TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif.
Flip through any Michigan phone book and you'll find the likes of the 1/24th Marines.
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September 24, 2006
Story By JOE SWICKARD, Photos by DAVID P. GILKEY
DETROIT FREE PRESS
Chuck McCall is a Ford assembly worker weighing a buyout. Jade Tanguay and Paul Kraus are a pair of Detroit cops. Rudy Mendoza of Newberry -- by way of Pontiac -- was stocking grocery shelves when he decided to join up because he was "sick of seeing things on TV and not doing anything myself."
When the unit ships out, it will be the largest single Marine Reserve deployment from Michigan in the war on terror.
The military is wary of releasing exact numbers, destinations or timetables, but the battalion's core is made up of more than 700 Michiganders, along with another few hundred from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Tennessee. This month, those men found themselves running through a realistic mock-up of an Iraqi village in the Mojave Desert -- humping 40 pounds or more of automatic weapons, miscellaneous gear and ammo in 110-degree heat.
But they weren't thinking of sowing democracy as they dived through windows, kicked in doors and charged up stairways to face snipers, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades.
No, it's personal for these firefighters, salesmen and managers from places like Lansing, Dearborn and Livonia who strapped on Kevlar helmets and armored vests, bedded down in the dirt, bathed with baby wipes and went through weeks of sweat-soaked training that lasted from before dawn till long past dark in preparation for a seven-month deployment to Anbar province in Iraq's Sunni Triangle.
"It comes down to getting your buddy's back," says Lance Cpl. Craig Brightwell, 20, of Paw Paw.
The First Battalion of the 24th Marine Regiment ended almost five months of intense preparation this month with Mojave Viper 19-06, a massive three-day around-the-clock maneuver. The 1/24th -- supported by armor and other units -- was pitted against insurgent fighters in a replicated Iraqi town called Wadi al Sahara. About 400 villagers, sheikhs, officials and merchants holed up in about 500 homes, offices, markets and mosques all constructed at full-scale using steel shipping containers stacked up to three stories tall.
Most of the Wadi al Sahara roles were filled by Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans so that the troops would learn how to deal with a civilian population -- plus insurgents -- with a different language and culture in the midst of chaotic action and explosions.
Mojave Viper was the payoff for weeks of exhausting ambushes, searches and close-quarter gunfights.
It's hoped that Wadi al Sahara and the role-players, many of them from metro Detroit, would give the regiment a true tactical and cultural immersion for their Iraqi assignment, said Col. Ron Baczkowski, a Hamtramck native who heads up the training in the Wadi al Sahara.
"When they deploy, I want them to feel like they've been there before," he said. "They're going to hear the Muslim call to prayers five times a day and they are going through the souk -- the marketplace -- so they'll hit the ground ready to operate."
After weeks of go-go-go training, suffocating heat and sandstorms broken by epic deluges, the men are straining to lunge into action.
"Yessir, yessir," said First Sgt. Chedrick Greene, a Saginaw firefighter and union official. "Waited too long to turn back."
Bonding among neighbors
With a roaring bear's head insignia proclaiming itself Terror from the North, the 1/24th is Marine Corps, no doubt about it. Yet it significantly differs from most outfits, say the men who lead it.
Instead of teenage recruits from across the country, Maj. Christopher Kolomjec said the 1/24th is made up mostly of older Marine Reserves, often neighbors, bonded by years of drills and training. Their service is bolstered by lives and careers established outside the Corps, Kolomjec said.
The unit was headquartered at the Brodhead Armory in Detroit near Belle Isle for about 50 years and transferred to Selfridge Air National Guard Base outside Mt. Clemens in 2003. Its component companies also are based in Saginaw, Lansing and Grand Rapids, as well as one in Perrysburg, Ohio.
"They're just a snapshot of everyday life in Michigan," said Kolomjec, a 38-year-old Grosse Pointe Farms lawyer with three kids at Richard Elementary School. "We are older, we are more mature and we chose to be here," he said.
In this complex and dangerous war "we need thinking Marines, we need smart Marines," said Kolomjec, adding that Marines with jobs and families can "address the problems over there with a perspective that I think is more effective."
Yes, said Brightwell, but you can't train to leave your family.
Winston Farrow, who swapped his Detroit Fire Department lieutenant's bars for Marine master sergeant stripes, said his three kids got a preview when he was called to help with hurricane relief in the South last year.
Farrow said he has tried to prepare the kids with regular talks "about obligation, dedication and service." But they are kids, and he thinks even model kids can get stressed after a few months.
