[THS] Chris Hedges: They Kill Alex

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.truth-out.org/they-kill-alex63013

"They Kill Alex"

Monday 06 September 2010

by: Chris Hedges  |  Truthdig | Report

photo
Lance Cpl. Alexander S. Arredondo, 20, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004. (Courtesy of
the Arredondo family.)

Carlos Arredondo, a native Costa Rican, stands in a parking lot of a Holiday Inn in
Portland, Maine, next to his green Nissan pickup truck. The truck, its tailgate folded
down, carries a flag-draped coffin and is adorned with pictures of his son, Lance Cpl.
Alexander S. Arredondo, 20, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004. The truck and a trailer
he pulls with it have become a mobile shrine to his boy. He drives around the
country, with the aid of donations, evoking a mixture of sympathy and hostility. There
are white crosses with the names of other boys killed in the war. Combat boots are
nailed to the side of the display. There is a wheelchair, covered in colored ribbons,
fixed to the roof of the cab. There is Alex’s military uniform and boots, poster-size
pictures of the young Marine shown on the streets of Najaf, in his formal Marine
portrait, and then lying, his hands folded in white gloves, in his coffin. A metal sign
on the back of the truck bears a gold star and reads: “USMC L/CPL ALEXANDER S.
ARREDONDO.”

“This is what happens every week to some family in America,” says Carlos. “This is
what war does. And this is the grief and pain the government does not want people
to see.”

Alex, from a working-class immigrant family, was lured into the military a month
before Sept. 11, 2001. The Marine recruiters made the usual appeals to patriotism,
promised that he would be trained for a career, go to college and become a man.
They included a $10,000 sign-on bonus. Alex was in the Marine units that invaded
Iraq. His father, chained to the news reports, listening to the radio and two
televisions at the same time, was increasingly distraught. “I hear nothing about my
son for days and days,” he says. “It was too much, too much, too much for parents.”

Alex, in August 2004, was back in Iraq for a second tour. In one of his last phone
calls, Alex told him: “Dad, I call you because, to say, you know, we’ve been fighting
for many, many days already, and I want to tell you that I love you and I don’t want
you to forget me.” His father answered: “Of course I love you, and I don’t want—I
never forget you.” The last message the family received was an e-mail around that
time which read: “Watch the news online. Check the news, and tell everyone that I
love them.”

Twenty days later, on Aug. 25, a U.S. government van pulled up in front of Carlos’
home in Hollywood, Fla. It was Carlos’ 44th birthday and he was expecting a birthday
call from Alex. “I saw the van and thought maybe Alex had come home to surprise
me for my birthday or maybe they were coming to recruit my other son, Brian,” he
says. Three Marine officers climbed out of the van. One asked, “Are you Carlos
Arredondo?” He answered “yes.”

“I’m sorry, we’re here to notify you about the death of Lance Cpl. Arredondo,” one of
the officers told him. Alex was the 968th soldier or Marine to be killed in the Iraq war.

“I tried to process this in my head,” Carlos says. “I never hear that. I remember how
my body felt. I got a rush of blood to my body. I felt like it’s the worst thing in my
life. It is my worst fear. I could not believe what they were telling me.”

Lance Cpl. Alexander S. Arredondo, 20, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004.
Courtesy of the Arredondo family.

Carlos turned and ran into the house to find his mother, who was in the kitchen
making him a birthday cake. “I cried, ‘Mama! Mama! They are telling me Alex got
killed! Alex got killed! They kill Alex! They kill Alex! They kill Alex!” His mother
crumbled in grief. Carlos went to the large picture of his son in the living room and
held it. Carlos asked the Marines to leave several times over the next 20 minutes, but
the Marines refused, saying they had to wait for his wife. “I did this because I was in
denial. I think if they leave none of this will happen.” Crazed and distraught with
grief, the father went into his garage and took out five gallons of gasoline and a
propane torch. He walked past the three Marines in their dress blues and began to
smash the windows of the government van with a hammer.

“I went into the van,” he says. “I poured gasoline on the seats. I pour gasoline on
the floor and in the gas tank. I was, like, looking for my son. I was screaming and
yelling for him. I remember that one day he left in a van and now he’s not there. I
destroy everything. The pain I feel is the pain of what I learned from war. I was
wearing only socks and no shoes. I was wearing shorts. The fumes were powerful
and I could not breathe no more, even though I broke the windows.”

