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Battle scars: Soldier's war wasn't one he expected, but he came out alive - and almost intact

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) The two Marines clambered up a thin metal ladder, hand over hand, clanking and straining with equipment. They reached the slanted roof of the warehouse, five stories high, and began to creep forward in a low crouch.

Underfoot, the roof alternated between 2-foot-wide strips of metal and yellowed plastic. Cpl. Patrick Tiderman and his partner, Cpl. Jesse Komrs, both snipers with the 7th Marine Regiment, moved to the roof's edge and slumped down on their stomachs. Tiderman, a sturdy, dark-haired 21-year-old from Illinois, put the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the outskirts of Baghdad far below them. His heart raced and he took long, deep breaths to slow his pounding pulse.

Komrs spotted a man moving in and out of the stark shadows on the street beneath them. The man was wearing a green uniform and holding an AK-47. The fair-haired Komrs, a crack shot from Wyoming, gripped his rifle and prepared to shoot. But the man slipped around the corner and out of sight.

The gunfire on the streets below was moving away. The two Marines needed a closer position, maybe on the roof of the next warehouse. Tiderman grabbed his rifle and set off to scout for a new perch. He found a promising spot and, turning back toward his partner, again began creeping along the weather-worn roof. He was almost back when his boot landed on a piece of the plastic and it tore away like tissue. Komrs barely had time to look up as the large, frantic figure of his partner vanished into the hole beneath his feet.

I had met Patrick Tiderman on a sweltering March morning in Kuwait, Day One of my tenure as an embedded reporter with the 1st battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment. He was one of the first Marines I met in the unit that I would be traveling with over the following weeks or months or however long this new war in Iraq would last.

"You from Chicago?" Tiderman said, poking his big, crew-cut head out the flap of his tent. Nobody in Kuwait passed up a connection with home.

I was sitting with a couple of snipers in the dappled shade of some camouflage netting slung above a picnic table. The scout-snipers, the Marines' select cadre of reconnaissance specialists and sharpshooters, pride themselves on being a bit smarter than the average Marine - smart enough to get out of the sun on a hot day - and the shaded table was a way to distinguish their tent from the dozens like it scattered across the sandy plains a dozen miles from the Iraqi border.

The battalion had arrived in Kuwait at the beginning of February. The dozen or so guys in the sniper platoon spent their days practicing desert maneuvers, tinkering with their rifles and teaching new members how to use the radios and other gear.

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Yeah, I'm from the Tribune, I said, and we joked for a minute about the Cubs and traded other hometown bits and pieces. In the days before the war, when there wasn't much to do but imagine life afterward, conversations tended to meander among mental oases. The group of us idly sat in the shade as he talked to us about a cute girl he knew from Columbia College, launching us on another happy mental detour from the heat and the future.

Like everyone else that day, Tiderman wore tan camouflage pants and an old, olive-green T-shirt. Under his arm he carried a big, dog-eared copy of "Lord of the Rings," and the other guys teased him about how long he'd been toting it around.

Tiderman still had the build of the defensive lineman he'd been in high school. He was a sophomore when he first talked of joining the Marines. He'd always respected his uncles and grandfathers who had been in the military, and he liked the idea of serving his country and not working behind a desk.

His mother, Ann Stephens, hated the idea. She spent two years trying to talk him out of it. You could get hurt, she said, or worse. She was a nurse for disabled kids, and she reminded her son of his longtime nightmare of ending up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Just what she needed, she thought. To be a single mother of four with her oldest son paralyzed. She had separated from Patrick's father when Patrick was 3 years old.

Finally, she gave him a choice: the Marines or her. Days before his 18th birthday, he chose the Marines and moved out of the house.

They eventually made up, and were close again by the time he graduated in June 2000. He left for boot camp, where he endured the usual miseries and ended up as a mortarman, dropping 81-mm shells into launch tubes. But his attention had been drawn immediately to the snipers.

