from San Diego Downtown
One Marine’s journey back from Iraq
By JASON WATKINS | San Diego Downtown Magazine
JASON LILLEY IS torn between two people: the old him and the new him.
The old Jason Lilley served two tours in Iraq as a Marine with the First Recon Batallion and was part of the first group of Americans to breach the southern border of Iraq at the beginning of the war. At some points, he was among the northern-most Marines in enemy land.
During his second tour, the old Jason Lilley saved six of his fellow Marines in a roadside ambush, an action that earned him a Silver Star, the third-highest honor in the military. His story has been told in Rolling Stone magazine, in a recently released book called “Generation Kill” and on evening news broadcasts, each of which call him a war hero. The old Jason Lilley was a hardened warrior, a Devil Dog, a member of the Corps’ most elite group of fighters similar to Navy SEALs, of which there are less than a thousand.
But that’s the old Jason Lilley. The new Jason Lilley is a damn mess.
I MET THE NEW Jason Lilley at Pizza Port in Carlsbad. He was a colleague of my roommate, Carlos, who was also in First Recon. The two served together in Iraq.
Wearing sandles, a sleeveless black shirt and long, spiky hair, the new Jason Lilley looked like a frat boy. He stood six foot two (not counting the hair) and had sideburns and a lip ring. He had just been released from the Marine Corps, and his sudden change in appearance was common among newly separated troops.
The new Jason Lilley needed a place to crash after getting out, so my roommate and I invited him to stay with us. What was supposed to be a couple of weeks ended up being five months, during which time the old and the new made a desperate attempt to reconcile their differences.
The new Jason Lilley was confident and spoke with a faint southern drawl, his voice littered with gravel and abrupt starts and stops. He would study his arms and chest in the mirror, surprised they belonged to him. He looked like twisted steel.
“I applied at the post office today,” he said after a month of surfing and playing video games. “A buddy of mine works there and told me to apply. Pay’s pretty good.”
I helped him write his resume, culling anything useful that might translate into employability, but his method of service didn’t offer much. The real world has little use for combat skills.
The new Jason Lilley would spend hours playing video games, each one a variation of the same war game, each one more cathartic. The new Jason Lilley could just press restart when he got hit by a bullet. They provided an escape from the white noise of battle which he said haunted him during some nights.
He had the power to change things, to be a leader of men, to take lives and save lives, but he didn’t have the power to secure a job at the post office or the power plant or anywhere else he applied.
He eventually took a job as a bouncer at a nightclub. On one particularly busy night, he spotted a guy dancing on a table where he wasn’t supposed to be. He told him to get down but the guy ignored him so Jason pulled him to the floor. Then Jason noticed the TV cameras in his face. The guy was the lead actor in an MTV reality show that was being filmed at the club.
Jason found other employment at a company that bought sold motorcycles. He would return from work on most days, cursing the place and the people who worked there.
“Man, I work with some idiots,” he’d say. “I can’t believe how stupid some people are.”
It’s hard to relate to your new co-workers when you’ve spent the last two years getting shot at by people who want to kill you, he’d say. It’s like everyone’s volume gets turned down.
THE OLD JASON Lilley sat at the wheel of his Humvee as it drifted across the flat Iraqi desert. It was March 20, 2003, and the men of First Recon were leading a series of raids through southern Iraq in a push toward Baghdad. They were at this moment the northernmost Americans in that country.
First Recon, the ultra-elite fighting force responsible for leading the most daring missions during wartime, is a band of tightly-knit young men who take pride in being the Marine Corps’ “cowboys.” They’ve endured much of the same hell as Navy SEALs, but their numbers are far fewer; only the top one or two percent of Marines get to try out for First Recon, and more than half drop out. Once in, Recon Marines lead dangerous missions by foot to conduct surveillance, to take out enemy targets and to attack. Their motto is “swift, silent and deadly.”
This was First Recon’s first wartime mission since leaving Camp Pendleton a month before, a journey that would take them a thousand miles north, across the Tigres and Euphrates rivers, through the fabled city of Babylon, to the capital city of Baghdad. It lasted more than a month.
Jason Lilley was in charge of getting the men in his Humvee from point A to point B, usually amid heavy gunfire, the possibility of roadside bombings, through foreign terrain and across mine fields. If their caravan was attacked, he was expected to have the wherewithall to stay alive to get the rest of the guys to safety. By the time he reached Baghdad, he had seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives ended, including women and children and civilians.
He was 6,967 miles away from his home in Rose Hill, Kansas.
