EAGER TO ENLIST

The war in Iraq drew attention to the growing number of noncitizens in the U.S. military -- about 37,000. Ten were killed during the war, seven from California. Most were Latino. This is the third of four portraits of Green Card Marines who gave their lives.

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The Marine recruiter had heard all about the kid from Escondido, the one whose senior class project was a tribute to the Corps.

In his white cap and blue uniform, Staff Sgt. Pedro Hernandez was leery as he stepped up to the front gates of Valley High School on that spring day in 2001. Kids were always talking about signing up, most of them in boast or jest.

He got only a few steps onto campus when he met Jesus Suarez del Solar. Jesus was good-looking, a small, trim teenager dressed in stylish urban clothes and jewelry. “One of those snappy-dresser kind of guys who maybe talk the talk but don’t walk the walk,” Hernandez thought.

Jesus launched into his own sales pitch. Marines were the best. They had the sharpest uniforms.

All I want to be is an infantry sniper, he told Hernandez. Not many recruits say that.

They headed back to Hernandez’s office and talked for hours. Like so many other young men looking to sign up, Jesus was an immigrant, a green card holder from Mexico. Unlike many, his English was good and he had no trouble passing the preliminary qualifying test that day.

He couldn’t grab enough recruitment posters. The sniper Marine. The Marine coming down the rope. The Marine in dress blues. And he couldn’t wait to get started. By the time Jesus left, Hernandez had a measure of the kid from Valley High.

“He was an image kind of guy,” Hernandez said. “He wanted to be the best at something ... wanted to feel important. He didn’t just want to be one of the guys. He wanted to be one of the top guys who stood out and everyone looked up to.”

In the hours before the invasion of Iraq, Jesus must have felt he had reached his goal. An ABC-TV crew filmed him climbing to a sniper’s nest near the Iraqi border, looking for enemy soldiers who had been spotted planting land mines. He wore a camouflage bandanna pulled tight over his head as he set his rifle on a tripod and peered into the desert.

Was he nervous, being so exposed to Iraqi guns? the TV reporter asked.

“No. Not at all,” Jesus said calmly, as he turned to the camera.

A week later, as his armored reconnaissance unit pushed toward Baghdad, he was killed. It was either a bullet or a bomb. There are conflicting reports.

Jesus grew up a Tijuana boy who swore allegiance to the United States as a young man. He came from a family that moved between two countries and two cultures. Theirs was an ambivalence familiar to many Mexican immigrants, whose lives and loyalties straddle the land of their ancestors and the land of their aspirations.

In Jesus’ case, the tug of war began when he was a tot and continued beyond his death. Weeks after he was killed, his family was debating whether to accept posthumous U.S. citizenship for him. His wife, a mother and widow at 20, thought he would have wanted it. His father insisted Jesus was proud to be Mexican and nothing more.

In the living room of the family’s condominium, Fernando Suarez del Solar watched the ABC videotape for the 20th time. It had been broadcast after his son’s death.

All through the boy’s life, Fernando said, he had a single vision for his son: that he become a Mexican politician, not an American soldier. Fernando had the same dream for himself once, but moved north across the border for his children.

Since his son’s death, Fernando has held news conferences and given many interviews. He has criticized the war, questioning whether his son died for “Bush’s oil.” He helped start a Web site and make T-shirts that promote his son as the Guerrero Azteca -- the Aztec Warrior. The Web site features a picture of Jesus and an Aztec god wielding a spear.

Fernando, a small, neatly dressed man, balding, with an ink-black mustache, is now thinking about running for office in Escondido, where Jesus has become a local hero. Relatives and friends complain privately that Fernando’s high profile seems disrespectful.

“This is my way to cry for my son,” the father said in his own defense.

In life, Jesus took away his father’s political hopes. In death, his father said, he is giving them back.

“I’m at a point -- and how sad it is because of my son dying -- that a lot of people know me. I have an opportunity now to be a voice” for people who can’t or don’t speak for themselves, he said. “I feel Jesus is putting his hand on my back and he is pushing me.”

