bookofdays: a tale of three marines

Andres Raya's story, which is disappearing rapidly from the national headlines (though it continues to bust up the Modesto papers and likely local TV, sends contradictory, mirror images bouncing around the brain like so many brightly colored pool balls. Conflicting stories leave questions wide open: Who is this Marine, who left Camp Pendleton to shoot three police officers in his home town?

Is he, who told friends he would do anything not to return to Iraq, a classic case of PTSD, a sort of psychological collateral damage? So say some of his friends, as do numerous peacenik websters like myself. Eric Rudin says in CounterPunch:

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Raya's family know that his experience in Iraq cost him his life. When he was home for Thanksgiving, he told family and friends that he had seen Marines commit suicide rather than continue fighting in Iraq. "He kept saying it was a war that had no point, that it was all for oil, and it made no sense that we were after bin Laden, but went after Saddam Hussein instead," Andy's cousin Alex Raya said. Other friends described how Andy had fallen asleep at a party, and when they shook him awake, he lunged for a gun that wasn't there.

Police initially reported that Andy had committed "suicide by cop," but later stressed that Raya had gang connections and that post-mortem tests showed cocaine in his system. "They have to say something bad," said Andy's uncle, Nicholas Cortez. "They can't say something good because he killed one of their partners."
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The gang in question, the Nortenos, is powerful and brutal, and is active throughout the Southwest ("Nortenos" and "Surenos" originallyhaving derived from their home bases in Mexico). The Modesto Bee reports that
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Police interviews of Raya's Marine comrades revealed that during his approximately year-long stint with the Marines, Raya admitted to being a member of the Norteños and repeatedly returned to Camp Pendleton wearing red clothes after time off. Police said Raya told barracks mates that he wanted to buy an SKS rifle because it would penetrate police body armor; he bragged later that he was keeping such a rifle at one of his "boys'" homes.

In his Ceres bedroom safe, police unearthed photographs Raya kept of himself and others flashing gang signs and a pencil-scrawled "shopping list" for AR-15 assault rifles and bulletproof vests.
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Raya's friends said that Raya left all his Norteno schwag locked at home, leaving childish playthings behind, and that fact showed that he'd meant to start his life over when he joined the Marines. They just hadn't expected the new life would be so senseless. "He wasn't Andy anymore."

Police make a lot of the former gang affiliation, as well as what the Defense Department told them: that Raya's combat unit was not headed back to Iraq, and that he had not "seen any real combat." I can't pretend to have been a witness to what was going on in Raya's head on that horrible night, when a liquor store surveillance camera caught him firing on, and killing, two police officers before being gunned down himself in what was initially called a "suicide by cop."

I can't pretend to know what was in his head, of course, on that awful night. But I'm strongly reminded of two other California Marines, both of whom were sentenced to death -- one became a cause celebre, and the other went down to obscurity even faster than Raya's seems to be.

Nearly six years ago, another Marine, Manuel Babbitt, was executed after having received a Purple Heart on death row. Like Raya, Babbitt came from a desperately poor home, and he joined the Marines for the perennial reasons. As reported in South Coast Today, "The vehicle he used to get out of poverty was the Marine Corps. ... He found a home in the Marine Corps," said [a fellow Vietnam veteran]. Surviving boot camp, Babbitt's duty station was Khe Sanh, site of a battle that's been compared in ferocity to the Alamo:
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Fighting was sometimes hand-to-hand. In the course of the 77-day siege, the US Air Force dumped more than 150,000 bombs into the surrounding jungle. When a soldier was killed, his comrades would try to cover the body, with bedrolls, blankets — whatever might protect the body from the shrapnel and the rats. They would take personal belongings, such as cigarette lighters, as keepsakes. Then the corpse’s ankle was tagged for identification.
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All of the above will be relevant in a minute.

