When the War Comes Home

The Marines say they were not inclined, by instinct or training, to question the mission.

"It was just like, 'Hey, we're going.' There was never any discussion of the whys," said Sgt. Andrew Taylor, who studies Arabic in hopes of becoming a U.S. agent overseas. "We didn't join up to argue about the right or wrong. I don't think anybody cared."

"If it fails," Taylor said of the Iraq campaign, "that doesn't change the fact that we were trying, we were making an effort. It's kind of a bad analogy, but it's kind of like Christmas: You give someone a present they don't like, but at least you gave it to them and made the effort."

What now, as Iraq struggles and a majority of Americans oppose the war?

"If we pull out of Iraq too soon, every single American who died over there will have died in vain," said Gunnery Sgt. Larry Bowman, 36, an Ohio state trooper who blames his recent divorce largely on friction over his Marine devotion. "I'm a big believer that fires you don't put out are going to burn bigger."

April: Arlington National Cemetery

The dogwoods and azaleas stood in glorious bloom at Arlington National Cemetery on April 27 when half a dozen Marines arrived from Columbus. With the Pentagon visible through the trees and the Washington Monument rising in the distance, they made their way to Section 60, where names of the Iraq war dead were newly chiseled into white headstones and the seams still showed on fresh sod.

Finding familiar names, they crouched close in silent conversation. There lay Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis Youngblood, a husband and father attached to Lima as a medic. Nearby were Staff Sgt. Anthony Goodwin and Lance Cpl. Christopher Dyer.

One of the visitors, John Dyer, had been to his son's grave before.

"You walk up," he said, "and you hope it's not there."

Dyer found himself replaying his final telephone conversation with his son.

"Are you getting enough sleep?"

"Dad, when I get home, I'm going to sleep for a week."

A few days later, a roadside bomb exploded and 19-year-old Chris Dyer was gone.

"To a certain extent, you reconcile yourself to never being comfortable," Dyer said, motioning toward the surviving Marines. "You just fake it, which is what I do."

Pride and Pain

Staff Sgt. Steve Hooper tells of Marines swerving suddenly on suburban Ohio roads after spotting what in Iraq would be likely hiding places for bombs, and of Marines on an Indiana training mission refusing beef jerky because it reminded them of seared flesh.

When he is with his girlfriend, he does not discuss combat.

"I don't tell her a thing. I don't want her knowing a lot of things I did over there," said Hooper, a quiet Bronze Star winner who talks often with fellow Marines. "Some people are proud of it. Some people wonder if God will forgive them for what they did."

Hooper's sharpest pain is the death of Cpl. Andre Williams, 23, his second-in-command and closest friend. Williams died while hunting insurgents not long after videotaping a message for his daughter's sixth birthday. Hooper keeps reaching, asking himself if he could have done something, anything, to keep him alive.

Late one June night, as Hooper was driving to a bar after finishing his shift as a prison guard, the radio began playing the melancholy Green Day song "Wake Me Up When September Ends," adopted as a theme by some Lima Marines as they counted the days until their tour ended on Sept. 30. Later, it was the soundtrack of a memorial video for Williams.

"Ring out the bells again, like we did when spring began," the song goes. "Wake me up when September ends."

Here comes the rain again,

Falling from the stars.

Drenched in my pain again,

Becoming who we are,

As my memory rests

But never forgets what I lost .

As the song came on the radio, tears filled Hooper's eyes. He switched stations.

The War-Peace Switch

A skilled assassin in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Brian Taylor is a healer back home.

"Lift your heels up, girlie. Like this. You've got to help me out," he gently and playfully coached a frail woman with a brain dysfunction and a broken hip. "Can you catch a ball? We're going to play ball. Here. Catch the ball."

Taylor, 34, feels as though he came equipped with a war-peace switch. In Iraq, he spent endless hours silently studying insurgents through the scope of his powerful sniper's rifle, feeding on the tension of deciding "whether they take their next breath."

"Most of the time, you've got to go with a gut feeling," he said. "More than likely, you're right."

A good day, he said, was "when we got a bunch of bad guys and we had no casualties."

But the insurgents' successes, particularly their killing of six Ohio-based snipers ambushed while supporting Lima, left Taylor begging for more missions.

"I don't feel we were defeated," he said, "but I wish I could've killed a lot more. They got a lot of us."