Life of Privilege

The story of Jesus Suarez del Solar begins with the story of his father.

Fernando is the son of a career politician, and his life was anchored in the privileged class of Mexico City. His upbringing included a cook, a maid and a chauffeur.

Fernando was sent to the respected National Autonomous University of Mexico to study law, but he never finished. When his father died in the early 1980s, Fernando’s prospects for a political life seemed to die too. His stepbrothers cut him out of the family inheritance, he said, and a partner cheated him out of a small taco business. He arrived in Tijuana with $15 in his pocket.

He had first met Rosa, the strong-willed daughter of a physician, during a visit to Tijuana in the late 1970s. She was a clerk at a liquor store. She and Fernando had a daughter but never married. She waited months to tell him they had a second child -- a son.

He saw Jesus for the first time after the boy was a year old. As the only baby boy in the Suarez del Solar family, his path seemed clear -- at least to his father.

Fernando asked Rosa to marry him. They struggled at first. Then a department store hired Fernando as a purchasing manager, and he and Rosa moved into a second-floor apartment. Jesus celebrated his third birthday there.

Family photos show curls of reddish-brown hair pushing out from under his white cowboy hat. In one photo, he is closing one eye and pointing a toy handgun at the camera. Just before the photo was taken, he tumbled down the steel staircase of the apartment building. The scar that the fall left next to his right eye never went away.

He was a boy always in motion. His uncles called him Pirulillo after a wild young character from a movie starring Mexican singer Pedro Infante. Sandra Cabrera, a neighbor who met Jesus when he was 5, remembers him as lovable but “very, very hyper ... like a puppy you just got from the store.”

A tidy new development on the east side of Tijuana caught the eyes of Fernando and Rosa in the mid-1980s. They put a down payment on their first home. Soon Fernando began to feel the pull of higher wages across the border.

He moved to the San Fernando Valley and obtained his green card. Through a relative, he got a job making tortillas at an upscale East Los Angeles restaurant. He lived on this side of the border and his family lived on the other. Then, when Jesus was 6, he and his mother and two sisters were reunited with Fernando in a Bell Gardens apartment complex.

Jesus picked up English quickly and loved “the life here and the customs,” said his grandmother Beatriz Penuela.

But Rosa felt out of place. She set down rules for her children. After school, they were to get a snack and start their homework. One afternoon, Jesus refused to complete his assignments. After three or four hours of defiance, Rosa said, she hit him. Jesus told another child at school and soon the police came calling, asking questions about what she considered her business.

“They gave me the idea they could take my kids away,” she said. “If you discipline your kids here, they can call 911....If they are vandals and robbing, isn’t it the parents’ fault for not disciplining them?” She said she would not live in a country where she couldn’t spank her child.

Back to Tijuana

Within 18 months, the whole family was back in Tijuana.

Family and neighbors recall Jesus as a tough kid who sometimes made other children cry with his bruising play. He was also a momma’s boy. He would climb onto her lap, and she would stroke his head and arms.

Fernando commanded a tight ship. Sometimes, he took a belt to Jesus.

“I was very hard on him,” Fernando said. “I feel I really went too far sometimes.... I yelled at him. I grabbed him by the ear, as they had done to me at school.”

Fernando enrolled Jesus in the city’s Junior Police program, a kind of adolescent boot camp. “They wanted us to do push-ups and run,” said Josue Ledesma, Jesus’ best friend, who also attended the camp. “I couldn’t hack it. Jesus ate it up.” Soon, Jesus was talking about becoming a police officer, like his uncles in Tijuana.

When it came time to pick a secondary school for Jesus, Fernando and Rosa chose one of Tijuana’s strictest. The uniform was gray pants, tie and cap. Jesus hated it.

Parents organized a carpool for students that left each morning at 6 a.m. Despite the hour, Jesus was always revved up, chattering and teasing the other kids. “He’d say the other kids had lice,” Sandra Cabrera recalled. “Everyone would leave the car scratching their heads.”