The old Jason Lilley hadn’t taken a shower in a month, his feet were swollen inside his boots and the smell was like death itself. His Humvee passed through dozens of towns on their way to Baghdad, each one more pathetic than the last, each covered in wreckage and ruin. Electricity had long been cut, and most of the villages were steeped in raw sewage from busted pipes. The people who inhabited the villages, though torn by war and circumstance, were usually happy to see Americans, whom they were certain would bring an end to the chaos.
Jason Lilley was almost seven thousand miles away from home, but he might as well been on the moon. He was now just skin and sinew and bones, existing on fewer than two MREs a day, living beside other young men who equally missed their homes and their girlfriends and who, besides doing what they’re doing, could think of nothing more important than singing, shouting, Avril Lavigne’s “I’m With You.”
It’s at this moment that the old Jason Lilley has found his home, a man among men, careening down a dusty road through the open gates of fate.
THE NEW JASON Lilley is sleeping on the couch, his arm covering his eyes, as I quietly walk to the door on my way to work. When I return, he’s in the same position, but in the space between he has made himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, slipped on his wetsuit, caught a few decent waves, made another sandwich, checked the mail, checked his e-mail, picked up a job application, called his brother, made another sandwich, played a video game and taken a nap. This is the sum total of most days.
The job at the motorcycle place didn’t work out. Seems the main boss decided to fire Jason’s boss, his friend, the one who gave Jason the job. Both the new and the old Jason Lilley are nothing if not loyal, like bad wallpaper, so he walked out of the place too.
The new Jason Lilley is, of course, broke and broken and bored and wants nothing more than to be a part of something that carries a fraction of the weight of being a Marine. He’s told to come back tomorrow to speak to the boss, then told there’s nothing open, but maybe next month, we just hired someone and we’ve got a full house, but good luck to you. He’s told he’ll need to take a class first, but that costs $800 and doesn’t start until next month. He’s told he’s overqualified, underqualified, appropriately qualified, but nothing.
During all this, my roommate, Carlos, and I supported his growing sandwich addiction. We helped him buy a car so he could widen his search area — his old car caught fire on the side of the road and he left it there — but there was something with his license or his registration so he didn’t drive it much. He borrowed my vehicle whenever he wanted to go on a date.
I found something noble in his ability to sit for days on end, producing little more than a fascination with war games and a five o’clock shadow. I couldn’t fathom the horrors that haunted him some nights, the image of Iraqi children being maimed by RPGs, his fellow Marines taking shrapnel in the head, and I certainly couldn’t help him. Close though we were, I could never relate to him on that level.
I was also fascinated by the old Jason Lilley. He was twelve times the man I was, ever hoped to be. He accepted duty with grace, death with respect and fate with open eyes and a wide smile. His body endured daily what would have surely killed me. In fact, the only thing we shared in common was our first name, but despite that we were fast friends. His sense of humor was always on, a joke slipping from his tongue the instant he fell asleep and a continuation of the same joke the minute he woke up in the morning.
But underneath, the new Jason Lilley was unraveling.
“I don’t know what to do,” he would say. “I don’t know why I can’t find a job.”
Keep at it, I’d tell him, offering him advice or job leads or just blind encouragement. The truth was, I couldn’t figure out either why no one would hire him, a decorated war hero with discipline, respect and a golden work ethic.
“Marines have a pretty bad reputation,” he said. “They’re not very well liked around here.” I could see that. Businesses didn’t want a bunch of rough and rowdy “jarheads” at their place, but the Marines I knew — mostly members of the First Recon who were friends of my roommate — were the most stand-up guys I’d ever met. Jason had the misfortune of being a great guy in the midst of a lot of punks.
Sometimes, and without warning, the new Jason would share his old war stories, like the time they killed an Iraqi soldier and had put him into the back of their transport vehicle to be identified later. Halfway down the road, Jason noticed his seat was unsually soft; when he looked down, he realized he was sitting on the dead soldier. It was these moments that stay with him.
Jason rarely spoke about the truly terrifying moments — days when he was certain he was going to die and thought that maybe he already had. Occasionally I would ask about some detail and he’d answer my questions but say little more. It’s a heavy feeling to be a part of someone’s life after they’ve gone through war. Sometimes, though, when it was just us, Jason would share some story or some funny moment he’d hidden away, the telling of which sounded forced and unrehearsed like he hadn’t ever put it into words.