There was something alluring about their understated confidence, the way they kept to themselves, always fine-tuning their fancy rifles, practicing stealth operations and skirting many of the grunts' mundane daily rituals. They wore their hair a little longer. They were all top-notch runners and shooters.

Sniping is not a job that everyone craves in this era of remote warfare, with its cruise missiles, "stand-off" air-assault tactics and laser-guided weaponry. It's a job that still requires a rifleman to pick a human target, squeeze a trigger and see the consequences. But snipers pride themselves on having come to terms with it.

"You identified and put an end to a man, a woman or even a child who would have killed your best friend, most of your friend's friends, and you," shouts the commander in "Marine Sniper," a Vietnam tale that is standard reading for new guys. "And that's what is important to you."

Tiderman had been a mortarman for nine months when he finally got the chance to try out for the snipers. There, he met Komrs and they hit it off. Tiderman was smart, good at picking targets and collecting reconnaissance. Komrs was cool-headed and strong, with the sort of eerie patience that makes a deadly gunman.

Komrs had graduated from sniper school, making him a "hog" in sniper talk. Tiderman was still a "pig," having missed the cut in sniper school because he wasn't yet good enough at stalking or moving undetected. He was in sniper school for the second time, midway through the stalking section, when he was pulled out and sent to the Mideast. It gnawed at him that he wasn't going to war as a hog.

By the time they set foot in Kuwait, Tiderman and Komrs were among the senior members of the platoon. This would be their war.

For weeks, the infantry companies and sniper teams had prepared for a sensitive early mission: securing a major oil-pumping station in the southern town of Az-Zubayr. Commanders expected Saddam Hussein to stack his forces around the facility, knowing that it held the spigot for the vast Rumaila oil fields.

So in the first hours of the ground invasion, they set off for the site, expecting a fight. Flanked by Apache helicopters, the winding convoy of assault vehicles and Humvees crossed the border from Kuwait and raced north, through the battered town of Safwan. But when they arrived, no bloody engagement ensued. The oil facility was all but undefended.

Komrs and Tiderman were one of the first sniper teams to reach the site. Braced for the clash he'd trained for, Tiderman was amazed to find little more than a scattering of luckless civilians, whom he shooed away before they became victims of the advancing columns of infantry.

The anticipated resistance didn't come until dawn. A company on patrol through dense palm groves found itself in a firefight, facing 10 Iraqi T-55 tanks and dozens of soldiers. Commanders scrambled to thwart the attack and the unit emerged unscathed. But to the Marines - and the reporters traveling with them - the message was clear: This war wouldn't follow the script.

Over the following days and weeks, the mood among the 1,000 or so members of the 1st battalion swung wildly. One day they would race north unimpeded through the desert of southern Iraq, and the next they would be pinned down by a withering sandstorm. By day, they would brace for a battle with an enemy front that never materialized, and at night they would come under punishing guerrilla attacks from gunmen they could barely see.

The Marines craved news of the war's progress, and they came to reporters groping for updates. Are we winning? Is it going as expected? Who are these guerrillas? Are people still protesting at home?

But we, the media, also were struggling to make sense of it. For journalists accustomed to round-the-clock information, it was disorienting. I was joined by reporters from the Washington Post and CNN, and we eagerly shared our notes each evening to sift insights from the tangle of rumors and half-truths. Yet, for all of our fancy satellite telephones and high-tech gear, we rarely knew much about anything outside our immediate experience.

As reporters, we had come to Iraq speaking of war in its grandest terms, of justice and strategy and geopolitics. But in time, our lives narrowed to encompass only the small and furious world we inhabited. Each day brought a cast of names and personalities, minor heroics and tragedies, flashes of horror and comedy: the sergeant who awoke every day suspecting he would die by nightfall; the major whose discipline made his men miserable, but kept every one of them alive; the private whose endless tales of teenage mischief kept the men laughing during tense times.

For Tiderman, the days were similarly up and down.