Fernando, who became active in community organizing, was clear about his expectations for Jesus. He said he wanted his son to be a lawyer and to enter politics. Jesus’ mother didn’t share Fernando’s longing. “Study what you like,” she told Jesus. “It doesn’t matter if you are rich. The important thing is that you do what you want.”

By the mid-1990s, their Tijuana neighborhood had become the turf of gangs and a border drug trade. Teens were stealing cars, tagging walls, sniffing gasoline and fighting. Jesus was forbidden to play outside.

Family and friends say Jesus began talking about being a U.S. Marine, and soon he was fusing his military dreams with his desire to battle the scourge of narcotics around him.

He complained to his grandmother that the police in Tijuana were corrupt. Marines, he assured his mother, would fight drugs.

Jesus and his older sister pestered their father to move across the border before their visas expired. They had visited Sea World, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and San Francisco on family trips, and those memories were pushing them north. We have to go now, they said.

“It was my obligation,” Fernando said, “my debt to them to listen.”

The Move North

They moved across the border, but just barely.

The family took a small apartment near San Diego’s Logan Heights neighborhood, a barrio known for a street gang of the same name. “We were very scared -- shut in,” Rosa said. “I felt better in Tijuana.”

Jesus and his sisters were determined to stay and to get their green cards. The family moved to Escondido, and Jesus was soon crossing the divide between his family’s working-class neighborhood and the upper-income enclave of his school, San Pasqual High.

He shared a math class with Sayne Rojas, a petite girl with long dark brown hair who had come from the Philippines. Sayne noticed that Jesus constantly raised his hand in class. What a nerd, she thought.

But she saw something lovable about him. Within a year, they were dating.

“Escondido was hard for him” at first, she recalled. “It was a brand new start. He had no friends.”

Jesus found himself missing Tijuana. For nearly two years, he couldn’t return because his residency papers were being processed. When he finally was able to take Sayne for a tour of his old neighborhood, it was dirtier and had more graffiti. “It was not what he expected,” Sayne said.

Still, he loved going back for family gatherings, walking through the Saturday open-air market, going dancing and eating carne asada tacos. He and his sister Olivia had pressured their parents to come north. Now, they commiserated about what they left behind. “You cross the border ... there is a certain smell in the air,” Olivia said. “You feel that you’re home.”

Jesus distilled his own blend of Mexican and American pop cultures. He loved the norteno band Los Tigres del Norte, as well as rappers Eminem and Snoop Dogg. On this side of the border, he preferred Taco Bell, and was a fan of pro wrestling. He watched “The Simpsons” on TV, and his favorite movie was “Scarface,” about the bloody rise and fall of a Cuban cocaine smuggler. “He liked the guns,” Olivia said.

Jesus took jobs at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and J.C. Penney’s. He helped pay the family’s electricity bill, and spent extra cash on clothes -- not just for himself, but for his mother, his girlfriend and his cousins.

His father “wanted him to go to a four-year college and have a career,” said Luis Carachure, his high school buddy. “But Jesus was the type of guy” who did what he wanted.

He fell behind at San Pasqual High, with tardiness and truancy staining his record. His grade-point average dropped to 1.97.

During his junior year, as a way to make up classes at his own pace, he transferred to Valley High, a continuation school. He began hanging out at parties, dance clubs and the 18-theater Cineplex in San Marcos. He and his girlfriend, Sayne, got their tongues pierced.

His parents tried grounding Jesus, but he would climb out his bedroom window, Carachure said, sometimes not getting home until 4 a.m.

He wouldn’t stop talking about becoming a Marine. Carachure said he got tired of hearing it. “No, man. That’s not for me,” he would tell Jesus.

‘Committed and Focused’

Jesus faced one obstacle. He had to have a high school diploma to sign up. He worked hard and boosted his grade average to a B. “He was really committed and focused,” Valley High Principal Jan Boedeker said. For his senior project, Jesus prepared a slide show on being a Marine.

