Veterans Face Memories, Fears In Search For Marine

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Veterans Face Memories, Fears In Search For Marine
By DAMIEN CAVE

The New York Times

Published: April 7, 2008

PORT CHARLOTTE - A week after Eric W. Hall disappeared into the woods of Southwest Florida, his mother stood in a parking lot overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. She had asked for volunteers. Would they come?

Becky Hall's son had experienced a flashback, fleeing a relative's home after sensing that Iraqi insurgents had surrounded him. He was 24, a former Marine corporal from Indiana who had been medically discharged after a bomb ripped through his leg. Here, among the retirees and strip malls, he was a stranger.

And yet his absence spurred a community to action. More than 50 people stepped forward that first day in February. Others came later, young and old, contributing four-wheelers, pickups, boats, horses, search-and-rescue dogs, and even a small plane.

They searched day in, day out for weeks because Hall's story broke their hearts and, many said, because his case inspired them to look past arguments over whether the war was right or wrong. It was a mission, not a debate: A Marine was missing and had to be found.

"He has these issues as a result of what we asked him to do," said Kathryn Preston, 52, a botanist who spent time in the Army as a young woman and used her pontoon boat for the search. "It felt like we were responsible for him. People in the United States. All of us."

Here in Southwest Florida, the Iraq war is no stranger. Tampa has both the headquarters for Central Command, responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of four hospitals that care for the nation's most severely wounded soldiers. Since 2003, at least 34 families from Clearwater to Fort Myers have endured the chest-crushing pain of a knock on the door that leads to a funeral.

Hall's story, to many, sounded familiar. And in the end, it connected military families from coast to coast. He was among the thousands who had been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq more than once. When he came home in 2005 after being wounded by a bomb that killed his close friend, he was forced to endure repeated surgery, post-traumatic stress and the loss of his career in the Marine Corps.

At his parents' home in Indiana one day, he told his mother that he no longer fit in.

"Everyone is moving on," he said. "Look at me. I'm not."

Failure To Readjust

Among Marines and soldiers recently returned from Iraq - including men such as Billy Huether, who helped search for him - Hall's combat horrors rang true. His failure to readjust, in a society that often seems more concerned with Britney than bombs, also made him a brother to Vietnam veterans here, like Charlie Shaughnessy, who camped out for several nights looking for Hall.

And in the struggle of Hall's loving Midwestern family, many here and outside of Florida came to recognize a sad and unavoidable truth: that wars do not always end when the warriors come home. On the home front, they last a lifetime.

Huether, an outgoing father of two, worked as an Army recruiter from 1998 to 2003 in and around the town where Hall disappeared. He had served for more than a decade when he received the assignment, and the task became easier after the Sept. 11 attacks, when scores of Americans signed up to serve their country in the fight against terrorism.

Even then, he said, the war in Iraq seemed inevitable and area residents seemed ready for its consequences.

"The American flags went up, the yellow ribbons came out," he said. "Instead of Tampa Bay Buccaneers' flags outside their windows, they were flying the American flags."

One in five of Port Charlotte's 46,000 mostly middle-class residents is a veteran, above the national average of 12.7 percent, according to the 2000 Census. In neighboring Punta Gorda, a smaller community, the share of veterans is even higher, at 29 percent of the population.

But it didn't take long for support of the Iraq war to fade. When Huether, 40, came home from a yearlong deployment to South Korea in the spring of 2004, he noticed that the community had become more skeptical, describing Iraqis as squanderers of freedom or outright killers. Even members of his family began to question whether Iraq was a war that could be won.

Huether also knew he could not sit back and watch. Since retiring in August 2006 as a sergeant first class with 20 years of service, he has worked in the veterans' service office for Charlotte County. He said it was his job and his sense of duty that prompted him to chase leads and scour the area's waterways for a missing Marine.

The Vietnam Veterans

Charlie Shaughnessy; Thomas McCarthy, known as Wolf; Jerry Lutz, known as Animal; and Bob Constabile were strangers before Eric Hall disappeared. Each had been a Marine. Each had fought in Vietnam and struggled with the consequences.

Animal and Wolf, who still prefer their Vietnam nicknames, struggled with homelessness. Shaughnessy spent four years living without electricity in the woods of upstate New York before rejoining society. And even then, he said, he overcame the experience only with intense therapy.

"The military has an effect on your life forever," Shaughnessy said between cigarettes in his living room this month. "Forever."

By the time these men reached Florida, they were busy trying to move on. Like so many here, they had come to retire, to check out - and Iraq in particular was not a war they identified with.

The military had changed, becoming an all-volunteer force in 1974. The number of troops dying in Iraq has never reached the heights of Vietnam. And as they watched Iraq war veterans coming home to parades and public sympathy, many older veterans felt no need to link arms with younger colleagues. They watched Iraq like most Americans - as spectators.

