turned over to Iraqi authorities for prosecution. If convicted, they are sent to Abu Ghraib prison.
Because of highly publicized prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, “our sensitivity of how to handle prisoners is, well, you’d be surprised,” says Caponi. “They’re really treated with kid gloves, when they probably shouldn’t be.”
But capturing prisoners isn’t always the objective. To flush out guerrillas, Marines on patrol purposely draw them into battle.
“When we’re out, we try to invite contact with the enemy,” says Scott. “When they’ve tried to fight against us, it just doesn’t work out for them. They end up on the losing side very quickly.”
On November 12, insurgents attempted to set up a route of retreat for rebels fleeing Fallujah. In their path, west of Yusufiyah, was a Fox Company platoon.
“They attacked our position with probably 4-to-1 odds in their favor,” says Scott – about 40 Marines against 150 insurgents. In a firefight that lasted four hours, Marines countered with their full arsenal – M-16s, machine guns, mortars and rounds of artillery ordered from the rear.
The Marines prevailed. But there were 11 Fox Company casualties that day, 10 wounded and one killed. Cpl. Brian Prening from Plymouth was fatally shot while helping another Marine unjam his machine gun. The 24-year-old reservist, a machinery setup man at Kohler Co., had just gotten married in August. His wife is expecting their first child.
“I always wanted to be a Marine.”
It’s a simple statement made by Cpl. Jason Hass, without much consideration of Abu Ghraib or Donald Rumsfeld or Weapons of Mass Destruction or any of the other misgivings about the war in Iraq. Like many of his fellow Marines, Hass acted out of tradition. His father was a Howitzer mechanic with the Army National Guard, his uncle served in Vietnam, his grandfather served in World War II.
Hass was 18 when he signed up for the Marine Reserves in November 2000. Before he was activated, he worked for the family business, Hass & Hass Heating & Cooling in South Milwaukee. He’s got a fiancee back home, Jenny, who’s studying to become a paralegal. But he has no qualms about going to war. In fact, the possibility of being in a battle zone was one reason he enlisted.
“It’s the real deal,” he says of combat. “But it’s kind of exciting.”
When he first got to Iraq, the temperature shot up to 110 degrees, so blistering hot that a Marine had to wear gloves to hold his weapon. The seasons changed, and by December, Hass was adding an extra layer of clothes as the temperature dipped to 50.
On a typical security patrol, Hass and his squad walk the streets of Yusufiyah, M-16s in their hands at all times, stopping at the market, the gas station, talking up the locals. The fair-haired Hass learned “survival Arabic” in basic training and uses it to break through the cultural barrier. As he makes the rounds, Iraqi children swarm around, begging for candy – “Mister, hey mister. Chocolata? Snickers? M&Ms?” – a ritual of American military occupation in war after war.
The Marines’ mission, says Hass, is twofold. “It’s not uncommon to go from giving candy to kids to opening up a house” – room-to-room sweeps, battering down doors, weapons leveled, searching for rebels. “Sometime it goes smooth, sometimes things don’t.”
In his four years with Fox, Hass rose through the ranks with the same group of reservists. A few of them hung out at a bar on South 27th Street called Anticipation.
Those deep friendships make it easier to handle the fatigue of combat – the days and days of foot patrol on four or five hours of sleep, the occasional ping of a bullet ricocheting overhead, the rush and fall of adrenaline.
“The ones that we have unfortunately lost I’ve known for quite some time,” says Hass. “You think about them, you mourn for them in private. Then you pick up. You have a job to do. You try to prevent anything in the future from happening to someone else. You pick up and you move on.”
Except for a little trouble bending his wrist, Staff Sgt. Connolly healed quickly after the rooftop mortar attack that wounded him, Shogren and Correa.
“I still have 26 pieces of shrapnel in me,” says the dark-eyed Connolly, one piece for each year of his life. “Arms, hands and both legs all the way down. They said it would do more damage if they’d try to remove it.”
But unlike Shogren’s shattered knee, Connolly’s injuries didn’t incapacitate him.
“After talking to the doctors, I convinced them I could still do my job,” he says. “I wanted to return. I wanted to be in my platoon again with these Marines and finish out the job. And also I want to get to these guys that have been mortaring us.”
