Remembering a Marine, Step by Step

[Casino67]

NYTimes.com:



COMBAT OUTPOST LILY, Helmand Province
— For Marines who have experienced combat together, the many rituals and gestures of bidding farewell to the dead, beginning from the point of medevac and continuing beyond the fallen Marine’s journey to the grave, are observed with a devotion that is at once quiet, fiercely followed and unsummoned. The more formal rituals are matters of tradition, like memorial services in the field and the escorts who accompany a dead Marine through his or her funeral back home. Some Marines are further memorialized in the names of outposts and landing zones; thus, “Combat Outpost Hanson” and the adjacent “Landing Zone Currier,” named after two Marines from Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, who were killed several hundred yards from here in fighting against the Taliban in February. Other gestures are impromptu, spontaneous and intensely personal, propelled by feelings that take hold within young infantrymen who fight through ambush after ambush together, and who find, as their tattoos often say, that they are bound by blood and then by a set of memories that will be theirs alone for the decades ahead.
Combat Outpost Lily

Lately, anyone visiting Combat Outpost Lily, a joint American-Afghan post in northern Marja, will chance upon a small token of a grieving platoon, a memorial that is an early marker on the long road to try to sort out what it all means, and what it really cost.

What is this place, Combat Outpost Lily? In the most obvious sense, viewed from the flat and dusty road that it sits beside, it is the home of a contingent of Afghan soldiers, a few dozen officers from the Afghan National Civil Order Police and the Marines of First Platoon of the battalion’s India Company. It also rests on soil adjacent to a long abandoned Russian base. And yet as it happens, for all of this outpost’s martial air and history, Lily, for whom this small cluster of tents and bunkers was named, was never a Marine. She was a date-to-be, the Marines say, a young woman who had stood up a Marine lieutenant who had asked her to the annual Marine Corps ball. These circumstances — a no-show for an officer waiting in dress blues — earned Lily a small measure of fame, if fame could wear a smirk. Once India Company arrived in Afghanistan, her name was recycled as a healthy celebration of an insult, and gave an inhospitable place its name.

Now forget Lily, “that very special lady,” as one Marine said bitingly. These Marines almost certainly will. This outpost has already been dedicated to someone they hold much more dear. He greets all visitors in a way that is understated and yet impossible to miss. Behind the concertina wire at the outpost’s entrance is a piece of bone-dry scrap lumber bearing a small pen-and-ink drawing of an M16 rifle, its bayonet thrust into the ground between a pair of boots, and a helmet resting on its upright butt stock. A four-leaf clover adorns the upper left corner.

The spare lettering reads: “Gone But Never Forgotten, RIP, LCPL Christopher Rangel, 1987-2010.”

Lance Corporal Rangel, a married 22-year-old Marine from San Antonio, was killed on a foot patrol that set out from here on May 6.

Everyone in First Platoon, ambushed repeatedly by now in the farmers’ fields and irrigation ditches and tree lines to the south, knows that what happened to Lance Corporal Rangel could have happened to any of them, and that his story was much like theirs.

The assignment to Marja, the scene of a large Marine offensive in the winter, marked the beginning of Lance Corporal Rangel’s second deployment and what seemed like a promising career and productive life. He had served a tour in Anbar Province in Iraq, where he had impressed his squad leader there, Sgt. Jonathan J. Lopez, 27, as a hustling young man with skills and drive. “He was a Marine who wanted to be good at everything,” Sergeant Lopez said. “He was hard-working. He had a good ethic. He was the kind of guy everyone liked. Everyone wanted to be with him.”

To prepare and to pass the quiet hours, Lance Corporal Rangel conditioned himself methodically. He was short, but became powerfully built, packing on muscle as he passed his months as a grunt. “In Iraq, we both got really strong,” said Cpl. Everett Hudnell, 25, one of his lifting partners, who watched his friend’s bench press climb over 300 pounds. “He beat me, and I had 285. He had at least 315.”

By the time First Platoon had trained for its next tour and been assigned to the offensive on Marja, Lance Corporal Rangel had picked up two duties. He was both a fire team leader and the platoon’s intelligence specialist. The second duty made him responsible for gathering and analyzing the intelligence assembled from each foot patrol or operation, and for handling any evidence collected in the field. The first made him responsible for the lives of three other Marines.