When a tip came in about a young man with a limp, who sat on a bench next to an old woman, smelling as if he had not showered, they both "dressed homeless," as they put it - donning old clothes and sleeping in the homeless camps that dot the undeveloped land here behind cookie-cutter homes and fast-food restaurants.

They tried to stay positive even after Hall didn't turn up in the camps - or anywhere else. Four weeks into the search, he still hadn't materialized.

Shaughnessy - a squat, wide-chested, quiet soul with a Purple Heart hanging in his living room - kept worrying that they had missed something. He wondered, Why hadn't Eric used his ATM card? Where could he have gone without his motorcycle?

With his new wife at home, Shaughnessy returned several times to the field by Sulstone Road near where the police found Hall's blue Yamaha R1 racing bike on Feb. 3, the day he disappeared. It was an area of palm trees, low brush and sandy trails not unlike the Euphrates River valley that Hall got to know during his time in Fallujah - the kind of place Billy Huether sought to avoid.

On the night of March 6, Shaughnessy noticed something new - a scent coming from a metal drainage pipe 3 feet in diameter. The next morning, he crawled in, going 25 yards before the darkness and dirt forced him to squeeze back out.

A day later, he resubmerged with a combat knife and a flashlight, pushing forward on his belly for 60 long yards. He blocked out the smell, the mud, the maggots too, and desperately hoped to discover only a dead animal.

But once he reached the source, he saw what he feared - a skull and human jaw.

"I didn't say anything," he said, recounting what happened during an interview near the pipe. "I didn't want them to panic."

When he emerged, Hall's mother was there.

She asked, "Is it Eric?"

They locked eyes. Deep down, they already knew.

The Halls

When Eric Hall's parents talk about him before Iraq, two elements stand out; his tenaciousness and his love of the Marine Corps.

He was the skinny 12-year-old who played catcher on baseball teams with teenagers because he could always hold on to the ball when a runner slammed into home. And in the Marines, his family said he found his niche - a society where everyone was equal, without ranks on their combat uniforms.

A tour in Afghanistan from March to September 2004 introduced Hall to war. He went to Iraq next and on June 14, 2005, during a foot patrol in Anbar Province, an improvised explosive device blew up a few feet from him, changing his life forever. His parents described a brutal recovery at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., with as many as 20 operations. And when he returned home to Jeffersonville, Ind., a few months later, it was clear that his mind was wounded too.

"He didn't really sleep," said his mother, Becky. "He woke up screaming. He kept a pistol under his pillow because he was afraid."

After being "medically retired" in June 2006, he found himself at home without a job and with friends who were especially interested in his pain medication. He came to Florida to live with a relative, seeking a fresh start. He disappeared only a few weeks after he arrived.

Becky Hall, 52, a physical therapist's assistant, immediately moved into her sister's home to manage the search.

The community response at times overwhelmed her with emotion.

Becky Hall found particular comfort in the Vietnam veterans, with their stories of struggle, of war and of its aftermath. Together, they even managed to laugh, in mud on four-wheelers or when she started ad-libbing her shouts to her son while searching, scolding him as if he were still a toddler.

"We were just so exhausted, it was, 'Come out, come out wherever you are,'" she said. "I just wanted to wring his little neck."

Her toughness impressed the veterans. They called her "our commander." She in turn cherished their dedication, which she suspected brought costs especially for Shaughnessy, who later said he was suffering again with nightmares of war.

Hall's parents said they wished their son could have learned from such men. "If he got to talk to people like these, who experienced boots on the ground, it would have been a totally different story," said his father, Kevin.

Kevin Hall, 51, a maintenance supervisor at a local courthouse, stayed home during the search in case Eric Hall appeared. He arrived in Florida only after his son's body had been identified. And with him came waves of grief.

On a hot morning in mid-March, he and his son Justin, 27, who flew from his Navy post in Virginia, visited for the first time the site where Eric Hall had died. They were accompanied by Becky Hall, McCarthy and Shaughnessy, who explained what he and the authorities thought had happened.

"I think Eric came here to collect his thoughts and smoked a cigarette, and that started a fire," Shaughnessy said. "He climbed into the pipe for cover."

Eric Hall's father said later that his mind landed on the consequences of so much time underground. "After five, six weeks," he said, "his body was pretty decomposed."

He began to cry. "He loved that Marine uniform. The first thought that hit me" - his shoulders shook with tears - "was that he wouldn't be able to wear it."

A few hundred yards away, Becky Hall and Wolf were hugging. He and Shaughnessy had volunteered to bring Eric Hall's ashes to Indiana for the funeral.

"We're coming up," Wolf said.

Becky Hall looked up at him. "Oh, God love you," she said.

In her hand, she held a flier with her son's picture, smiling with his dog. She gently rubbed her fingers over the photograph.

"He's with God and the other guys in the platoon," she said. "You're OK now, Eric. It didn't have to be so hard."

Then she walked over to her last living son, comforting him as he crumpled in tears.

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