For Marine Base, Pain Is Unrelenting

The talk at Carl’s Tavern, a decades-old hangout for thirsty Marines near Camp Pendleton, was festive one evening recently. The topics were NASCAR and music -- two types: country and western.

Then the conversation switched to something with no joy: the death toll among Marines in the battle for the Iraqi town of Fallouja. The lightness was gone and words came slowly and laden with emotion.

“It’s been a tough week for all of us, a very tough week,” said Staff Sgt. Terry Waters, who just returned from seven months in Iraq, his boisterous tone suddenly subdued.

“It hits you right in the gut,” said Barb Meyer, who is married to a Marine gunnery sergeant. “My husband and I have cried a lot in recent days.”

At least 32 Marines from the Camp Pendleton-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force have been killed this month in Fallouja, Ramadi and other areas of the Sunni Triangle.

Since U.S. forces invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, more than 190 Marines from Camp Pendleton-based units have died in that country.

Four troops from Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego were killed. Also killed were four military personnel from other San Diego bases and 47 Marines from Twentynine Palms, Calif., where Marines have been sent to Iraq under command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

Only Ft. Hood, Texas, home to the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, with 127 dead as of last week, comes closest to the death toll from Camp Pendleton.

In other parts of the country, the grief has been sporadic as notifications are made to the individual families of dead soldiers and Marines. But here, the pain has been unrelenting, like waves hitting a beach without end.

The shock is felt throughout the region, but hardest hit is Camp Pendleton, the epicenter, and the cities that surround it: Vista, Oceanside and Fallbrook.

“This is San Diego [County]. Everybody knows somebody who is in the military,” said Billy McCay, a salesman for a hydraulics firm.

The defining historic and cultural feature of San Diego County is the presence of more active-duty and retired military personnel than any section of the country. The difference between this area and the rest of California is never greater than during times of war.

Every casualty is front-page news for the North County Times, the 95,000-circulation newspaper that serves this area and has twice sent a reporter-photographer team to Iraq to accompany Marines from Camp Pendleton into combat.

“The way I see it, this is North County going to war,” said Publisher Dick High. “The United States may be at war in Iraq, but North County is doing the fighting.”

The newspaper has started the Honor Campaign to raise funds to provide a $15,000 savings bond for each child of a Marine, sailor or other service member killed in Iraq who was either stationed at Camp Pendleton or has close family living in the area.

So far, the campaign has raised $975,000, helped by matching funds from the newspaper’s former owner.

“The community responds instantly as soon as we say we need more money,” High said. “I guess we’re going to need some more after these latest casualties.”

At Carl’s, a tumbledown joint made famous by Clint Eastwood’s 1986 movie “Heartbreak Ridge,” newspaper obituaries for Marines killed in Iraq are pinned on a bulletin board in a place of honor next to the pool table. Patrons approach the board with a sense of respect.

“I read every obituary for every Marine,” said Chip Stratmann, a retired Marine major who came to Carl’s with several associates from the financial services firm where he now works. “I think we owe them the honor of knowing them as individuals.”

Marine brass at Camp Pendleton guard the privacy of families living on base; access to the base by reporters is heavily restricted. The Marine Corps prefers that families do their grieving outside the gaze of the media.

Still, the sense of loss spills over into the surrounding community.

“Some days we’re up and then other days we’re down when we hear about more casualties,” said Leah Rancourt, a preschool teacher. “It hits home even if you don’t have someone there.”

Even children are affected, mostly by the television coverage of combat, funerals and grieving relatives.

Rancourt said her 11-year-old daughter, Desiree, “is very aware of it. She gets very sad and doesn’t know why.”

The presence of Camp Pendleton also has made the area a focal point for protests against the U.S. military involvement in Iraq.

A recent protest rally was held at a seaside park in Carlsbad. For nearly two years, peace groups have placed crosses on the beach near the Oceanside pier to protest the death toll.

Shelli Hallidy, a psychotherapist and co-founder of the North County Coalition for Peace and Justice, is worried that the daily drumbeat about violent death has shaken the civilian and military communities alike.

“We’re being continually traumatized,” she said in a telephone interview from her office in Carlsbad. “We think people are getting numb and shutting down and losing their sense of outrage about so many young people dying senselessly.”

Within two weeks, Hallidy’s group plans to place more than 1,000 crosses on the beach in Oceanside and then engage off-duty Marines in conversation to help them avoid post-traumatic stress.

“These kids are broken-hearted,” she said.

At Carl’s, Fred Silver, an appliance store owner, agreed that a certain numbness from the death toll has set in. “It’s not like it doesn’t affect you,” he said. “It’s just that you can’t let it affect you too much.”

A memorial to fallen Marines and soldiers was erected quietly last week on a wire fence surrounding an abandoned gas station in downtown Oceanside.

Homemade dog tags bearing the names of the dead were tied to the fence by a couple who asked not to be named.

Businesses near Pacific Coast Highway and Mission Avenue -- where laundries, comic book stores, equipment stores, fast-food joints and a multiplex theater cater to off-duty Marines -- already have signs in their windows offering support.

Ted Gallegos, a barber offering $6 buzz cuts to Marines at a downtown shop, said he can always tell what’s going on at Camp Pendleton by what his customers are talking about.

“I had a kid today -- a lance corporal -- who said he’s been on funeral duty,” Gallegos said. “He said he’s been very busy.”