A Peace-Loving Marine Recalled by His Mother : Desert campaign: Sergeant, who hated injustice, and two others die in non-combat collision. They are the first based in the Southland to be killed in the conflict.

“I have often wondered how neat the world would be if no nation needed a military. How easy it could be done; no borders, just caring people. Our world isn’t anywhere near that, however.

“Shame.”

--Marine Staff Sgt. Michael Conner in a letter to his sister dated Dec. 13

Michael Conner hated war. And, raised in lush areas of Northern California, he hated the desert. So dying in an accidental crush of military steel in desolate Saudi Arabia seems to his mother to be an especially brutal way for her son to die.

Conner, 32, a career Marine and father of two children, and two other Marines, both 20, were the first troops deployed from Southern California to be killed in the nearly two-week-old Gulf War.

Conner, who was most recently stationed at the Marine Air-Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Lance Cpl. Arthur O. Garz of Kingsville, Tex., and Michael A. Noline of Phoenix died Saturday when two light-armored vehicles collided after an operation involving the war’s heaviest ground artillery attack. Seven others were injured in the non-battle incident.

On Sunday, Marjorie Glynn, Conner’s mother, described her son as a sensitive, peace-loving family man, who was upset by injustice. She said he told her during their last conversation--five days before the war erupted--that if the peace talks succeeded, it would be the happiest day of his life, because then he could return to his Fremont home and his wife, Sylvia, and his sons, Michael Jr., 11, and Mitchell, 7.

“He hated war. He doesn’t like violence,” Glynn said in a telephone interview from her home in Lucerne, about two hours north of San Francisco. “But he wanted to do what he had to do to protect his family, his country and his God. He said he can’t sit by and see somebody get away with raping Kuwait--something that horrendous. It was an injustice, and he was proud to do his part to counteract that.”

Conner wrote of his dreams of a peaceful world in a letter to one of his sisters a month before the first shots were fired.

“No nation should allow another to do what Iraq did to Kuwait,” he wrote. “You should see it. My God, you wouldn’t think people could do this in this century.”

A spokesman for the Pentagon said Conner and the other Marines in the two light armored vehicles apparently were moving back from the border after a raid on unidentified Iraqi targets in Occupied Kuwait. Conner and the other Marines, members of the First Light Armored Infantry Battalion from Camp Pendleton, probably were providing security to the artillery groups firing 155-millimeter howitzers, the spokesman said.

The last time Sylvia Conner talked to her husband was two days after the war broke out, and he was concerned about the troops’ readiness for battle. He told her that in war exercises, men in his battalion had been “killed” in simulations, and he worried that meant they were unprepared.

But he told his wife he felt safer because he had switched to a new squad, Glynn said.

The Marine Corps official who notified the family of Conner’s death gave them few details ofthe fatal accident, only that they were leaving the battle area so it was considered a non-combat situation.

“I asked what that means, and he said it means he won’t receive a Purple Heart. I almost died when he told me that,” Glynn said, choking back tears as news from the Gulf blared on the television in the background. “Michael won’t come back to me, or his wife, or his sons, and they consider him not worthy of a Purple Heart.

“I read some boy got one because he got shrapnel in his shoulder. But my son is coming home in a body bag and he doesn’t get a Purple Heart because it was non-combative.”

Conner wanted to be a Marine since he was 3 and saw a uniform, his mother said. He signed up when he graduated from high school 15 years ago.

On Aug. 16, Glynn stood in the broiling desert at Twentynine Palms and hugged her son goodby as he left for Saudi Arabia. She remembers that he did not like the starkness of the desert. And he talked about how he missed the redwoods and other forests around Eureka and other Northern California towns where he was raised.

“He hated the desert, the desolation. The last six months were the worst of his life,” she said.

The last time the mother and son talked, on Jan. 11, he said he was pleased Congress had just approved the use of force against Iraq.

“He said now he could get in there, get it over with and get home. . . . All he wanted to do was get it over with and come home,” she said.

Glynn said she could tell that her son was afraid and that he somehow knew he wouldn’t come home alive.

“He’s a man. But I’m a mother. And I could tell there was a little quiver in his voice, knowing it was tremendous, overwhelming odds that they were facing,” she said. “He said it was overwhelming what they had to face, that it was going to be tough.”

Conner also worried about the protests he heard about in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has had some of the nation’s largest protests.

“He said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to come home if there’s protests like with Vietnam.’ So he’s not coming home. Not alive at least,” she said.

Glynn does not know if her son ever got her last letter, which said some things she desperately wanted him to know because she had a gut feeling that she would not see her son again.

“I told him he promised me as a child he’d never give me any trouble. And he never did,” she said. “He kept his word. He was always such a brave boy and that brave boy grew into a brave man.

“My suffering is over,” she said. “But there’s other wives and parents out there. I’m a mother, and my heart goes out to them.”