He would be listening to the instructor talk about “rejection awareness” and “confirming logistics in the close” and the other jargon that makes training to become a Marine Corps recruiter sound more like selling long-distance telephone service than the 16 men and one woman in camouflage would probably like.
He would be worrying about facing “live fire” next week, which, when you are in recruiter school, means walking up to strangers and talking to them about the Marines.
But Rob, like nearly half the 250 Marines slated to begin their recruiter training in March, was sent to war instead. The live fire in Iraq is real. And though the war is winding down, he still faces real danger.
He does not buy lunch for $3.25 at the chow hall, or wait in line to be fitted for a new dress uniform, or go bowling with the guys the night before the big test.
No one is more aware of the gulf between Rob’s hardships in a war zone and life on this picturesque base than his best friend in the Marines, Sgt. James Fallis. Rob and James were assigned to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, where recruits learn how to become Marines and Marines learn how to recruit and train new Marines.
As war with Iraq approached, Rob’s orders were changed; James’ weren’t.
Now James, a 1991 gulf war veteran, sits in a classroom and worries about the friend who isn’t there.
“It’s a very, very dangerous time over there right now,” he says. “I just want him to keep his damn head down and make it through these last days, if they are last days.”
Once or twice a week, he calls Rob’s mother, Fran Johns, who has protested against the war in Iraq. Sometimes, she and James talk about her anti-war beliefs. More often, she asks him to explain military terms to her, and he reassures her that her son will be safe.
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“He asks how I’m doing,” Fran says. “He warns me that Rob may not want to talk about it when he gets home. He tells me that Rob is smart and knows how to take care of himself. It’s just nice to hear from him.”
The Tribune has been chronicling the story of Fran and her son, Rob, 31, through the war. Just as she watches television, trying to glean news or perhaps a glimpse of her son, others, too, look for the dark-haired, green-eyed man who grew up on Chicago’s North Side and stumbled his way through school and work until he found his footing in the Marines.
Rob’s earliest childhood friend, Ian Rasmussen, played war with him in the alleys of Lincoln Park and now keeps a copy of Rob’s will in an envelope he hasn’t opened since Rob handed it to him the day before he was deployed. A high school buddy, Chris “Bubba” Madding, gathered with other alumni of St. John’s Military Academy in Wisconsin for Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day parade and toasted Rob, who used to turn up in fatigues and aviator sunglasses, dog tags dangling from his neck.
In Cincinnati, Rob’s former girlfriend, Hilary Barth, watches the news in the garage so Rob’s 5-year-old daughter, Parker, won’t see it.
Of them all, James best understands what price wars can exact on those who fight them.
“Fran just wants Rob to come home in one piece, but veterans never really do come home in one piece,” he says. “There’s always a piece of them left on the battlefield. That’s the way it is.”
Tall and sunburned, with thinning blond hair, James, at 32, is one of the older students in his class. On the cover of the leather binder that recruiters call their “scheduling and results,” or “S and R” books, he has attached a piece of tape.
On it, in red pen, he has written, “This is my rifle . . . ” It is a reminder to always carry the binder with him, just as he used to carry his weapon, an homage to the rifleman’s creed every Marine memorizes in boot camp and, perhaps, a wry comment on his current situation.
“I feel, in essence, it’s the second half of a game and I’m on the bench this time,” he says.
At the recruiters school, the war is the ghost in the classroom, an unseen but unavoidable presence even though the television in the corner doesn’t get cable and during chow time is tuned to soap operas.
Gunnery Sgt. Todd Walker, who is group adviser to this section of 17 students, says they are the most distracted class he has ever taught. The other day, he was prepared to chew out a Marine falling asleep at his desk until he learned the young man had been watching CNN until 2:30 a.m., worried about the fate of his friends.
“This class is more concerned with what’s going on in Iraq than what’s going on in the classroom,” says Todd, who has decorated his classroom with NASCAR posters and a portrait of John Wayne. “It’s natural. They want to be there because their brothers are there.”
