Marines Grappling With Aftereffects of Gulf War : Military: The conflict’s quick, indecisive end bothers many. Emotional, marital problems are on increase.

As the jubilation and hero worship vanish into history, a darker legacy of the Gulf War is settling on Camp Pendleton, where 1st Sgt. Robert McKenzie is back from the war a changed and driven man.

McKenzie, 37, an old pro of a Marine with upper arms like hams, packs of Camels stacked on his desk, is pushing himself and training his green young troops harder than ever before. The war is still with him, and he worries about his marriage becoming a casualty, too.

He is among 22,000 Camp Pendleton Marines who went off to fight and returned forever touched by their brief but intense experience with privation and death. Although the war left some of the troops more mature and determined to embrace life, Camp Pendleton also is noting a phenomenon of depression and other emotional problems among many Marines, as though fighting the desert war was the easy part.

Base officials and outside sources report a dramatic increase after the war in failing marriages, and higher incidence of misdemeanor crime, drunk driving and weapons violations involving Marines.

Beyond those troubles is a peculiar undercurrent of dispirit among some war veterans who wanted to shine in combat, only to have the fighting over within days. Many were left feeling dissatisfied and undeserving of the hero image pushed on them by the public.

“There’s almost a sense of guilt that ‘I don’t rate this,’ ” said 1st Lt. Vince Swinney, a platoon commander in the war. “On one hand, war is the most horrible thing, but there’s a part of you that says, ‘I’ve trained years for this.’ ”

But, as it turned out, “you’re never tested to the full extent of what you can do,” he said.

In addition, many members of the 1st Marine Division are troubled that their decisive victory failed to destroy Saddam Hussein and his war machine or keep the Iraqi ruler from persecuting the Kurds.

“He’s still going at it,” said Sgt. James Simms, 27, from Seattle, “and there’s the possibility of us going back to finish what should have been done the first time.”

Similar feelings of postwar distress are seen regularly these days in the cramped office of Navy Chaplain Crutcher Evans Jr., who served with the Marines in the war zone. “A lot of people came back with a sense of depression because of the anticlimactic way things ended. There was really no closure,” he said.

“Because of the lack of closure and their inability to work out that aggression, they are acting out and probably aren’t aware of it,” Evans said.

This is the period that Ben McCart, a base marriage counselor, calls “the letdown stage” of the war.

After the scary exhilaration of combat and the close bonding among comrades, life after homecoming seems mundane.

“You have a memory that’s hard to match,” he said.

McCart, who was a Navy combat pilot during the Vietnam War, estimates that 800 to 1,000 Marines are seeking help to save their marriages, 25% above normal. They are people who find their lives altered more profoundly and permanently by war than they ever expected.

Officials at El Toro and Tustin air stations in Orange County reported a “slight increase” in the number of Marines receiving personal counseling for marital, family and other problems. More than 8,000 men and women from El Toro and Tustin served in the Gulf War, flying and maintaining squadrons of F-18 fighters and helicopters that ferried troops and equipment.

“If anybody says it hasn’t changed them, they’re lying or kidding themselves,” said 1st Sgt. McKenzie. And he should know.

He spent harrowing months in the war zone, months with bloody blisters on his hands, knots of anxiety over the threat of a hideous death by chemical attack, and, finally, the reckless adrenaline of furious close combat.

Then he came home in April to endless celebrations and incessant questions, and suddenly McKenzie knew he wasn’t the same. His usual playful joking was left behind on the searing sands. This practitioner of arms for 19 years found himself transformed.

He’s up at 4:30 a.m., training new Marines with a fury, overtaken by the conviction that he must help them to be supremely prepared and toughened if they are to survive war.

Although he tries to leave the persistent memory of war behind when he wearily drives home to San Diego, his intense preoccupation with the welfare of his troops has forged a silence that has invaded his six-year marriage. “We are going through some hard times,” he said gently.

