Jewish Marine Discharged : Court-martial: Lt. Tony Homayoun Moradian said he didn’t want to fight in Gulf War because he couldn’t countenance defending an Arab nation.

A Jewish Marine who fled his Gulf-bound ship in Hawaii last December to avoid defending Arabs will be dismissed from the Marine Corps with the equivalent of a dishonorable discharge and fined $3,000, a military judge ruled Saturday.

The highest-ranking Marine to avoid service in Operation Desert Storm, Lt. Tony Homayoun Moradian, 26, was found guilty of missing a troop movement Dec. 10, when the rest of his light attack helicopter squadron sailed out of Pearl Harbor en route to the Persian Gulf.

“Being brought up as an orthodox Jew, being aware of the animosity of the Arab-Israeli conflict and considering myself a Zionist, (I couldn’t see) going and defending an Arab nation that doesn’t believe in my right to exist,” the Iranian-born pilot said at his general court-martial at Camp Pendleton. “But I wanted to be a Marine.”

During nearly two hours of testimony, defense witnesses described Moradian as an outstanding and dedicated young Marine who had overcome great obstacles to become a pilot, his lifelong dream. His loyalty to the Marine Corps was only equalled, one witness testified, by his deeply rooted religious convictions.

“All his life, he wanted to be a pilot--that’s what he dreamed and lived for,” said his brother, Ibrahim Moradian, of Los Angeles. “On one side, he was a Jew. On the other, he loved the Marine Corps.”

Those two sides never were in conflict, Moradian testified, until Operation Desert Shield got under way. Even then, he said, he thought he could put his religious convictions aside in order to do his duty.

“I’m not a coward, nor am I afraid to take part in any battle,” said Moradian, who became a U.S. citizen in 1985. “I knew I had a duty to this country and I thought I had come at peace with myself. But once I got aboard the ship, I found those duties overwhelming.”

After he jumped ship, he caught a commercial jet from Hawaii to California and immediately presented himself at Camp Pendleton. He knew he would be punished for what he called a “desperate” decision, but he hoped to be able to resume his military career.

“I always wanted to be one of you,” Moradian said, reading from a brief written statement he had prepared. “I never wanted to give anyone any reason to treat me differently. I’m proud to be an American. . . . I salute all my fellow Marines.”

Capt. David Ingold, one of Moradian’s two defense attorneys, said that his client had “no right answer” to the dilemma Operation Desert Storm presented. Living in Iran until he was 14, Ingold said, Moradian had seen “first-hand the hatred, the terrorism” between Muslims and Jews.

When he got to this country, speaking not a word of English, Moradian “did everything he could to conform. He became a U.S. citizen. He worked to become a U.S. Marine,” Ingold said. But in his effort to be true to God, country and corps, Moradian found himself, as one fellow pilot who testified said, “between a rock and a hard place.”

The government prosecutor, Maj. Carlos M. Baldwin, countered that Moradian had let down the Marine Corps, taking what it had to give and then refusing to keep his side of the bargain.

“His tour in the Marine Corps is only remarkable for its selfishness. All he wanted to do was fly--under his terms and conditions,” Baldwin said, adding that when Moradian signed his enlistment contract and pledged to serve in combat “it didn’t read ‘except in the Middle East.’ ”

Baldwin noted that many women Marines served in the Persian Gulf defending a region where women do not enjoy equality. Moradian, he said, should have been able to do the same.

“It was not an issue of race or gender. It was not an Arab-Israeli conflict. It was countries united together to stop aggression,” he said as he called for Moradian to be discharged. “This isn’t the first time the Marine Corps has been deployed to the Middle East and it won’t be the last. Would the accused have chosen to deploy to Lebanon? We can’t let him make that decision ever again.”

Lt. Col. Rudolph Kaiser, the commanding officer of the administrative support detachment where Moradian has been assigned since December, said he sympathized with Moradian’s moral struggle and told the prosecutor he did not think cowardice played a role in Moradian’s decision to flee.

But he also said he could not imagine what job Moradian could do now in the Marine Corps, given his history.

“He would be a hard man to place right now, quite frankly, as an officer,” Kaiser said. “We’re a small community. It would be discovered who he is and what decision he made.”

Maj. George Trautman, the executive officer of Moradian’s helicopter squad, submitted written testimony in which he said the squad was weakened by Moradian’s absence. Of the 43 helicopter pilots in the squad, he said later, every one saw combat in Kuwait.

“He tarnished the reputation of the unit and hurt morale. And what really hurts is he never approached anybody--his peers or up the chain of command,” Trautman said outside the courtroom.

Col. Edwin Welch, the military judge, said Moradian should have talked about his concerns with a Navy chaplain, even though there were none that shared his faith on his ship. Welch declined to impose a prison sentence, he said, in part because Moradian had promptly turned himself in at Camp Pendleton after he flew back from Hawaii.