War’s Toll Respects Neither Youth Nor Experience

SAN FRANCISCO — The coffins arrived on the same commercial airplane, US Airways Flight 29 from Philadelphia.

Two grieving families, representing different generations of loss in the Iraq conflict, huddled in the fog-shrouded cargo bay outside San Francisco International Airport.

On one side of a cargo zone parking lot, standing in the eerie green glow of airport halite lights, the mother of 21-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Erick James Hodges said it seemed only yesterday that her young son was at home playing with his Rambo doll and vowing to be a Marine.

“In my mind, he was still my little boy,” said Marina Beyer, 46. Hodges was the second of Beyer’s six children, ranging in age from 8 to 23. For Hodges’ birthday earlier this month, she sent him a card showing a boy on a tricycle. In his letter back, he chided her for treating him like a kid and asked for cigars.

Hodges, from Bay Point, Calif., died in a bomb explosion in Fallouja on his birthday, Nov. 10. “He was 21 for a day,” Beyer said.

Less than 100 yards away on Wednesday night, the family of 45-year-old California National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Michael Ottolini mourned the loss of a husband and father of two grown children. He had been in the Guard longer than the young Marine whose body was sent home with his on Flight 29 had been alive.

Ottolini, a Sebastopol hay hauler and a 28-year Guard veteran who had never before seen combat, was also killed Nov. 10, when the truck he was driving north of Baghdad exploded after hitting a roadside bomb.

As the casualties in Iraq continue, the generation gap widens. Unmarried and childless, Hodges had yet to realize a full life. Family members described Ottolini, a civilian truck driver, as a man whose life goals had been largely met.

Most of those killed on the front lines in Fallouja and other hotspots are in their early 20s. Many of those killed in support positions and on transportation convoys are older reservists and National Guard soldiers whose units are fighting in their first overseas conflict since the Korean War.

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 149 members of the National Guard have died there.

The average age of the nine California National Guard members killed so far in Iraq is 31. Ottolini was the oldest. The oldest soldier to die in combat in Iraq was also in the National Guard, 54-year-old grandfather Sgt. Roger Dale Rowe of Bon Aqua, Tenn. Rowe, who had served as a medic in Vietnam, was killed by a sniper July 9, 2003.

Going into this weekend, 346 U.S. Marines had been killed in the Iraqi campaign, 61 from California. The average age of the Californians killed in action was 22. Hodges was younger than the average. Despite his youth, he was serving his second tour in Iraq.

He enlisted while still a student at Mt. Diablo High School in Concord, and his first full-time job was in the Marine Corps. In between tours in Iraq, friends said, he took real estate courses and talked about helping his family move out of the working-class East Bay area where he grew up.

Beyer, who lives in Alamo, Calif., and works as a clerk at Longs Drugs, said that she last spoke with her son Oct. 29 and that he was in good spirits.

“Please tell me that I’m going to wake up, and this is just a horrible dream,” Beyer said as she stood in the chill outside the San Francisco airport.

When the flag-draped coffin was pulled on a baggage cart into the US Airways cargo zone, Beyer leaned against the casket and wailed, “No! No!”

Three months earlier, she recalled, the family had dropped the young Marine off at the same airport after his last leave before his return to Iraq.

Services for Hodges were held Friday morning at Salvation Army Community Church in Concord. He was buried with full military honors at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno.

In a separate ceremony on the other side of the airport cargo facility, Ottolini family members gathered as a National Guard honor guard lifted Ottolini’s silver casket into a hearse. Among the pallbearers was Col. Michael Herman of El Dorado Hills, commander of the California National Guard Engineer Brigade. Herman had previously been commander of the Santa Rosa-based 579th Engineers, in which Ottolini and five other members of his family, including his father and his son, had served.

“As commander,” Herman said, “you are not supposed to play favorites. But the Ottolini family has always been special.”

Despite their training as military engineers, the 110 members of the 579th serving in Iraq have been converted into infantry soldiers and have been deployed to patrol the perimeters of Camp Anaconda, the sprawling U.S. military base near Balad.

The 579th has suffered more casualties than any other California National Guard unit in Iraq. In addition to Ottolini, Lt. Andree Tyson of Riverside and Spc. Patrick McCaffrey of Tracy died June 22 after their patrol was ambushed outside Balad.

Ottolini’s 78-year-old father, Daniel, a veteran of 33 years in the Army and National Guard, was calm and resigned to his son’s death.

“I feel bad about what happened, but going to Iraq is what he wanted to do,” said his father, who during his World War II service participated in the D-day invasion at Omaha Beach. Five of his six sons served in the military. When they finished their regular service, they joined the 579th, where the senior Ottolini was top sergeant.

“I can take comfort in the fact that my dad was actually doing something that he loved,” said Michael Ottolini’s 27-year-old son, Darrell, a heavy-equipment rental agent from Ukiah.

Still, he said, quietly smoking a cigarette on the edge of the parking lot, the reality of his father’s death did not come home to him until he saw the coffin in the airport cargo dock.

One by one, members of the family approached the casket, some pausing to rest a hand on the flag. One family member snapped pictures of the coffin with a disposable camera.

Dan Ottolini, 54, the dead soldier’s older brother, served as a Marine in Japan during the Vietnam War. When he returned home to the United States, the antiwar movement was at its peak and public attitudes toward the returning soldiers could be harsh. He recalled being spit on by an airport flower seller. He said he was pleased to see his brother treated with more respect.

“I don’t know if this is a good war or a bad war,” he said of the conflict in Iraq. “I just don’t want it to turn out like ‘Nam.”

When the family was finished paying their respects, an eight-member volunteer motorcycle escort from the Santa Rosa Police Department led the hearse and trailing cars across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sebastopol, where services were set for today.