“I don’t want to jeopardize my marriage because of how I want the company trained, and exhausting myself,” he said. Yet as deeply as he desires to regain a balance, the Marine Corps, as it is inclined to do, soon will call McKenzie to another sacrifice. He will ship out again within months, destination unknown, at least to him.

“If I can keep it together through this float, we’ll probably have it made,” McKenzie said.

McKenzie has no interest in the public’s intoxication with the Gulf War, the parades and patriotism.

“One of the mistakes we’ve made is we’ve almost glorified this thing,” he said. “When are they going to stop this trash? It’s ridiculous.”

He finds talking about it unpleasant and useless.

“Kids wanted to know what it was like, and did I kill anyone. I was pretty uncomfortable talking about it. Why, I don’t know,” he said. “The way I look at it, I had a job to do. There are certain things I’m not proud of, and I don’t want to boast about.”

Victory has left a hollow feeling for McKenzie and some other Marines who find that it has come at the price of family harmony--affecting not only young marriages but established, solid ones.

Karyl Ketchum, 35, has been married to a staff sergeant for 11 years, and she knows him like he knows the Marine Manual. Yet even Ketchum was surprised that her husband returned from Operation Desert Storm moody and withdrawn.

“He’s been in a depression. He didn’t want to talk about it (the war). He wanted nothing to do with the parades,” said Ketchum, who is a schoolteacher on base.

The Ketchums were reunited in April, but the war wasn’t entirely left behind.

“This is August,” she said. “When he comes home he just sits. He’s not the same by any means. A lot of times, it’s like he’s daydreaming. He’s distant.”

Friction has touched the entire family, and Ketchum said her husband has become short-tempered with her and their two children, ages 7 and 9. She said, “We don’t communicate as well as we did before. It’s like a wall that’s been built, through no fault of either of us.”

Barriers like that often occur after Marines grow emotionally bound to the comrades who shared the same harrowing experiences.

Chaplain Evans said, “unfortunately, a lot of husbands who have come back have been unable to disengage from that absolute bonding” and let others back into their world. In other cases, Marines have come home to find their wives transformed, base counselors said--independent, used to making decisions instead of deferring.

The epidemic of Marine marital problems isn’t confined to the somewhat closed 125,000-acre community of Camp Pendleton, where 36,000 troops are stationed. It is visible to outsiders.

An unusually heavy number of domestic violence cases is being handled by the Women’s Resource Center in Oceanside, where executive director Marva Bledsoe Chriss said the sustained anxiety over whether chemical or nuclear weapons would be used by Iraq has caused lingering stress problems for Marines.

“They’re dealing with stress which they probably don’t realize they have,” she said. The domestic flash point is often reached because, accustomed to a military environment, some Marines “deal with emotional issues through anger and violence.”

Alice Cate, a San Diego divorce lawyer, believes that there’s plenty of blame to pass around for the numbers of ruined Marine marriages, and she points to the behavior of some wives while their husbands were away at war.

Many “welcome-home divorces” are initiated by immature young wives who cheated on their husbands and don’t know the meaning of commitment or the reality of marrying a serviceman, Cate said.

Infidelity was rampant during the war, Cate said, and some wives have told heartbroken husbands of their affairs. “You certainly don’t have to put it in your husband’s face when he returns,” Cate said.

During normal times, she gets three or four military divorce cases a month, a load that swelled to five new cases a week throughout June and July and is just beginning to slacken.

The Camp Pendleton command also has been concerned about the increase of drunk driving--more than 90 arrests in July, up from 45 in July, 1990--and misdemeanor crimes--up from about 250 during July 1990 to more than 325 during July this year.

Camp Pendleton also has seen a near doubling in the number of unregistered firearms taken from Marines as well as an increase in the number of illegally concealed firearms.

“People are coming back and they have to unwind a little,” Henley said. “It takes a little readjustment.”

Violators are typically single Marines who became used to being armed during the war, or grew up in crime-plagued neighborhoods where guns for self defense were common, Henley said.

But the new trend will not be tolerated, he said. “The kids have to get used to the fact they’re not in a war zone any more.”

Times staff writer George Frank contributed to this report.