Doubts and Duty Tug at Marines

Grumbling is a storied part of Marine Corps life, the oil that keeps the Green Machine from seizing up. There is no morale crisis among Marines here, but threads of doubt are beginning to weave into conversations.

At this Marine Corps combat base in western Iraq, today’s post-invasion, post-occupation guerrilla conflict has left front-line troops on edge, tired, uncertain, frustrated, all at once -- even as they congratulate themselves on the gains they believe they’re making.

“Where you’re starting to see the strain is among the mid-career staff NCOs, the 10- to 12-year Marines,” said Sgt. Maj. David Plaster of Twentynine Palms, Calif. “The question they’re starting to ask is whether they want to continue.”

They are tired. Not just tired of the scalding heat, the dust storms that abrade their eyes like sandpaper, the ambushes, the roadside bombings and the murky, quicksilver loyalties of the Iraqis they encounter.

They are weary of back-to-back deployments that have separated many of them from their families for 18 of the last 24 months -- deployments that threaten to continue at an “up-tempo” pace for as far into the future as they can see.

They are uncertain. They wonder whether their families can bear it, whether they should have to bear it, whether too much is being asked of too few Americans in this global conflict.

Finally, they are frustrated because the herculean task handed them here is to try to unify a troubled nation. Yet they look over their shoulders toward home and see their own country divided between hope and doubt.

“I tell Marines that for the foreseeable future, they should expect to spend six of every 12 months deployed somewhere,” said Plaster, a 24-year veteran who has decided that he has had enough and plans to retire next summer.

He acknowledged that the Marine Corps “cannot afford to lose these people.” By virtue of training and experience, these staff noncommissioned officers are the ligaments that hold the Corps together.

The Marines appear to be close to their staff retention goals for this year. But that represents an unwelcome change from 2002 and last year, when reenlistments were booming and ran at nearly 100% of the Marine Corps goals. This year, for instance, the Corps could find itself 17% or so short of the reenlistments it needs for infantry platoon sergeants.

“I’m hearing Marines tell me, ‘The first 15 years were for me. The next five are for my wife,’ ” said Staff Sgt. Carlos O. Zuniga, a native of Choloma, Honduras, and retention specialist for the 7th Regimental Combat Team.

Indeed, Marines throughout the ranks say that wives and family considerations carry more weight now than at any time in recent history. Longtime veterans like Plaster note that spouses have become outspoken as they have become lonelier. They attend base “town hall” meetings back home and announce that deployment schedules are “going to have a serious impact on whether we -- We! -- stay in the Marine Corps.”

Circumstances are not, however, as simple as a tug of war between duty and family. The turbid, inconclusive battle against radical Islamic fundamentalists also wears on those who find themselves, month after month, on the front lines only to realize that there are no front lines and may never be.

Some Marines, like Capt. Doug Downey, who commands an infantry company in the 7th Marine Regiment, accept these new terms of battle. “To defend our country, we have to fight the enemy. I’d rather do it here than back home in Reading, Pa.”

But other Marines find it dispiriting to rebuild a school in a town where, later in the night, they are likely to be attacked.

“These Marines and sailors are being called on to make a huge sacrifice,” said Navy chaplain Lt. Michael E. Foskett of Twentynine Palms. “They look at the nebulous nature of this war and ask themselves, ‘Are we ever going to win? Is this the Marine Corps of the future?’ Here in this low-intensity guerrilla fight, married people in particular are beginning to reevaluate.”

Almost daily, Lt. Col. Phil Skuta, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, encourages his troops to recalibrate and update their thinking about the terms of victory in this war -- to accept small gains in Iraqi stability, to resist despair over setbacks and to recognize that “the people here won’t be handing us babies to kiss when we depart.”

Skuta urges his subordinates to take satisfaction in the unfamiliar roles in which Marines find themselves, part street cop, part military instructor, part reconstruction supervisor, part goodwill emissary as well as part warrior.

It is a sign of bravery, Skuta continues, for a Marine to enter a town smiling and waving after he was ambushed there the night before, and to do the same thing the next day.

But in turn, this altered 21st century version of Marine Corps gung-ho has created a different rub. The small, incremental gains that Marines believe, or hope, they are making in Iraq are not being acknowledged at home.

This is a nearly universal point of view among these infantry Marines at Al Asad. It is voiced not just in interviews, but also in casual conversations among themselves, often short-handed this way: “The media doesn’t get it.”

The cliche comes easy, but the thoughts behind it are more complicated. In truth, Marines here have an exceedingly narrow window on the news: a morning BBC report on the chow hall television and random, usually stale, periodicals.

But they have a much firmer connection to the emotions of their families and to what they believe are the imperatives of this era of impatience and doubt into which they were born.

What they seem to be questioning is whether America shares the will to stick it out in Iraq; Marines, after all, being believers that will is essential to victory in any form.

The U.S. armed forces in Iraq enjoy abundant evidence of public support at home, whether it’s in published polls that put them at the top of the most admired people in the United States, or the God-bless-you letters that are Scotch-taped by the scores on the walls of headquarters buildings.

Still, they understand that Americans are perpetually hungry for results. If the fight seems nebulous and incremental to those who are engaged in it up close, how can it be otherwise for those back in the States? And, more to the point, will that be good enough? For how long?

“This generation fighting this war was raised on ‘The X-Files.’ If anyone grew up to be cynical, it’s them,” said John Sears, another Navy chaplain at Al Asad base. “What’s our goal here? Winning hearts and minds. Well, they know if the hearts and minds at home don’t stay in it, how can we win here?”