You survive in the military because certain actions become automatic, whether it's training or actual combat experience that burns those neural paths. Pair that automatic response with nightmares from the deaths witnessed and caused, add homelessness and and alcohol, and an elderly woman becomes a disarmed Vietcong, tagged as per military protocol:
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Just before Christmas 1980, on a foggy night in Northern California, Manny was crossing the road in a drunken stupor. Startled by a vehicle, Manny Babbitt ran for cover, and tore through the screen door of the first house he came to. It was the home of Leah Schendel, a 78-year-old grandmother. Mrs Schendel confronted the intruder. Manny beat her with his hands. She fell dead from a heart attack. Manny took some personal belongings from Mrs Schendel, but ignored many more valuable items. He put a mattress over her body. He tagged her ankle with a leather strap. Then Manny escaped back out into the night.
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I'd heard this story by one of Babbitt's last attorneys, just before he was executed; thanks to Matt Cherry at the New Humanist for the twin narratives of Khe Sanh and its echo in that Stockton bedroom. (The complete failure of Babbitt's first defense lawyer to paint this picture, and of fellow Vietnam veteran Gray Davis to have the courage to grant clemency, is a betrayal of another sort entirely). I have little doubt Raya set out to rob that liquor store, but wonder if that kind of automatic response didn't set in once, cocaine hyping his blood and blurring his concentration, he saw two armed figures and went on automatic.

But Andres Raya never saw combat, you tell me. He's no Khe Sanh survivor.

Neither was Zane Floyd. Honorably discharged in 1998 from Camp Pendleton (Raya's homebase), Floyd was a $5-an-hour bouncer at a Las Vegas bar who walked into a supermarket in full camouflaage, started shooting and didn't stop until the police came. Four people died and one was critically injured: no one could come up with reasons.

When I heard about this, I remember writing in my journal about the military's college money promises that turn sour, about the job training that isn't. about the alcohol problem that's so endemic to the military that people make jokes about it; about the resultant minimum-wage job in the desert. At his sentencing, a similar picture was filled in by the family:

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Evidence at trial showed that Floyd spent time drinking and reflecting on the sorry state of his life before he went on his crime spree. He entered Albertson's around 5:15 a.m. and opened fire with a shotgun.
Floyd spent nearly four years in the Marine Corps before his abuse of alcohol led to an honorable discharge in July 1998. He had trouble holding down jobs after that and moved into a guest home behind his parents' house two days before the shootings.
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None of this excuses Floyd, or Raya, or even poor Manny Babbitt, just as I don't excuse the MPs at Abu Ghraib or the men at Fort Bragg who killed their wives in 2002. But I have felt for a very long time -- long before this war - that the Department of Defense owes servicemembers a program of systematic deprogramming, once they leave the military: not just ongoing support around trauma, but therapy tailored for the hormonal and psychological responses intentionally triggered by training and combat. Many, perhaps most, can devise their own way, but at what cost?

So yes, the Raya case is a canary in a coal mine - in all its moral ambiguity, all its blood. There will be many more like it, as these guys (of both sexes) start flooding home. If what the military insists on calling GWOT (pronounced "gee-wot.' according to Seymour Hersh) is a war like no other, the afterrmath of the Iraq phase is going to be disgustingly familiar -- and is likely to metastasize rapidly, like the cancer from which it springs.

PBU9

Comments

I too have been greatly moved by this story. I have quite a different take on it as I work with gang members. Perhaps you and your readers would share your comments on my blog.

Posted by: Crystal Clear | January 24, 2005 at 12:25 AM

Thank you very much for taking the time to visit and comment. I greatly appreciate your respectfulness although we appear to disagree on a number of issues!

Posted by: Crystal Clear | January 25, 2005 at 12:47 AM

January 23, 2005
A Tale of Three Marines....

I Highly believe that there is a lot that needs to be done! Being a Best and Close friend to one of your named subjects, I feel the Military made a great Marine! I do know the brass at Camp Pendleton, also the same day, gave their deepest sympathies to the parents of Zane. As we all did and do. But yet they train men to "Kill" and become machines, automatic Killers, then when they get out, nothing to reverse that. This is where they need to look After they do proper testing to make sure the men and women going in, wont someday snap.

Posted by: Karen Z | February 01, 2007 at 07:30 AM