One night, I joined Jason, Carlos and our newest roommate, Bryan “Trip” Thurmond, who was a distant relative of Senator Strom Thurmond, at our computer so we could look at pictures they’d taken in Iraq. Most were candid shots of nameless, smiling Marines gripping their weapons or playing cards. Some were graphic shots of dead Jihadists, their heads blown away by Mark 19 bullets. Marines posed by the bodies, proud of their kills — and maybe proud that they were the ones smiling and not the ones who were dead. I realized I was looking at first-hand relics from a war we still don’t understand taken by people who were there.
Historians tell us we have to wait twenty years before looking back at a war with any kind of reasonable understanding. I think that’s probably true. But on that night, surrounded by these three men, I was a part of the story, looking at the pictures that will one day become testament to who we were and how we lived. Whatever my view of the war — which is constantly evolving — I’m thankful these men aren’t cowards.
THE OLD JASON Lilley returned to Iraq for a second time during this war. It was April 7, 2004, and Lilley’s platoon was crossing the desert when a group of sixty Iraqi insurgents started firing on their convoy. Five Marines were injured in the gun battle, which lasted just a few minutes.
“Anybody who tells you they were in combat and weren’t scared is lying,” he later told his hometown newspaper. “Every day, every one of us was scared.”
Seven thousand miles away, Jason’s mom, Janis South, is teaching a classroom full of students about music and wondering where her son is. “It was very, very hard to get up in front of the kids and be happy and act like everything was great,” she said later. Sometimes she’d recognize the name of a Marine who served in her son’s batallion and she’d slip away to a quiet place and “fall apart for a while.”
According to the official paperwork, Jason Lilley crossed the shallow waters of a canal and onto a berm where, against heavy enemy fire, he began shooting. This allowed the remaining Marines, who were far outnumbered, to retreat with their lives. By the end, Jason had killed five Iraqi soldiers and had saved six of his friends.
Because of Jason Lilley, six Marines got to go home to their moms.
THE NEW JASON Lilley is standing in his dress blues in front of 125 people in Wichita, Kan., flanked by other Marines and community leaders.
“It is our nation’s third highest combat metal and I’m proud to honor Corporal Lilley and to say thank you for your service over and above the call of duty,” the city’s mayor, Carlos Mayans, says. “You are an American hero and I salute you.”
A Marine captain is in the crowd to pay his respects. It’s the first time in the captain’s twenty-two years in the service he’s seen the Silver Star awarded.
“It’s an honor to receive it,” Jason says later during an interview with the local news. “I just did my job, did was was asked of me, what anyone else would have done in the same situation.” He’s right and he’s wrong, for courage isn’t learned. It’s moments like those that create heroes and heroes become future leaders of America.
He lives in Kansas now, surrounded by family and friends who know both versions of Jason Lilley, the old and the new. He’s starting a life as a civilian after living the tumultous existence that is southern California, but he still misses it here. Now, the only physical remnants of the old Jason Lilley is a hardened gaze, a bright silver medal and a tattoo across his chest that reads “today is a gift.”
I spoke with him by phone recently, the day before he started a new job in construction making ten dollars an hour.
“I’m nervous,” he says. “I know I’m going to hate it. I know I’ll be bored. I know it won’t be challenging. But I need to give this a shot, living as a civilian.”
I encourage him, even though he’s probably right.
“I’ve only given being a civilian nine months,” he says. “That’s not very long.”
“How long is it supposed to take?” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”
Tonight he was supposed to take his little sister to the movies but he’ll have to call and cancel so he can get ready for work in the morning. He says all he wants right now is to own a brand-new car, and not even an expensive one, just one he can drive without worrying about it catching fire.
“I just want something that’s nice,” he says. Then he tells me he’s been thinking about joining the Navy and becoming a SEAL. If I had a dollar everytime I heard someone say they were going to become a Navy SEAL I could buy him a car, but when Jason Lilley says it, it doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.
“I like serving my country, man,” he says. “I really do.”
THE NEW JASON Lilley is making a final dive into the cold water off the Carlsbad coast.
It’s been six months since leaving the Marine Corps and leaving the best group of guys he’ll ever know. He’ll soon return home to Kansas to start over and to accept the praise of a grateful nation, but right now he’s using the last light of the day to ride the waves, paddling into them, then diving under, then paddling farther.
I watch from the shore and realize that in these fleeting moments, when the orange sliver of the sun sinks below the horizon and all light fades into a soupy gray, Jason Lilley is disappearing into a void created by war and peace and this business of growing up.
It’s then that he begins to make peace with the old and the new and starts to become whole again.