Connolly is a U.S.Marine through and through. He joined the Corps as an active Marine just days after graduating from Pius and served nearly eight years. He never saw combat. So when he was discharged in January 2004 and returned to Milwaukee, he signed up for the Reserves.
Connolly is one of Fox Company’s four platoon sergeants. He’s in charge of three squads of Marines, 13 or 14 men in each squad.
A month after getting hit by the mortar, he was back in Yusufiyah leading patrols.
“I take a squad with me,” he says, describing a typical “ambush patrol” into the countryside. “We start out [in a Humvee] in the middle of night, about a mile away from where we believe the insurgents are hiding. Then we patrol in on foot, find a house or some sort of structure to stage and set up an observation and listening post.” With night binoculars, they watch and wait. If the insurgents launch an attack, the Marines counterfire with 60-millimeter mortars, assault rifles and machine guns. Connolly himself carries a 9-millimeter pistol and a 12-gauge shotgun, a stock weapon in each platoon.
It’s a dodgy game of cat and mouse.
“Most of the insurgents are cowards,” he says. “They’re going to try to get the drop on you. They will not confront us directly. The majority of it is roadside bombs, mortars, rockets, things like that. But we’re gonna keep going out until we finish them off.”
Identifying insurgents is a problem. They operate on the run, using old cars and trucks and blending in with the Iraqi population. Sometimes villagers help insurgents move around clandestinely.
“It would be like trying to find insurgents in Milwaukee, with them dressing like everybody else and using vehicles like everybody else,” says Connolly. “We have to catch them in the act.”
And when they do, they try to kill them.
“It’s just a job,” he says. “These people are trying to kill us. It’s not something that I want to do, but you have to. It’s just a job. The way that I look at it, it’s no different than a police officer. Or a paramedic who witnesses something like that, a bad car accident, for instance.”
A military presence will be needed in North Babil Province long after Fox Company exits, “basically until the Iraqi National Guard is able to take over and effectively protect these people. While we’re trying to train these Iraqis to defend themselves and fight the insurgents, the insurgents are countering and trying to make people lose faith.”
Connolly plans to go to college when he returns to the states and then find a job in law enforcement, he says. If he could, he’d volunteer for another stint in Iraq.
“But I made a promise to my girlfriend. If I didn’t have a girlfriend, yeah, I’d stay over here. I just want to keep going out on missions. That’s just me personally.… Just keep giving me missions and I’ll be happy.”
There’s no down time in a war zone, nonights and weekends off.Official rest and relaxation come every three or four weeks, maybe for a couple of days. By rotation, Marines are sent to the rear base in Mahmudiyah. But R&Rdoesn’t mean boozy nights of partying; alcohol is forbidden. R&Rmeans catching up on sleep and waiting to use a computer to send e-mail home. Sometimes troops watch DVDs on someone’s laptop. Usually they just sit around and talk.
In the battle zone, weapons are always within reach, even when a Marine sleeps.
“As long as we’re here in Yusufiyah, we have to be ready to fire at any time,” says Sgt. Mark Molinski, a Milwaukee West Sider, fresh out of college. “We’re always on standby. It’s not like we’re ever fully relaxed. I make sure I always have my gear on, have my weapon with me. It’s a little nerve-wracking. It’d be nice to take the gear off and lay back. I can’t complain, though. I signed up for it.”
Molinski, 26, joined the Marine Reserves in 1999 “out of boredom,” he says. “I was working as a commercial electrician and didn’t like it.”
Married, with a home in Milwaukee’s Enderis Park neighborhood, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a degree in mechanical engineering in the spring of 2004. Weeks later, he was sent to Camp Pendleton.
When Molinski signed on with the Reserves, combat seemed improbable. “I really hadn’t expected it at all, actually,” he says. But the world changed. And today, he’s the leader of an eight-man mortar section in a war in a foreign land.
War is a grim business. The culture shock. The risk. The casualties – fellow Marines as well as Iraqi civilians.
“The adult Iraqis, they’re not as enthusiastic to see us anymore,” notes Molinski. “I think they’re sick of us being here. They’re just sick of the whole war. They just want the thing to be over and get on with their lives.”
Constant is the knowledge that each Marine, in his camouflaged uniform and helmet, is a walking target. Always.
