When the War Comes Home

On Nov. 12, Zierk donned his dress blues -- white belt gleaming, black shoes shining, white hat crisp and snug -- for the annual Marine Corps Ball. Nearly 1,000 people packed a downtown hotel. His buddies were there, and so were parents and widows of the dead. The combination of clinking glasses and raw memories was too much.

He slipped away and walked through the streets of Columbus, alone.

A City's Embrace

At McDonald's, customers thanked them. At nightclubs, people bought them drinks. Someone invited a group to the Super Bowl. A film crew produced a powerful documentary titled "Combat Diary." The mayor of Columbus, father of a Lima Marine, called them "true heroes."

The fact is, no one expected Lima Company to see so much combat, to become so decorated or so wounded, and certainly not to be adopted so strongly by the city. Lima was a reserve unit, an amalgam of students and workers, almost all from Ohio, who mustered every month to train for duty that might never come.

When it came, the citizen-soldiers found themselves posted at a Soviet-built dam on the Euphrates River in western Anbar province, home to some of the most violently contested territory in Iraq.

Between Feb. 28 and Sept. 30, 2005, the company launched patrols and fought joint operations amid 1,700 square miles of mostly Sunni areas from Hit and Haditha to the Syrian border, targeting anti-American insurgents and their supporters. In addition to the 23 dead, 31 Lima Marines were wounded, 17 of them badly enough to be sent home.

After the headlines and the public worrying, many well-meaning Columbus residents honored Lima's men and felt they knew them. The Marines were grateful but dubious, especially of the questions: "What was it like over there? How many Iraqis did you kill?"

A Dissatisfied Warrior

In central Ohio, 80 miles from Columbus, Travis Brill, 30, returned to work at a steel mill.

"I was leading combat troops in Iraq, and now I'm picking up scrap metal," he said one desolate day. "They even have rules for walking through the parking lot."

Trained as a warrior, he had prayed for combat, and months after returning from battle, his brain was still tuned to his Iraq soundtrack. He remembered Pantera's "Walk" blaring through military loudspeakers as he knocked off enemy fighters with his booming .50-caliber machine gun.

"If you know you're on the verge of being blown up any second," he said, "you're feeling alive."

Brill said he and maybe 15 other Marines had a bet of $100 each on who would get the first Iraqi kill, who would be the first Marine to be wounded, who the first to die. The "winner's" sum would go to his survivors. Once the war became a grind, the bet no longer seemed so clever and they dropped it.