Marching Home Again
They returned from war without any injuries, but these four men who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will never be the same
Capt. Gavin Tsuda along Route Irish, the main
road linking Baghdad International Airport to the
Green Zone
in any way that we can. They were our motivation.”
Hospitalman Third Class Keohikai Laikupu, 23, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Fox Company, Mehtar Lam and Jalalabad, Afghanistan
Kaneohe Navy corpsman Keohikai Laikupu says war is stressful, but firefights are a rush. Laikupu didn’t care much for the hikes through mountainous terrain, with 40 pounds of medical equipment on his back in addition to the 95-pound pack Marines carry.
Laikupu, an aspiring firefighter, says the highlight of his deployment was the firefights. “We did have one pretty big contact,” says Laikupu, who was born on Oahu and raised on the Big Island. “It was a battalion-wide operation so all the companies (got) together in order to do this mission. We walked in about (12 miles), took us about three days to get to the objective.” A platoon had taken enemy fire and seven troops were flown out by medevac. When the attackers struck again two days later, Laikupu’s group had already arrived.
Lance Cpl. Chris Mauzy takes a break 8,000
feet up in Laghman Province, Afghanistan
“They hit us at about 11 p.m., so everyone was sleeping,” he says. “I had my kevlar (helmet) and boots next to me. At 9,000 feet everything’s moist so everything gets wet, so you put it in a waterproof bag. ...I use my flak (bulletproof vest) as a pillow because we were sleeping on the side of a mountain on a bunch of rocks and stuff. When they hit us ... you just hear RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and mortars blowing up next to you. And I sat up, and you can hear the rounds whiz past your ears and everything.”
He says you don’t really think in those intense situations, you just react. “I just calmly put on my stuff and then took cover. I was with heavy weapons platoon, 81mm mortar section. So while we were getting shot at, they were dropping rounds, and I was right there dropping rounds with them. It was pretty cool.”
Lance Cpl. Chris Mauzy, 23 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Golf Company, Jalalabad, Kandahar and other sites in Afghanistan
Marine Lance Cpl. Chris Mauzy went to Afghanistan and blew things up. When search and seizure operations yielded weapons caches, Mauzy, an assaultman attached to a grunt platoon, took care of them. “I’ll get my explosive out, set the charges, set it on a time fuse,” he says. “Then we get the heck away from there ... and then it blows it up so they can’t have their stuff no more.”
Mauzy grew up splitting his time between Phoenix and Makawao, Maui. He describes searches of villages and mud huts this way: “You go in their house and you search their haystacks, search under their floorboards, in their ceiling, and that’s where we usually find a lot of stuff - mostly in their floorboards or in their hay bins,” he says, “ammunition and medical supplies for aiding Al Qaeda.”
Kaneohe Marines lost four members during its seven-month deployment to Afghanistan, which ended last month. Among the casualties was Mauzy’s friend, 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Steven Valdez of Arkansas. They hadn’t known each other long, but had gone through basic training and infantry training together. And in the corps, he says, your fellow Marines become like brothers.
“When I heard an attack happened and he was taken, it really hurt,” says Mauzy. “It was like man, I know that guy, he’s a real good (guy). I was sad and mad at the same time. I wanted to go out there and get whoever it was who did it.”
The reality of war hits home in that moment and one’s feeling of invincibility is shaken, he says. “There’s been so many times when gunfire is exchanged and none of your guys are hit so you think ‘That was awesome, that was cool, let’s do it again.‘But when a death occurs you think again. ... This isn’t a game; this is real life.”
Mauzy says losing a friend “is probably the worst feeling in the world,” but while you’re in a war zone you can’t let your emotions distract you from your mission. “If you become distracted by that you yourself could be taken,” he says. “You shed tears but you can’t let yourself be overwhelmed.”
The mourning for the four Marines came later, far from the battlefield, at a memorial service in Kaneohe last Tuesday.
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