“Losing a guy that’s standing next to you… it’s terrible,” says Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Kelly, a mortarman in Molinski’s section. “But it’s something that comes with the territory, I guess.”
Kelly, 23, is from the town of Hartford in Washington County. A friend talked him into joining the Marine Reserves three and a half years ago. When the Marine Corps activated Fox Company last June, he was a couple of credits away from a marketing degree at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He hopes to go on for an MBA.
“I’m definitely looking forward to coming home,” says Kelly. “Initially, it was quite an experience, an adventure. But it wears on you. It’s a little more stress than you’re used to day to day. That can wear you out.”
To turn off the war, he turns on an iPod or a CDplayer that he keeps with him. He listens to everything from hard rock to rap to country.
He also passes the time reading books. His latest is On Combat,co-written by Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and West Point professor. The book examines how combat troops deal with the unfathomable experience of killing.
Late in the morningof December 13, a squad of Marines on patrol approached the Yusufiyah market. Iraqis crowded the street, buying fruits, vegetables and meats. As the Marines passed, a parked car exploded behind them. An Iraqi civilian and two Marines from Fox were killed.
Lance Cpl. Richard Warner of the Town of Genesee and Pfc. Brent Vroman of Oshkosh became Wisconsin’s 31st and 32nd fatalities of the war. Injured were two other Fox reservists and several Iraqis.
The car bomb was what the military calls an “improvised explosive device,” or IED, an acronym that has come to represent the deadly persistence of the insurgents. Drawing upon hidden stockpiles of munitions – fragmentation grenades, C4 explosive, artillery shells, mortar rounds – guerrillas plant homemade bombs along roadways in abandoned cars, animal carcasses, heaps of garbage and mounds of dirt, then detonate them from a distance. Sometimes they’re set off with a detonation cord, sometimes by remote control with a hand-held electronic device such as an ordinary cell phone.
“You look for telltale signs, but I’ll tell you, the dead cow lying on the side of the road could be an IED,” says one Marine.
The IEDs have killed and maimed hundreds of Marines and soldiers, leading critics to call for more body armor and vehicle armor for American troops. Of Fox Company’s 13 Humvees, four or five are “up-armored,” constructed at the factory with steel protection on all surfaces of the vehicle. The rest have been retrofitted with armor kits.
To guard against IEDs, Marines now walk ahead of transport vehicles as they travel, eyeing the terrain for signs of hidden explosives.
The deaths of two Fox reservists in a single day hit hard in North Babil Province and in Wisconsin. Fox Company hastily arranged a memorial service for Warner and Vroman in its sandbagged patrol base in Yusufiyah. Halfway around the world, Marine Corps headquarters in Camp Pendleton placed a call to Fox Company in Milwaukee: Stand by for further information was the order.
Chief Warrant Officer Terry Bellis was on his morning run along Lake Michigan when the call came. As he walked into the Reserve base, a low-slung building on South Shore Drive, he got the word: “We got another CACOcall,” a call to muster a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer, in Marine jargon. Three hours later, a fax made it official: Two Wisconsin Marines were dead in Iraq.
“Okay, get your Alphas on,” said Bellis, and he and three other senior Marines hurriedly changed into their green dress uniforms, service ribbons and medals prominently displayed. In two teams, they would visit the families of the dead Marines to deliver the cheerless news.
It would be the fourth time in a year that Bellis would make a CACOcall.
“When you see the name, you say, ‘Damn, which one was it?’ ” he says. “And then you see the picture and you say, ‘I know that guy.’ ”
Bellis drove to Oshkosh with Staff Sgt. Penny Knade to contact Vroman’s parents. The mother was at work at a medical clinic. From the parking lot outside, Bellis called the clinic on his cell phone and asked to speak to a physician. He asked that a room be set aside for a private conversation.
The Marines walked briskly into the clinic. The doctor escorted them into the room where Vroman’s mother waited. “I regret to inform you, ma’am, that your son was killed in combat in Iraq,” Bellis told her.
“Are you sure?” cried the mother, refusing to believe. “Are you sure?”
The same procedure, sympathetic and decorous, was repeated at the Marine’s father’s place of work. And again, the same heartbreaking flood of tears.