As Carlos stepped out of the van, he ignited the propane torch inside the vehicle. It
started a fire that “threw me from the driver’s seat backwards onto the ground.” His
clothes caught fire. It felt “like thousands of needles stabbing into my body.” He ran
across the street and fell onto the grass. His mother followed him and pulled off his
shirt and socks, which were on fire, as he screamed “Mama! Mama! My feet are
burning! My feet are burning!” The Marines dragged him away and he remembers
one of them saying, “The van is going to blow! The van is going to blow!” The van
erupted in a fireball and the rush of hot air, he says, swept over him. The Marines
called a fire truck and an ambulance. Carlos sustained second- and third-degree
burns over 26 percent of his body. As I talk to him in the Portland parking lot he
shows me the burn scars on his legs. The government chose not to prosecute him.

“I wake up in the hospital two days later and I was tied with tubes in my mouth,” he
says. “When they take the tubes out I say, ‘I want to be with my son. I want to be
with my son.’ Somebody was telling me my son had died. I get very emotional. I kept
saying ‘I want to be with my son’ and they think I want to commit suicide.”

He had no health insurance. His medical bills soon climbed to $55,000. On Sept. 2,
2004, Carlos, transported in a stretcher, attended his son’s wake at the Rodgers
Funeral Home in Jamaica Plain, Mass. He lifted himself, with the help of those around
him, from his stretcher, and when he reached his son’s open casket he kissed his
child. “I held his head and when I put my hands in the back of his head I felt the
huge hole where the sniper bullet had come out,” he says. “I climbed into the casket.
I lay on top of my son. I apologized to him because I did not do enough to avoid
this.”

Arredondo began to collect items that memorialized his son’s life. He tacked them to
his truck. A funeral home in Boston donated a casket to the display. He began to
attend anti-war events, at times flying the American flag upside down to signal
distress. He has taken his shrine to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and Times Square
in New York City. He has traveled throughout the country presenting to the public a
visual expression of death and grief. He has placed some of his son’s favorite
childhood toys and belongings in the coffin, including a soccer ball, a pair of shoes, a
baseball and a Winnie the Pooh. The power of his images, which force onlookers to
confront the fact that the essence of war is death, has angered some who prefer to
keep war sanitized and wrapped in the patriotic slogans of glory, honor and heroism.
Three years ago vandals defaced his son’s gravestone.

“I don’t speak,” he says. “I show people war. I show them the caskets they are not
allowed to see. If people don’t see what war does they don’t feel it. If they don’t feel
it they don’t care.”

Military recruiters, who often have offices in high schools, prey on young men like
Alex, who was first approached when he was 16. They cater to their insecurities, their
dreams and their economic deprivation. They promise them what the larger society
denies them. Those of Latino descent and from divorced families, as Alex was, are
especially vulnerable. Alex’s brother Brian was approached by the military, which
suggested that if he enlisted he could receive $60,000 in signing bonuses and more
than $27,000 in payments for higher education. The proposed Development, Relief
and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, is designed to give undocumented
young people a chance at citizenship provided they attend college—not usually an
option for poor, often poorly educated and undocumented Latino youths who are
prohibited from receiving Pell grants—for at least two years, or enlist and serve in the
military.

The military helped author the pending act and is lobbying for it. Twelve percent of
Army enlistees are Hispanic, and this percentage is expected to double by 2020 if the
current rate of recruitment continues. And once they are recruited, these young men
and women are trained to be killers, sent to wars that should never be fought and
returned back to their families often traumatized and broken and sometimes dead.

A mobile shrine dedicated to Lance Cpl. Alexander S. Arredondo, 20, a Marine killed
in Iraq in 2004.
Courtesy of the Arredondo family.

Alex told Carlos in their last conversation there was heavy fighting in Najaf. Alex
usually asked his father not to “forget” him, but now, increasingly in the final days of
his life, another word was taking the place of forget. It was forgive. He felt his father
should not forgive him for what he was doing in Iraq. He told his father, “Dad, I
hope you are proud of what I’m doing. Don’t forgive me, Dad.” The sentence
bewildered his father. “Oh my God, how can I forgive you? ... I love you, you’re my
son, very proud, you’re my son.”

“I thought, when he died, my God, he has killed somebody,” Carlos says quietly as
he readied for an anti-war march organized by Veterans for Peace. “He feels guilty. If
he returned home his mind would be destroyed. His heart would be torn apart. It is
not normal to kill. How can they do this? How can they take our children?”