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'I'm Not Going to Come Home': One Marine's Third Iraq Tour
One week after their son was killed, Ken and Ruth Mortenson sat at his graveside service. "I've been there twice, and no, I don't want to go back," Marty Mortenson had told an interviewer before being deployed again.
(By Jake Bacon -- Arizona Daily Sun Via Associated Press)
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A year later, the second tour was greeted with a certain amount of confidence, he said. "We had an idea of what to expect this time: the heat, everything bad about Iraq."
But learning about a third tour was tough.
"Those of us who had gone through [the first and second deployments] were pretty convinced we weren't going to go back," said Young, whose enlistment ends in August. "Honestly, I was kind of pissed off about going back."
Cpl. Matt Buchanan, 22, a machine-gun squad leader in Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, agreed. He was shot in the arm during his third tour this spring and was sent back early to wait out his September separation from the service.
"I thought, 'You have got to be kidding me.' I could not believe they were doing that," Buchanan said. "I can accept that because it comes with the job. But the worst part was telling my family."
Mortenson enlisted in May 2002 and was in the first large U.S. ground force to go into Iraq on the first night of the war in March 2003. The battalion secured a facility in the Rumaila oil fields along the Iraq-Kuwait border and pushed more than 300 miles north to Baghdad. Before returning stateside in August, they had engaged in fierce fighting with the Fedayeen and had taken over a mosque where Saddam Hussein had been sighted.
By fall 2003, Mortenson knew his battalion was headed overseas again, this time to Okinawa by mid-December and perhaps on to Iraq. The training cycle in Okinawa, however, was curtailed by February 2004.
"We were discouraged that he was going to miss another Christmas, and then he was only in Okinawa a month and he called and said, 'They're moving up Iraq,' " said Mortenson's mother, Ruth.
By March 2004, Mortenson and Alpha Company were in Fallujah. They commandeered an old potato chip factory they nicknamed FOB (Forward Operating Base) Wounded Knee and ran security patrols out of it.
It was during that first battle for Fallujah in April 2004 that Mortenson bailed out his entire platoon. A SAW gunner, Mortenson sprinted more than 300 feet under intense enemy fire to set up his machine gun to provide cover fire for his unit. He earned the nickname "Mad Dog" and was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal for Valor in Combat.
Mortenson was back at Camp Pendleton in late summer 2004. He told a National Public Radio reporter who was interviewing Marines upon returning from their second tour: "I've been there twice, and no, I don't want to go back."
His mother recalled what he told her: "I've had it."
