Somali Images Haunt Marines Arriving Home

Lance Cpl. Brian Malloy returned home Thursday, buoyed by a hero’s welcome but weighed down by a storehouse of horrific images accumulated in less than a month’s time in Somalia.

“The worst was seeing the little kids’ faces,” Malloy said as he and 202 other Marines came back to their families and friends after arriving at Camp Pendleton. “You see how hunger-stricken they are and you just want to die.

“It’s pathetic. All day long, you see them beg, and they beg for anything. I had never imagined a country with so much poverty or so much suffering.”

Malloy was one of 244 Marines who landed at March Air Force Base in Riverside on Thursday morning after an all-night journey from Mogadishu to Cairo to Frankfurt to Philadelphia to their home bases. From Riverside, 41 went to Twentynine Palms and the rest went to Camp Pendleton.

They were the first group of Marines sent back from Somalia since U.S. troops were deployed last month, part of a routine recycling of forces. The impressions were powerful and lasting for each Marine. Never had they conceived of a place with so much suffering or a civilization so utterly a shambles.

“It hit so much harder than seeing it on television,” Cpl. Raymond Beumer said. “It’s everything you see on television, only more so. It’s people who look like they’re dead, just walking, walking, walking . . . and flashes in the sky at night that never seem to stop.”

Beumer, a 23-year-old from San Bernardino who has been a Marine for 4 1/2 years, said he had “never seen anything like it. It was incomprehensible--buildings in rubble, people milling about constantly with no place to go, asking always for food and water. It was hell.”

Pfc. Damon Reyes, 19, of Modesto said his lasting memories are of a city, Mogadishu, that is “utterly devastated, with overturned cars, burned-out cars, streets and buildings scarred beyond belief from where all these grenades have gone off.”

“I saw bullet holes everywhere, and thousands upon thousands of people just walking the streets all hours of the day and night, on their last legs. It seems totally hopeless, and it’s hard not to feel discouraged by it,” he said.

Reyes spent much of Thursday morning telling friends that no matter how insoluble the problems of the United States may appear, “they are nothing” compared to those of the African nation.

“It made me think, over and over, that I just don’t have it as bad as I thought I did,” he said. “I’m much more grateful for things now. Much more. That’s the lesson it taught me.”

Lt. Kevin Bentley, spokesman for Camp Pendleton, said the command is aware of the horrors of Somalia and the impact that memories of it could have on young Marines. He said psychological counseling will be available to those who want it, just as it was after Operation Desert Storm.

“We know that much of what they saw and experienced over there was difficult,” Bentley said.

Beumer said he was not surprised by this week’s first casualty, when Pfc. Domingo Arroyo of Elizabeth, N.J., and the Twentynine Palms Marine base, was killed in a firefight near the airport.

“I was there three weeks, and toward the end things were getting much worse,” Beumer said. “It’s pretty serious over there. Several times at night there was shooting right outside the main gate of where we were staying. It figures to get worse from here.”

Lt. Timothy Oliver, 25, of New York City was struck “by the collapse of an entire country. There’s no infrastructure left. Everything has been looted or stolen or broken. It looks as though every single building in Mogadishu has been destroyed.

“They’ve pulled out all the plumbing, all the wiring and broken all the glass. They’ve gutted the place. They sell the metal for scrap in Kenya and Ethiopia. And the children may look pitiful--don’t get me wrong, they do--but a lot of them throw rocks. And that’s all they do.”

Even so, Oliver said that near the end of his three weeks, Mogadishu was “quieter than when we arrived,” and clearly changed by the presence of 11,000 Marines and an allied force of more than 33,000 in the country. About 4,000 from Pendleton have been sent to Mogadishu.

“More law and order had returned to the city, and the level of anarchy had dimmed somewhat. Some sense of normalcy has come back, but believe me, man, it’s no Disneyland,” Oliver said.

Lance Cpl. Malloy, 20, of York, Pa., said he had dreamed of returning to his home in Fallbrook so that he and his wife of four months, Holly, could go to the real Disneyland--a date he promised but had yet to keep. He said he was happy about getting home in time to see this weekend’s National Football League championship games on television and “being able to take a bath.”

“I was there almost a month and didn’t take a bath one time,” he said. “We had only a few showers, and they were all with cold water. A shower was the first thing I took when I got home (Thursday) morning. I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

Holly Malloy, 20, also from York, Pa., said her husband’s first deployment was particularly frustrating to her.

“It just felt like a part of me was missing,” she said from the couple’s Fallbrook apartment. “I was so worried. I wasn’t quite sure where he was at any given time. I just tried to watch the news but it was frustrating because there was never enough news to satisfy a worried wife.

“I just want to make him a good, home-cooked meal and take him out on a date. Go to a movie, do something normal. But then if we go nowhere, that’ll be fine. Just having him home, safe and sound, is enough.”

Malloy expects his memories to linger. He said the poverty and homelessness of Philadelphia and Los Angeles pale next to what he saw in recent weeks.

“It’s the children you can’t forget,” he said. “It’s their faces you can’t get out of your mind. You see them in your sleep. I still see them now, in fact. We were told not to give them anything, but we did anyway. How can you not?

“They really liked chocolate and crackers and anything we could give them really. I’ve just never seen anything like them--in Philadelphia, or any place else I’ve been. I’ve never seen anything like it on television. And I hope I never do. You see it once, believe me, you won’t forget it. You just can’t get it out of your mind.”