Marine Widow’s Retreat to Disillusionment : Military: Carol Bentzlin rejects official version of ‘friendly fire’ in Saudi Arabia. Her bitterness is aimed at Pentagon, defense contractors.

Before the Persian Gulf War, which killed her Marine husband in a “friendly fire” accident, Carol Bentzlin knew well the role of the perfect military wife.

“It was ‘God bless America, apple pie and rah, rah, rah,’ ” she recalled. “At one time, I really believed all that. At one time, I was that. But not any more.”

A widow with three children, Bentzlin, 32, lost her husband, Camp Pendleton Marine Cpl. Stephen E. Bentzlin, 23, for reasons that still remain hazy to her. What information she has pieced together has come at a price, not the least of which is a loss of faith.

For her, the memory of war never really fades, especially when there are always headlines to remind her. Just last month, her anger was reawakened by the news that a defense contractor had been cleared of wrongdoing in connection with the fatal accident that robbed her of her husband.

Her story is one of bitterness--at the government whose policies placed her husband in a war she considers pointless; and at what she calls a cover-up that kept her and the families of other Marines killed in the same accident from learning the how and why.

“To this day,” she said, “I’m not sure I know exactly what happened.”

Bentzlin’s husband and six other Pendleton Marines perished in the first land battle of Operation Desert Storm in January, 1991, when their lightly armored vehicle was hit by a missile fired from a U.S. Air Force A-10.

It happened in Umm Hujul, a coastal region about 60 miles from Khafji, a northern Saudi Arabian border town seized by Iraqi troops. Compounding Bentzlin’s bitterness was a remark made by now-retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander, who described the battle as “militarily insignificant . . . a mosquito on an elephant.”

“I’d like to be able to tell my children something different,” Bentzlin said. “If it was so worthless, then why did my husband die? Why was he even there?”

Bentzlin’s post-war anger reached a crescendo last month when a Garden City, N.Y., aerospace firm, Lucas Aul, was cleared of causing the deaths of the seven Marines, despite the firm’s admission that it falsified test results for defective missile-launcher parts. The firm’s admission was part of a plea bargain with the U.S. Justice Department, which took action against Lucas Aul after a two-year investigation.

Bentzlin believes her husband’s death was caused by defects in the “LEUs”--launch electronic units--made by Lucas Aul or by an errant firing of the missile itself. The missile was made by Hughes Aircraft Corp., which, for reasons of national security, has been granted immunity from litigation.

In a plea bargain last month in U.S. District Court, Lucas Aul pleaded guilty to a felony charge of deliberately submitting falsified results and agreed to pay the government $4 million in fines, $7.5 million in restitution for the faulty parts and $500,000 for the cost of the investigation.

Lucas Aul acknowledged that employees had falsified test results, indicating that the LEUs had passed vibration, severe weather and current-flow tests. The units, which help pilots fire missiles such as those used in Saudi Arabia, were manufactured under a $54-million classified government contract.

In return for the plea bargain, Lucas Aul, the subsidiary of a multimillion-dollar British-owned defense contractor, Lucas Industries, was absolved of any wrongdoing. Bentzlin and other survivors played no role in the proceedings and knew only recently, she said, that the government had even placed the firm under question.

Because the inquiry made no attempt to discover how the friendly fire mistake happened, Bentzlin viewed the action as highly symbolic “only to have it, too, end in a typically crushing disappointment,” she said.

Renate Myles, the spokeswoman for Lucas Industries, said the company’s LEUs played no role in the accident and thus the plea bargain had no relevance to Cpl. Bentzlin’s death.

“It’s very unfortunate what happened,” Myles said. “But Lucas is not the problem and never has been. Our (LEU) was not even on the aircraft in question, but unfortunately, a lot of people want to see this as a big conspiracy.”

Regardless of who’s to blame for what happened in Saudi Arabia, Bentzlin said she is furious at what she regards as the secrecy surrounding her husband’s death and insists that, without the involvement of the American press, she would still be largely in the dark.