The patrols were dangerous. In less than three months, more than half a dozen of the platoon’s men were wounded. Lance Corporal Rangel walked with charm. His right arm bore the tattoo of a cross. A silver four-leaf clover hung from a leather strap around his neck. “He told me that he always had the luck of winning with him,” Sergeant Lopez said.
‘The Kevlar Chef’

Lance Corporal Rangel was more than lucky. He was resourceful, and he knew that a platoon walks on its stomach. He found a new way to boost his friends’ morale: cooking. He acquired fresh food from the local bazaar, and with a field stove or Afghan cookware prepared all manner of dishes with these ingredients, sharing meals that spiced the bland field-rations routine. He put field rations to good use, too. First Platoon held a competition its members dubbed “the Kevlar Chef,” in which the only condition was that the competing cooks could use any ingredient from a meal-ready-to-eat, and nothing else, to concoct whatever dish they wished. “Nothing out of an M.R.E. tastes that good,” said another sergeant, Ryan J. Taylor, 24, a veteran of three combat tours. “But with what he did any M.R.E. would taste like gourmet.”

The sergeant sat silently in a tent for a moment, arms folded, eyes inward. He knew that Lance Corporal Rangel’s cooking meant more than serving food. It indicated a character trait. “He was just great to work with,” he added. “He saw the best in any of the worst situations.”

The worst situation for Lance Corporal Rangel came on a security patrol south of the outpost not yet three weeks ago, when his team was ambushed. The poppy harvest had just ended, and weeks of quiet had been replaced, quickly, by a resumption of combat. Uneventful patrols were now often turning into running gunfights. As this one began, Lance Corporal Rangel was near another Marine, who leapt into a canal under fire. Lance Corporal Rangel bolted for a compound. The ambush lasted perhaps 10 minutes, his friends said. When it ended, his Marines realized that he had been silent throughout. Then he did not answer his radio. A quick sweep found him. He was against a wall, his friends said, and holding his M16. Its selector lever was on and was set on “fire.” He had been shot in the head, front to back, below the helmet. He had died, they said, in an instant.

Back at the outpost that day, the Marines in First Platoon’s other squads did not know what had happened, except that something was not right. They listened to the radio chatter that accompanies any firefight. The squad in the ambush called in a casualty report, and listed Lance Corporal Rangel’s evacuation priority as routine. That can mean only two things.

“We were like, O.K., it’s either a really small scrape,” said Sergeant Lopez, “or a K.I.A.”

He knew how this story ends: “His squad leader came over the radio and said he was dead.”

Every day in Marja, each platoon stands its posts and walks its patrols, often small patrols, over ground that remains contested. With the arrival of this summer’s Afghan fighting season, small units of Marines and small units of Taliban fighters and gunmen hired by drug traffickers trade shots and sometimes casualties, hunting for each other in patches of flat farmland that are only several square miles across but can have the feel of a maze. As they work, Lance Corporal Rangel’s friends quietly grieve. Some of them say they are so busy that aside from the tears that flowed freely at his memorial service, they have not yet confronted what they feel. This will come later, they said. For now, there is always the next patrol, and for the next patrol each Marine is expected to focus. “A lot of guys really don’t talk about it,” said Cpl. Costin A. Turtureanu, 23, another fire team leader. “We internalize it.”

Corporal Hudnell added a thought almost any veteran can understand. “It hasn’t really hit us yet,” he said.

In the midday heat after another recent patrol, the Marines switched on their cameras and their laptops, and showed pictures and video clips of their friend, the guy from San Antonio with a hefty bench press, an easy smile and luck that buoyed him while he lived, as if he were still right outside the tent, cooking, joking, serving dishes over the plywood table or the piles of sandbags where the Marines often take their meals. Staff Sgt. Edgar O. Alvarado, the senior enlisted Marine in First Platoon, passed out a pamphlet he had saved from the battalion’s memorial service last week.

“He’s the first one I’ve lost,” he said. “I’ve had wounded,” he added quickly, and then seemed to read from a roster before his eyes.

“One, two, three, four, five.” He paused, nodded as he remembered another man. “Six,” he said. Then: “Seven.” He nodded again.

“And Rangel,” he said. “He’s my eight.”

He made a promise. No tribute he could offer here, from Combat Outpost Lily, would ever be enough. “When I get home, I’m going to visit his family,” he said. “His mom, his dad, his widow. I’m going to bring a pamphlet, a flag, some pictures.”

He showed several of those pictures. “The majority of the platoon wants to go visit them, too,” he said.

In First Platoon, everything is clear, even if it is unstated.

This post was named for Lily.

It is Lance Corporal Rangel’s place.