Hoo-Rah Turns to Ho-Hum

The signs in the windows of downtown businesses here carry a variety of messages aimed at Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton.

Some offer payday loans or used cars and furniture with no down payment. Some proclaim “God Bless Our Troops” and “Good Luck.” Others say “Welcome Home Troops.”

A visitor would be excused for not knowing whether the Marines are leaving for Iraq or just coming home.

Like the harried homeowner who leaves his Christmas lights up all year, Oceanside has decided that, after four years of local Marines serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, it cannot accommodate the changing seasons.

And so the announcement this week that 25,000 Marines and sailors of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force would deploy in the next few weeks to the violent Al Anbar Province in western Iraq was greeted almost with a civic yawn.

It’s not exactly compassion collapse. Respect for the uniform remains strong here. But this city of 170,000 outside the sprawling base no longer can readjust its metabolism with each deployment announcement.

“It’s become so commonplace. It’s not that we ever forget about them, but it’s become part of the daily routine,” said Mayor Jim Wood. “We see one crew come and another crew go.”

At a downtown barbershop with a cheery “Welcome Home Troops” sign still in the window, a barber who makes his living selling quick haircuts to Marines merely grunted and continued reading his magazine when a reporter asked for his reaction to the deployment announcement.

It wasn’t this way when the U.S. launched the war.

In 2003 the city threw a huge parade for Marines returning after toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein. Flags lined the streets. But there were no parades in 2004 and 2005.

“The sense of Oceanside is that we all believed that a quick victory seemed a reality,” said one of the 2003 parade organizers, Tom Reeser, executive director of community television station KOCT. “But now we’ve come to realize that we’re in for the long haul. We all realize they have to go back.”

Indeed, 4,000 Marines from Camp Pendleton-based units have spent several months in Iraq this year, bolstering units from Camp Lejeune, N.C.

It’s not just military boosters who seem to lack the energy they once devoted to watching the Marines leave and return.

An antiwar memorial on a wire fence around an empty lot on Pacific Coast Highway, festooned with small bits of silver-colored paper to symbolize the dog tags of Marines, soldiers and sailors killed in Iraq, has been untended of late, the flowers wilted and the signs gone.

This despite the fact that more service personnel have been killed from Camp Pendleton than any U.S. military base and that Marines in general constitute one-third of the U.S. casualties, but only one-sixth of the overall force. Many residents know a family that has lost a son or daughter in war, and funerals are a common part of life here.

The Marines say they’re on a “7 and 7” rotation, seven months in Iraq, seven months home. Most have served two tours; some have served three.

The Oceanside-based North County Times still reports each Marine death on the front page, but the San Diego Union-Tribune no longer devotes its second page to daily news from Iraq, and now runs such news on a back page.

Carl Luna, professor of political science at San Diego’s Mesa College, said he thinks a certain weariness has beset the public, particularly because with an all-volunteer military, the burden of service is not spread evenly. Luna has a family member who is a Marine and will soon return to Iraq for his third tour.

“We’ve gone from shock-and-awe to a revolving door,” Luna said. “It’s not like we’re finishing the job; it just drags on. It wears down the home front.”

While the public may have been unmoved, the deployment announcement -- which also includes Marines from the base at Twentynine Palms and the Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego -- seemed to increase the pace at downtown businesses that cater to Marines.

Some arrived at laundries with uniforms to be pressed. Others looked for weaponry and other gear at equipment stores.

One young Marine dashed into a Marine-themed clothing store to find a Christmas gift for a kid brother back home. His selection: A T-shirt with the Marines logo and the slogan “Fixing the Army’s Mistakes Since 1775.”

The local paper ran a story about the deployment announcement, but if there was any buzz, it was lost in the pre-Christmas bustle.

“You don’t see [a deployment announcement] weaving its way through the community as much,” said David Nydegger, chief executive officer of the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce. “People are busy with their lives.”