Back home, he focused on moving forward, even as his war experience sometimes colored his days; a ringing car alarm in his quiet cul-de-sac left him "huffing, puffing, trying to get out of bed. I felt like an idiot." He proposed to his girlfriend on an Irish vacation. She gave birth to a baby boy in August. He returned to his physical therapy practice, flipping the switch, even as he continued to train for the next deployment and to remember his dead friends.

"Thinking about that stuff sucks," Taylor said. "Really, it's a crapshoot. Some end up winners and some end up losers."

August: Louisville

The day the Marines returned to Columbus, when legions of Ohioans embraced them, Jason Dominguez drove to the grave of a friend, Andre Williams. To his surprise and dismay, he felt nothing.

"I was so frustrated. One of my buddies from my squad was lying there, and I couldn't feel a thing," Dominguez said. "I went to Arlington and five of our guys are there. Same thing."

Dominguez never looked at the clippings that friends had saved for him. He chose not to open the trunk holding his Iraq gear, still dusted with desert sand and flecked with blood. He threw himself into his Capitol Hill job and later campaign work, in part to avoid remembering.

For months, through intense stretches, Dominguez held things together. Some nights, he would stare at the ceiling, only to fall asleep and struggle to wake up. On the worst nights, when he felt a powerful urge to be drunk, he willed himself to stay sober.

The last weekend in August, he drove south by himself to Louisville to see Sgt. David N. Wimberg's grave.

"I'm there to pay my respects, but man, something happened to me. I just dropped to my knees, wrapped my arms around his headstone and started bawling like a baby."

"It was bad," Dominguez said, "but it was good."

Summer: Reconnected

When Guy Zierk was in Iraq, a former girlfriend began sending e-mails. Her name was Kelly Koby, and when they were together, long before the Iraq deployment, she was not ready for a long-term romance. But she wrote to Zierk in Iraq, and he sent war soundings.

"I thought things were going to get easier as we come closer to our return date . . . but they haven't," Zierk wrote. "We've taken a few losses . . . and it's messing with me a bit. I just need to get my head in the game and things here are just making it difficult for me."

Zierk was dating another woman when he left for the war, but he ended that relationship soon after his return. Still, Koby did not hear from him. She held back, saying later, "I knew he needed to come to me on his own terms."

Seven weeks later, the telephone rang one night at Koby's apartment. Zierk wanted to pull his life together. To be, in Marine-speak, good to go.

Within four days, he told Koby he wanted to marry her.

Koby, a 27-year-old elementary school teacher, remembers glimpses of the world Zierk had not wanted her to see. He struggled in his sleep. A wine bottle crashed to the floor and he jumped. He sometimes seemed distant.

"Those guys are always with him, who didn't come back," Koby said. "It's not just a job to him, it's a sense of being. It is who he is. He is a war fighter."

Sometimes, back in school at Ohio State, Zierk is hungry to return to Iraq, to finish the battle and to lead Marines who understand and care. He is considering a new round of Officer Candidates School but has also taken the Columbus firefighting exam, thinking it may be time to stay close to home.

For days, he ignores his ringing cellphone and withdraws into solitary projects, most recently woodworking and an Iraq video montage. He falls into conversation with Marine friends about Iraq and life. The nightmares that shook him awake are ebbing. He feels more at ease than the Marine who nearly lost his cool and shot an Iraqi teenager.

One mellow evening in Gallipolis, Guy Zierk and Kelly Koby were married on a green lawn near the fast-flowing Ohio River. He wore his Marine uniform, and she wore a grand white dress. Together they passed beneath the raised swords of 10 Lima Company Marines, warriors home from Iraq.

They entertained their guests beneath a white tent, setting aside an empty chair and a black-shrouded table for the fallen. On the table was a lemon, for the bitter memory of loss. Salt, for dried tears. An overturned wine glass, for toasts no longer shared. And a rose, for love.

More than anything or anyone, it was Koby who helped Zierk get back on track.

"It's having her with me when I'm having a bad night," he said. "She's good to go."

While guests danced and friends told tales as they worked their way through the 32 cases of beer on ice, Zierk thought about being home, far from the war being fought on the Euphrates. He could hardly complain on this, of all nights.

"Yeah," he said, "but I still wish I were there."