He readied himself by lifting weights and devouring military action movies. “They inspired him. He knew that was his career,” his girlfriend said. He joined a 24 Hour Fitness gym with his mother, and they competed on the treadmill.

He would strut around the house, flexing his muscles, doing push-ups and shouting military chants. “It was very annoying,” Olivia said. “He was just a showoff that way.”

It wasn’t all machismo driving Jesus, his girlfriend said. “He watched TV and saw things in the world ... bad things,” Sayne said. “He thought if he were in the Marines, he could help people -- he could make things better.”

When Sayne became pregnant, in their senior year, that only strengthened Jesus’ resolve to join the Marine Corps, so he could support their child.

After he signed up in the spring of 2001, Jesus stopped by the recruiting office every couple of days to pick up more posters and to check with Hernandez to make sure everything was on track. Sometimes he took Sayne along.

The recruiter urged Jesus to reconsider being a sniper. Snipers are on their own, he told Jesus, working on covert operations and extended missions.

It only made Jesus more committed.

“To him, that was like the coolest thing,” Hernandez said. “Being out there ... the whole camouflaged thing.”

Before Jesus left for boot camp, Fernando got the young man’s assurance that he would remain in the service no more than six years and continue his college studies during that time. But Jesus never found time to take classes.

In letters home, Jesus said he was thinking of being a firefighter. He told his mother he was training with rifles “like the poster in my room.”

Occasionally, the bravado of the boy who couldn’t wait to be a Marine gave way to the Marine who missed his mom. “When I first got here, sometimes I didn’t even eat because I thought about you so much,” he wrote to his mother from boot camp. “I didn’t sleep, and I cried at night remembering when I used to lie across your legs and you’d caress me with your hands.”

Jesus emerged from training and a tour of duty in the Middle East transformed. He put on muscle and said he wanted to fight terrorism. He was as proud as ever to be a Marine and a Mexican.

He took a group of five Marines on a tour of Tijuana. They drank all night, slept at his grandmother’s house and nursed their hangovers the next morning with bowls of menudo.

He married Sayne a year ago in Las Vegas, wearing his full dress blues in the sweltering heat. He donned the same outfit when he returned to Valley High late last year, just before shipping off to the Persian Gulf.

Teacher Tony Hutchinson barely recognized Jesus, who saluted Hutchinson and thanked the teacher for helping him in school. Hutchinson called it “one the most touching things I have ever experienced.”

Fernando Suarez del Solar knows the ABC news tape by heart.

The camera zooms in. He spots his son’s boyhood scar, there by his right eye.

Jesus is asked whether he is nervous.

“No. Not at all,” Jesus says.

“Para nada!” Fernando echoes in Spanish -- No, not at all.

Fernando wants to believe Jesus’ last recorded words are a message to him. He wants to believe his son is urging him to go forward and be a political leader.

Fernando is creating a foundation to help families whose children are killed in the armed forces. He is helping to lobby for bigger military funeral benefits and fewer barriers to citizenship for foreign-born members of the military.

Para nada. Don’t be afraid.

“That’s what he left me.”

At his funeral last month, the procession wound for miles through Escondido -- past Jesus’ high schools, past the mall where he hung out, past his parents’ house and the apartment he shared with his wife, Sayne, and baby son, Erik. Sayne decided she would accept posthumous U.S. citizenship for Jesus.

At Oak Hill cemetery, the Marine color guard honored Jesus, and an officer reached down and presented his mother and his wife with U.S. flags. Fernando took the flag of Mexico and draped his son’s coffin. Then the crowd sang the Mexican national anthem.

“He had a life on this side of the border,” his father said. “He had respect for what he could attain here and for the friends he made here.

“But he was a Mexican ... who loved the United States.”

Wednesday: Jesus Angel Gonzalez journeys from young radical to a Marine tank crew.