“Nothing surprises me,” she said of the plea bargain. “It’s scary as hell, the lengths they’ll go to protect defense contractors at the expense of American lives. But most people just put up with it.”

What angers her the most, she said, is the time it took to “find out anything” about what was behind her husband’s death. “The military is ridiculously private. They just don’t think it’s any of your damn business.

“If Steve had died in a traffic accident, the police would have told me everything that happened,” she said. “I could have gotten an autopsy report, which the military would never release. With (the Marines), it was shrouded in secrecy from the moment it happened. And what I want to know is why.”

Col. Fred Peck, the spokesman for Camp Pendleton, disputes Bentzlin’s version of events, saying that, while he feels for her loss as a widow, the accident that took 11 lives in all “was reported early on as friendly fire. The circumstances of the accident have been investigated exhaustively. We don’t know that we’ll ever be able to determine exactly what happened. But I would categorically deny that we only reacted in response to her complaints in the news media, which she’s accused us of on numerous occasions.”

Chief Warrant Officer Robert C. Jenks, a Marine Corps spokesman in Washington, called Bentzlin’s charge that the military engaged in a cover-up surrounding her husband’s death patently untrue.

“The investigation was very thorough, painstaking,” Jenks said. “It was a tragedy, a national tragedy, but there was no cover-up.”

After her husband’s death, Bentzlin said she knew nothing until seven months later, in August, 1991, when, after her complaints were aired in the press, she received a call from Sheik Saud al Nasir al Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, with whom she met the next day.

Stephen Bentzlin died, the ambassador told her, when an allied missile mistakenly struck the armored vehicle carrying him and the other members of his unit, all from Camp Pendleton. All but one perished in the accident that U.S. authorities eventually labeled friendly fire.

But soon after it happened, military authorities told Bentzlin in a letter that her husband had been killed by enemy fire and that no investigation was warranted. Military officials have since acknowledged sending the letter and concede they made a mistake.

Part of Bentzlin’s complaint, aired through the press and responded to by the Kuwaiti ambassador, was that the Marine Corps was slow in returning her husband’s personal effects--most of which were love letters--and paying her the second half of $100,000 in death benefits.

“Mine was a simple question that deserved a simple answer,” she said angrily. “But I had to claw and scratch and fight for everything I could.”

She received no response whatsoever, Bentzlin said, until the day after her meeting with the ambassador about eight months after her husband’s death. “And I’m sure it was just a coincidence that everything came through the day after I talked with him,” she said sarcastically.

Peck, the Marine spokesman, said Bentzlin received her full benefit payment and her husband’s effects “as soon as it was humanly possible.”

A native of Orange County who grew up in Costa Mesa and Tustin, Bentzlin had been previously married before she met the man who died in Saudi Arabia. Her first husband is also a Marine; he fathered her three children, ages 13, 12 and 11.

After they divorced, she met Bentzlin, a rifleman, a “grunt,” she says with a laugh, “and the best man I ever knew--my lover, my husband, the best father my kids could have had, even though he was really their stepfather.”

Her youngest son, Ricky, has taken the death especially hard, Bentzlin said, “and that $100,000? It’s gone. I bought a house, a car, but mostly, I paid off debts. You soon learn in the Marine Corps that you never have money. Mostly, you just owe everybody.”

She met Stephen Bentzlin at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in 1987, “and,” she said, “we recovered together.”

They were married about a year before he died.

Looking back on his life, it was his devotion to duty “that just astounds me,” she said. “His loyalty, his patriotism, his love for America.”

But someone, she said, ought to be held accountable for his death, whether it’s the maker of the missile, or the LEU . . . whomever. In her view, somebody ought to suffer besides her.

“It just didn’t happen,” she said. “If I drink and drive, I have to be held responsible. But these guys are absolved from all responsibility, and it just isn’t right. It concerns me. And it should concern every American.”