“Everybody tells me that I have the hardest job in the Marine Corps,” says Bellis, a full-time Marine, his dark hair shaved trim. “It is hard, it is very hard. But I’m always thinking of the Marines who were over there with the Marines that were killed, taking care of the body, putting them on the bird and going on with their mission. I don’t feel I have the hardest job.”
Bellis, 41, has been a Marine since 1983. He left the Corps to finish a bachelor’s degree in electronics at Southern Illinois University but enlisted again at the outset of Desert Storm.
“You’d be surprised how many Marines want to come back,” he says. “As the Marines say, ‘Get me back in, I want to go play.’ ”
Bellis came to Milwaukee in April 2001 as a Peacetime-Wartime Support Team Officer, essentially to run the administrative side of the Reserve base. His wife is also a military lifer – 19 years in – a major in the Wisconsin Air National Guard’s 128th Air Refueling Wing at Mitchell International Airport and eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel if she decides not to retire at the end of the year.
“She had her bags packed three times,” he says, ready to deploy to Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Each time, the Pentagon scrubbed her orders.
Bellis himself has 18 years in the Corps. “I’ve never seen combat either,” he says.
A lopsided frown betrays his disappointment.
A military aircraft flew the remains of Vroman and Warner to Kuwait and then to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. There, a military mortuary team prepared the bodies for funeral services in Wisconsin.
Vroman and Warner arrived home on December 20, just before midnight. A commercial plane taxied to the cargo area at Mitchell International Airport, where Fox Company Marines waited dutifully on the tarmac. They lifted two cardboard boxes containing the coffins, removed the packing cases, dressed the coffins in American flags, placed them into hearses at the loading dock and delivered the bodies of Vroman and Warner to Oshkosh and Pewaukee. A Marine was posted with each casket continuously until the funerals.
It was in the low 60s in Iraq on December 23. In southeastern Wisconsin, the temperature barely made it out of the single digits. The parking lot of St. Anthony on the Lake Catholic Church in Pewaukee overflowed that morning as hundreds gathered for the funeral mass of Lance Cpl. Warner. The voice of Ray Charles singing “America” reached the highest rafters of the church. In the vestibule, six Marine pall bearers stood at attention, eyes forward, unblinking, rigid in their dress blues – white belt, hat and gloves, dark blue jackets with red piping, high collars, brass buttons, blue pants, crimson stripes down each leg.
A high school friend remembered Warner as a guy who liked fettuccine Alfredo and cruising for girls at the mall. A fun-hearted American, killed in war at age 22.
Two hours later, a similar scene was replayed at St. Raphael Catholic Church in Oshkosh. Killed in action at 21, Brent Vroman was eulogized as a high school wrestling star who loved to fish and hunt, as a happy kid who had an infectious smile.
In the long procession to the cemetery, police officers and uniformed veterans stood on street corners in Oshkosh, saluting the hearse as it passed. At the cemetery, the sun set, a bugler played taps and seven Marines each fired three volleys from M-16 rifles into the sky as Vroman’s casket was lowered into the frozen ground.
Presenting the folded American flag to his mother was Vroman’s twin brother, Brian, an active Marine assigned to a tank division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He is scheduled to ship out to Iraq in the spring.
When Lance Cpl. mikeAndersonwas in high school, he wanted nothing to do with the military. His father was a Vietnam-era Marine vet, and Anderson rebelled against his disciplined way of life.
“Me and my dad didn’t get along,” says the Kettle Moraine High School graduate. “I blamed everything he stood for on the Marine Corps. I hated the Marine Corps.”
But 9/11 changed his mind about military service and about his father. He saw the attacks on the United States as a direct threat to all that his parents had worked for in their lifetimes. “No way was I going to stand by and watch some thug from across the big lake take that away,” he says.
Three months after 9/11, Anderson joined the Marine Corps Reserves. A year later, his sister Nicole signed on. She’s a Marine reservist based in Green Bay, but she hasn’t yet been called up.
Before going to Iraq, the 22-year-old Anderson sold car stereos at American TVand took classes at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s business school. Now he carries a machine gun around on ambush patrols with Fox’s weapons platoon.
“Mortar fire here is as common as the sun coming up,” he says. “We’re not just dealing with a bunch of angry farmers. The enemy is quite intelligent and quite technical.”