Mixed feelings
James isn’t sure whether he wanted to fight this war.
“There’s something so special about the bond that people create [in combat] that when you have a chance to relive it and you don’t take that chance, you feel a bit of a letdown,” he says.
“But, on the other hand, there is the overwhelming sense of the horror and the loss and not reliving that black haze and not having to live under such extreme circumstances. That I will not have to do that, there’s something that says to me it’s OK.”
He was 20 and just weeks out of infantry school when he was deployed in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. He had joined the Marines because he believed in the ideology, in pride and self-discipline. He had no idea he would almost immediately go into combat.
In Kuwait, he saw a friend die when a grenade accidentally exploded. One day, as he traveled in a convoy, children ran into the road, risking their lives to grab candy the Marines threw to them.
“At the end of the day, that’s all I could rely on. That another child would no longer be oppressed,” he says. “That does make it worth it. But I’m not naive about war anymore.”
He and Rob met at Camp Pendleton, Calif., where they were sent as infantrymen almost three years ago. James had left active duty in 1994 and bounced in and out of college and across the country before he returned to the Marines. Rob served in the reserves for five years before he signed up for active duty.
The Marine Corps prides itself on its sense of brotherhood, but Rob and James found common ground beyond the uniform. Older than most of the men around them and more likely to want to eat dinner at the Thai Palace than Denny’s, they quickly bonded. At night, they used to sit in the doorway of Rob’s barracks, smoking cigarettes and talking about life.
When the United States launched military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Rob and James prepared by reading a Russian journalist’s account of the Soviet occupation of that country. For Christmas, Rob gave James a silver cigarette lighter engraved with the dates of their service together in the same battalion and the message: “James, Brothers in arms, Semper Fi, Rob”
“We were like Frick and Frack,” James says. “Sometimes, he used to call me his Jiminy Cricket because I would sit on his shoulder and keep him out of trouble. But when he was deployed, I knew there was no way I could do that.”
Staples for a soldier
Two weeks ago, James sent Rob a package of items he knew his friend would need. Not cookies or brownies, but socks and T-shirts, an electric razor, batteries, a copy of Stuff magazine and the Marine Corps Times, a kaffiyeh scarf and 15 cans of Copenhagen chewing tobacco. He did not mention the chewing tobacco to Rob’s mother.
These days, Fran has shifted her attention from protests to politics. She is “candidate shopping,” she says, for someone to replace George W. Bush in 2004. Last week, she attended a fundraiser at a Chicago art gallery for former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.
Although the war seems to be coming to a close, she worries even more about her son, she says, because the situation in Iraq seems unpredictable and unstable. No armored vehicles protect Rob now, she fears, and he can’t call for air support. At any street corner he turns, he could encounter an enemy.
Until a newspaper photographer found Rob on Monday, encamped with his unit–Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment–in a state-owned cigarette factory compound in Baghdad, Fran did not know where he was or what he was doing. The most recent letter she has received from him was written in early March, before he went into combat.
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James last heard from Rob in the e-mails he sent from the ship that ferried him to the Persian Gulf in February. Now, he wrote, the two of them would truly be brothers in arms.
At the recruiters school last week, James and his classmates prepared for a graded performance, in which they pretended to recruit a stranger. Just before the rehearsal began, James went back to the barracks and saw the red light blinking on his answering machine.
As he feared, the message was from a friend who called because she had heard a Marine in Rob’s regiment had been killed. James returned to the classroom. He sat, his head in his hands, while his classmates rehearsed around him.
“I’d like to talk to you a little bit about your opportunities in the Marine Corps. . . . I have appointments at 2:30 and 3:30, which works better for you? . . . Do you know where my office is located?”
James looked around. “Sometimes,” he said, “being here is just so surreal.”
A few feet away, a Marine earnestly shook hands with the air.