Catching a breather after running through medical evacuation drills to practice treating and carrying the wounded to a helicopter under battle conditions, Gunnery Sgt. Paul McGowan, said he became a Marine because he wondered how he would have handled Vietnam.
Twentynine Palms, said McGowan, is a 934-square-mile area of barren desert and mountains, but it's not empty. It's a harsh crucible that "tests and tests the limits" of men and their commitment. "It builds camaraderie."
McGowan, like most of the other Marines, spoke during quick breaks in their hard-charging training. The men were eager to share their thoughts about their neighbors and workmates and the dads in the group all knew they were missing their kids' first days of the new school year -- but taking five from combat drills doesn't allow for deep reflective introspection and detailed autobiographies before armoring up and pushing on.
Still, they shared what they could.
At 44, McGowan, from Jackson and in the industrial and commercial lighting business, is one of the older men in the outfit and is now on the fifth deployment of his Marine career. And with a salesman's easy rapport, McGowan, who has a son and two daughters, schooled some younger Marines about coping with fear of the unknown and separation from families.
McGowan, who marked his 19th wedding anniversary and 20th Marine anniversary on Sept. 12 in the California desert, said his family "can't believe I have to go back" but understand his need not to sit this one out.
Also heeding the call is Lance Cpl. Mohammed Sayied. Always drawn to the military life, Sayied joined the ROTC at Detroit Cass Tech High School.
An Oakland Community College student and a bartender at Logan's Roadhouse in Livonia, he joined the Marine Reserves, a move that distressed his Bangladesh-born parents. He said he has been pushed to conquer "stuff I never would have. I never could have imagined living on a mountain, but we did."
A practicing Muslim who made his pilgrimage to Mecca, Sayied, 24, said he has explained his faith to his buddies.
"Islam is peace and serenity," Sayied said. "Nowhere in the Quran does it say to go out and kill people. A true Muslim just wouldn't go out and do that."
Sayied's data networking assignment is at odds with his go-getter urge for action: "If I wanted to play with computers in an air-conditioned room, I could have done that at Best Buy."
Unlike some Marines, he didn't rush to get married when called up. "It's bad enough with Mom and Dad," he said. "There's enough worrying without a wife."
Mendoza, the 22-year-old from Newberry, joined the Reserves at the same time his brother Jeremy joined the regular Marines.
"Mom kind of freaked" about the enlistments and potential dangers, he said, but now "she's hanging up our certificates and awards."
The latest certificate came in July for an Urban Breaching Course.
"That's blowing up doors," Mendoza said. "It is an adrenaline rush."
'Nobody's not scared'
Kolomjec said that once in Iraq, even routine duties will put his men in harm's way. It's probably unrealistic to think all of them will make it back home without casualties, he said.
So his goal, Kolomjec said, is for the men to "rise above their fears, rise above themselves and do something that they didn't think they could do."
The unit's hometown connections, he said, provide motivation but with a cost.
"I think everyone has their own individual fears and anxieties and limitations and weaknesses," he said. "You don't want to let each other down and you don't want to let the people back home down. And it is different because you are going back home and you have to, I guess, explain yourselves.
"An active unit goes back to another base, but we're going back home. So people are going to know what we did and what we didn't do and whether we failed. We have to account for that and that's an added stress."
Pfc. Mike Brasic of Ortonville, who married just before desert training, said service is a balancing of his life. "I'm 21 years old and it seems like I've been given a lot from my family, friends and America in general," Brasic said. "And when I get back, America's going to give me a lot more and so maybe this is a way of giving something back."
The men often fall into sports imagery for their coming task -- Iraq is their game time, and they're ready to play. But they know, too, success won't be marked with touchdowns or walk-off homers as the crowd goes wild.
Success comes "on a smaller scale," said Brightwell. "You got to take it piece by piece, making sure you've got your buddy's back and your buddy's got your back."
The thought of combat, he said "is a big weird gut feeling" with worries for the safety of "the guy right next to you that you've come to love or whatever."
"Nobody's not scared," he said.
Hearts pound with automatic weapons fire and explosions during the training; reflection comes in the sudden silences.
Lance Cpl. Ronnie Julian is a machine gunner who said that when "you put 1,000 rounds down range, it's intense. It gets your adrenaline going."
Barely pausing, Julian, 23, of Bay City continued: "I think it's going to be completely different scenario, though, when rounds come back at you."
Kolomjec said he has seen his men toughened under the harsh desert sun, but they haven't hardened.
"You take any one of these guys with a rifle -- and they're trained to be the most violent, the most aggressive, the best warriors that America has -- and you pull him aside and he's worried about his wife," Kolomjec said. "He worries about his kid, his mom; about if everything's OK because he's not there."