Anderson has had close calls. In October, while posted at a vehicle checkpoint, a mortar landed five feet from where he and three others stood. The round was a dud. “It hit the ground and made so much noise and dust that we thought it went off,” he says.
In November, an artillery rocket landed 20 feet behind him. Another dud. “You can hear a rocket coming, but you can’t do anything about it. They come in so fast. All you hear is a sharp whistle and a quick swish and it’s over. Your luck has pretty much run out.”
The experience of combat is like nothing he could have imagined. “It’s like extreme fear and excitement all at the same time. I really don’t know how to describe it. At first, it’s scary. Anybody who tells you it isn’t is lying. But you learn to deal with it.… It’s a whole different ballgame when you can physically see someone actually trying to kill you.… You watch everybody very closely. You treat everybody as if they are out to kill you.”
He can’t say for certain whether he has killed an insurgent. Often bodies are taken by surviving rebels before Marines arrive at a battle scene. But in training, some questioned whether reservists – “citizen soldiers” – would be able to take a human life.
“People here, and myself, thought it could be a problem,” he says. “But it’s not a problem whatsoever. I think it takes a lot of mental conditioning to get yourself ready to do that. It takes a lot of emotion to kill somebody.”
The killing mindset, the daily threat. War takes a psychological toll. And it teaches.
“We’ve had friends die, we’ve seen people die,” says Anderson. “Sometimes we’re seeing horrific scenes, things we wouldn’t tell anybody about. But it makes you appreciate life so much more.
“It’s probably the worst year of my life. But at the same time, it’s the best year of my life. It’s changed my life in a lot of ways.”
It will take time to decompress when he goes home. He looks forward to hanging out on the porch at his parents’ house on Pewaukee Lake. “I’ll try to get back to normal.”
But what will normal be for an infantryman fresh from combat?
“Going to the grocery store and not worrying that your Humvee is going to blow up,” says Anderson. “Walking down the road and not worrying about a roadside bomb blowing you up. Going to sleep and not worrying that someone will cut your head off.”
He has mixed feelings about going home, about processing the practice of combat, the essence of war.
“It’s going to be weird for me to go home and not look for my gun when I walk out the door. It’s going to be weird walking out to get my morning paper and not worrying that I’m going to be shot by my neighbor. It’ll just be weird when I get home.”
It wasn’t the physicalinjuriesfrom the mortar attack that pained Sgt. Shogren the most. It was the word he got from his doctors: “Game over.”
“That was probably the toughest part, hearing I wasn’t going to be with the unit I was trained with,” he says.
On the day after Christmas, Shogren sat in his Hartland home, his wife Kimberly at his side, their 17-month-old daughter Leigha napping in her bed. He was on a four-day leave from Camp Pendleton before returning to California for more medical care and rehab. It was a peaceful Sunday morning.
Plastic surgeons did a remarkable job repairing his Ed Harris-like smile. Although his tongue was almost cut in half, he has no trouble speaking. Dental surgeons will fit him with new teeth. More operations will remove scar tissue in his leg and stretch the tendons so his knee will fully bend.
“I once thought, I’m Superman,” says Shogren. “But you realize in a blink of an eye you’re not.”
Still, he’s determined to go back to the Brookfield Police Department when he’s de-activated. “Absolutely,” he says.
In the meantime, his mind drifts to Iraq and Fox Company. Though he was in combat for less than a month, the distance between Shogren and his brothers in arms eats at him. “I feel real guilty having to leave them in that type of environment. I feel a great amount of loyalty. I really believe in what we’re doing over there,” he says.
Shogren had a friend who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He was at work for Canter Fitzgerald on the 101st floor when Tower One collapsed.
“The Marines have a real sense of purpose: to make sure 9/11 doesn’t happen again,” he says. “I wish I could be there for them.… If they told me right now that I could go back as is, I would go in a heartbeat.”
Sometime this spring, fox Company will turn over its portion of “the triangle of death” to the Army and come home. No one can say how long U.S.forces will be present in Iraq. And it is possible that the Wisconsin Marines could be called up again. As one officer says, “It’s going to take some time to work this thing out.”
Kurt Chandler is a Milwaukee Magazine senior editor.
