Marine Town Fights Own Enemies: Loneliness, Fear : Twentynine Palms: Families say business is down, crime is up. They rely on toughness to get through war.
Morning has come to the Bowladium, and since it’s Thursday, so has the league that, inexplicably, changed its name this year from Desert Dolls to Desert Ladies.
On Lane 11, Peaches Oliva has rolled one right down the middle, the kind of ball that could spell triumph or disaster, a resounding strike or the dreaded 7-10 split.
It’s a strike. Oliva claps as her teammates whoop and offer high-fives. Then she resumes the role of mommy. Two daughters, ages 4 and 2, are behind the ball rack and a third, age 13, is at school. The little ones are whining for candy, but they’re a snap compared to her teen-ager.
“She’s so rebellious,” Oliva says. “. . . I just wish the ground war would happen so I’ll know whether I’ll have a husband or not.”
In this isolated desert community next door to the massive Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, such fatalistic bravado is often preferable to outright expressions of pain and dread. War means not only anxiety to Twentynine Palms, but also loneliness, economic troubles and crime. Yet with suffering expected to mount, toughness is the order of the day.
So far, the war with Iraq has claimed the lives of seven young Marines who were based at Twentynine Palms, and there’s a stoic acceptance that, with a ground war imminent, more Marine deaths are inevitable.
It is a subject that the wives, fellow Marines and townspeople tend to avoid.
“Have you ever had a friend die? What do you say?” explained Christopher Dobler, the city’s mayor. “I think people don’t want to say too much because there’s a good possibility things will get worse. They’re just biting their tongues.”
Worry and fear are only two measures of the war’s impact on Twentynine Palms. Another is economic. Not only have thousands of Marines left--the unmarried ones taking their paychecks with them--but many young wives have gone back to their hometowns, all at the outset of a national recession.
The arrival of some reservists has helped a little, but many rentals are vacant. Mayor Dobler, who operates a wholesale food sales and distribution company, laid off two truck drivers and cut the hours of five secretaries. Some video shops and other businesses have closed, and trade is down at local bars. With men in short supply, a tattoo artist named Vince said he’s been decorating more women lately, usually inscribing the name of a husband or boyfriend overseas.
At a laundry on Adobe Road, the main drag between the town and the base, manager Laura Ornelas and her 16-year-old daughter, Linda, witness both the economic and the human toll. Business, she estimates, is down more than half.
Linda was hanging around one night, complaining that she couldn’t find a job and that “29,” as locals call it, is lonely with the Marines gone. Linda said she hasn’t dated men from the base, but her 18-year-old sister, she said, corresponds with three or four in Saudi Arabia. “She’s trying to decide which one she’s in love with,” Linda said.
Her mother laughed, but agreed that many people are depressed and lonely. Laura Ornelas said she knew one woman Marine who received orders a few weeks after childbirth. “She had to leave a 2-month-old baby.”
When President Bush first ordered U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia last August, Twentynine Palms braced itself for hard times. This high-desert hamlet 150 miles east of Los Angeles is Leatherneck through and through. If you’re not Marine, a Marine wife or a Marine brat yourself, chances are a brother-in-law or a next-door neighbor is. And Twentynine Palms, like the Corps, prides itself on toughness, a keen sense of duty and pride in itself.
After the Marines died--some victims of the so-called friendly fire during the battle of Khafji, others in vehicular accidents--a memorial service in the base Protestant chapel drew about 200 Marines and their family members. The local newspaper, the Desert Trail, quoted an ex-Marine city councilman as saying the service “went very smoothly” without “a lot of emotions.”
Marines have their own way of mourning. More tears were surely shed in hometowns like Fremont, Calif., and Douglas, Ore., New Richmond, Ohio, and Belvidere, N.J. As it was, only one of the Marines had a wife in Twentynine Palms to grieve him.
Even if they don’t make a public spectacle of it, “people are hurting pretty bad,” said Frances Arnold, one of Oliva’s bowling teammates. Like Oliva’s husband, Jose, Arnold’s husband, Roger, is deployed in Operation Desert Storm.
One of the Marines killed during the Khafji battle belonged to Staff Sgt. Roger Arnold’s battery.
“That scared us,” Oliva acknowledged.
The younger children are the most resilient, many agree. Frances Arnold said her 10-year-old daughter is “stronger than me.” Laura Ornelas tells of a 3-year-old boy who walked up to her and asked, “Do you know where my father is?” Ornelas told him no.
“He’s in Saudi Arabia,” the boy announced. “He’s going to kick Saddam’s butt.”
Teen-agers are another story, parents say. Many sense an increase in rebelliousness, rowdiness and even juvenile crime, although there are no statistics to prove it. The problem, they suggest, is not simply that so many fathers are gone, but pent-up stress and anger associated with the war.
According to one Marine wife, the sons of a Marine officer who is due to ship out were recently arrested on charges of attempted burglary. “I think they think if they get into enough trouble, their father won’t have to go,” she suggested.
Many adults are angry, too, but for different reasons. The community’s military heritage dates to the 1920s, when a Pasadena doctor persuaded a group of World War I mustard gas survivors that the clean, arid desert air was the ideal salve for their damaged lungs. Today, many people here rail about anti-war protests, the media and a growing sense that the rest of the world doesn’t appreciate the United States.
“There’s too much war and too much war coverage,” declared Pat Bitter, a 54-year-old widow whose husband served in Korea and Vietnam. “My husband was in two wars, and if there had been this much coverage, I’d have been totally frustrated. I don’t know how these wives stand it.”
Barbara Lee, 33, is one such wife--and an ex-Marine herself. Now she raises two children while working full-time as a cook at the 29 Palms Inn and writing daily to her husband, Chris Lee, a staff sergeant who has been in Saudi Arabia for about six months.
“I grew up watching John Wayne movies and ‘Combat’ with my father, and I joined because I was always willing to fight for what we believe in,” she said. The United States, Lee suggests, has a duty to be the world’s policeman. If not us, Lee asks, “Who? Should it be Saddam Hussein? Should it be (Libyan leader Moammar) Kadafi? Or maybe we should let Manuel Noriega out and let him do it.”
Not knowing the date her husband will come home is hard, Lee says, but she insists she has no doubts that he will.
Cyndy Jackson, who sports a bowling average of 165, is another ex-Marine and a mother of two with a husband overseas, Gunnery Sgt. Eddie Lopez. Jackson used to wear sergeant’s chevrons but now wears a name tag identifying herself as a Mary Kay beauty consultant. She too worries more about others than Eddie, she says.
Jackson also worries about the Marine wives who went home to mothers and fathers. They would have been better off, she suggested, staying in Twentynine Palms, where there are so many people who understand. Some people might find solace on a starry desert night amid the stark beauty of nearby Joshua Tree National Monument. And some might escape to the Bowladium.
Not that Twentynine Palms is paradise. As if people didn’t have enough to fret about, the homes of Marines deployed overseas have become targets for burglary, said sheriff’s Deputy Jerry Buckland.
Jackson knows it too well. One night after her husband shipped out, she was awakened by a strange sound. Entering her daughter’s room, she found herself face to face with a prowler who had climbed through a window and stepped inside an open toy box.
The man had a hammer in his back pocket. And Jackson realized she had left the gun she keeps for protection in her own bedroom.
“He asked me, ‘Is your husband over the” Jackson recalled. “I said, ‘No, he’s not. Now get the hell out of my home.’ ” With that, she said, the prowler left.
The next day, Jackson said, her daughter asked why that man was in her room.
There wasn’t anyone in your room, her mother told her. You had a bad dream.