Pages
UM Marine: 'We need to finish what we started'
Last Updated (Tuesday, 13 May 2008 10:12) Written by Joe Meloni, AmherstWire.com Tuesday, 29 April 2008 21:47
Editor's Note: This is part of a series of stories generated by a journalism course titled "Politics, Journalism and the Web." Students will be reporting stories from now until the end of the semester.
AUDIO SLIDESHOW: Training for combat
Brad Durkin never really liked ceramics class and found little joy in watching the clock count down his final high school days. So, instead of spending months counting to a graduation ceremony he didn’t consider particularly important, Durkin marched into his principal’s office with an odd proposal.
“Once you get into college [during high school], you take easy classes that you don’t care about; like ceramics, all my friends took ceramics,” he says muffled by a soft laugh. “I didn’t want to waste half of my year, and I didn’t care about graduating with my friends. So I asked my principal to write me up a diploma. He typed it up, stamped it; and I brought it to [a marine recruiter]; I left the next day.”
Durkin arrived on Parris Island, the Marine Corps Recruit Depot near Beaufort, S.C., less than 24 hours after his makeshift diploma became binding. The life-changing sequence of events was anything but a rash decision by a confused teenager. Since he can remember, Durkin has been exposed to stories of the military life from his older cousins and uncles. They were the ones who stepped in as role models when his father died when he was 4-years-old. When his cousin returned from boot camp, Durkin, then 15, decided the life was for him. He pictured the life of an officer, living on military bases and progressing within the organization. A visit to a Marine recruiter’s office shortly thereafter made up his mind. He didn’t exactly know where it would take him, but the honor of serving his country as his relatives did had great appeal. He didn’t waste much time either; later that week he received his first taste of what to expect as a Marine.
“Every Saturday morning, I would get up at 8 a.m., and I’d go to physical training with the Marines. I was surrounded by Marines, so I basically grew up with these guys and always wanted to be one of them,” he said.”
The routine continued for the rest of his time in high school. As he spent more time with Marines, the life of an officer became less glamorous, but the military life was still the life for him.
He applied to the United States Naval Academy, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Citadel. The Naval Academy eventually rejected him, choosing instead to offer him a place at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, R.I., for a post-graduate year. The prospect of spending five years in school didn’t interest him. Brad, instead, enrolled at UMass and chose to become a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps joining a troop stationed in Londonderry, N.H. He also gained admission to the Citadel, but a bad experience with a student at the institution ruined his image of it, and made UMass the only real choice.
The Pioneer Valley isn’t an easy place for a Marine leaving for Iraq days to live, especially one who opted to study in the liberal majors of journalism and political science. He expected denouncements of all things military from his classmates and worried some professors may hold his involvement in the military against him.
“I thought it would be tough coming to UMass because everyone told me it was such a liberal school,” he said. “But all my teachers here have been awesome and really comforting. The journalism and political science professors are more adept at helping me out than a mathematics professor would be.”
Support for the U.S. presence in the Middle East is rare. Respect for those doing the fighting, however, most certainly is not. At times, he struggles listening to the thoughts of classmates who take their dislike of war a step too far, insulting the Marine, but he listens and waits for the right time to pick apart their arguments. His responses aren’t always as eloquent; they are, however, powerful and easily understood.
“What we’re trying to do over there is win [the Iraqi people’s] hearts and minds. Every time we have a drill, they us every 10 minutes that ‘we need to win the hearts and minds,’ so we have to focus on that,” Durkin said. “When you get over there, it is way less about politics and national pride; it’s about your buddies. It’s like the biggest fraternity in the world. I’m going over there with 3,000 marines, and I’m going to be really close with 45 of them.”
Recently, one of his professors posed the question “Should the U.S. have invaded Iraq?” to his class. He didn’t plan to speak on the topic initially. When a classmate said, “If the Iraqi people hated Saddam Hussein so much, they could have just voted him out of office,” Durkin had heard enough. The two argued back and forth before the teacher halted the discussion and segued into another topic.
Many consider Durkin’s thoughts that of a conservative, but, as he explains, for him and most Marines, the war isn’t solely about patriotism. It is about the man or woman next to you. Many of those who work at the infantry level are in the military in hopes of making a better life for themselves down the road. It just so happens that the current war means that opportunity may never come. The bonding and friendship fostered by their training and later by their time spent protecting each other is something that Durkin believes many Americans cannot understand.
“I’m not going to run away because I’m scared; I ‘m not going to jail,” he said. “For of all, that would disgrace my family and friends, but I don’t think the reality has set in yet. On the day I’m going to leave, I think it’ll be pretty hard for me to say goodbye to my family.
While his looming deployment weighs on his mind, the current race for the White House worries him more than anything. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both declared that, should they win the presidency, they would begin a troop withdrawal from Iraq.
“Every time I hear that, I laugh,” Durkin says. “Do you have any idea what would happen in Iraq if the U.S. started pulling troops?”
With so many differing viewpoints in a country like Iraq, it’s hard to imagine that the current Iraqi police could maintain anything resembling order in the country. His classmates express their views on the war and election daily, and he struggles to understand the level of certainty they speak with regarding a topic they know so little about. Personal feelings on war in general mean little at a time like this. Pulling troops from the country, in his mind, is the last thing Iraq needs.
“Whether or not we should have gone is irrelevant now,” he said. “We’re there. We need to finish what we started.”