Some days he would score a choice assignment that let his two-man team range deep into remote villages, scouting for enemy gunmen and sketching out street maps for infantrymen to follow. Or he would plunge far ahead of the main force, swimming canals, breaching barbed wire fences and staking out positions invisible to the enemy. At those moments, he felt the glimpse of glory he once imagined in military life. This was war, his war.

But other days were frustrating. He would spend long, tense hours waiting for missions that never happened, then learn that another sniper team had seen action elsewhere.

One night in the suburbs of Baghdad, after a wearying day of house-to-house searches that turned up few of the Syrian and Jordanian guerrillas they were hunting, a small team of Marines entered a terrified village that had been struck by an errant U.S. artillery barrage. A mother had been killed and several children maimed. The Marines struggled to communicate in their few words of Arabic, as enraged village men shouted a single unanswerable question: Why?

That evening, Tiderman and I sat, exhausted, in the fallow crop field where Bravo Company had set up for the night. All around us were the tinking sounds of shovels carving into the hard soil, as the grunts dug fighting holes by the fading light. We laughed bitterly about the day's fight against an absent foe. Everyone knew about the civilian casualties, and the horror hung in the air. But we were even more concerned with what lay ahead, what nightmare could be waiting in Baghdad's dark heart.

Two days later, on the hot, hazy morning of April 8, the battalion rumbled across a pontoon bridge on the Diyala River. A fierce fight had raged for two days here between Marines and Republican Guard units and guerrillas. We rolled among the bullet-scarred buildings and scorched woods, over the bodies of Iraqi men still littering the roadway and past the charred hulks of vehicles still burning. We headed into an industrial complex, where ricocheting bullets whined overhead. The infantry fanned out into the colorless landscape. Again came the ugly chorus of gunfire, first the rat-tat-tat of M-16s and AK-47s and then the deep thuds of machine guns.

The snipers searched for gun positions. As they climbed up the spindly metal ladder, Tiderman thought to himself how high the roof seemed to be.

Lying on the warehouse floor, in the moments before his world went black, Tiderman wondered if he would ever walk again. He lay motionless on the dusty cement, surrounded by old air-conditioning units, junked desks and odd bits of office equipment. He had landed face down, but the 100 pounds of equipment he carried apparently had cushioned the fall.

Alone in the strange, dreamy moment before the pain set in, he wondered if he was going to be captured. Outside, the crackle of gunfire continued, broken by sporadic blasts from a shotgun or machine gun. He wondered if he would be drinking his meals through a straw for the rest of his life. In high school he had seen the disabled kids that his mother cared for. If I'm ever paralyzed, he once told his mom, just find a way to help me die, because I don't ever want to live like that. Warm blood coursed down from his eyebrow, over his left eye and onto the floor.

Out in the sun, a couple of hundred yards away, I was standing with corpsman Jaimer Cadang, the senior medic for Bravo Company, when an urgent call came over the radio: "Sniper down." I joined Cadang and other Marine medics as they climbed into their assault vehicle and tore off down the road, pulling up moments later beside the warehouse.

Inside, the cavernous building was dim and dusty. Cadang, 27, an even-tempered Filipino-American from California, rushed toward the crumpled figure on the floor, where another corpsman was already checking for signs of life. Standing off to the side, I looked up at the jagged patch of sunlight beaming through the roof 50 feet above us. The figure on the ground looked dead.

The corpsmen, working intently, yelled questions at Tiderman - "What's your name? Where does it hurt?" - while groping for injuries.

"My leg hurts real bad," Tiderman moaned, as they rolled him slowly onto his back.

Both arms and hands lay at madly contorted angles like a broken doll's, and his left foot sat flat on the ground, the wrong way.

"Get those boots off and check for a pulse," Cadang said.

A gunnery sergeant gingerly sliced through Tiderman's left pant leg, moving up until he revealed the wet, white bone bursting through the sniper's thigh. The battalion surgeon was there now and he called out for anything to use as a splint. An officer picked up an old desk chair and smashed it to bits, handing the wooden pieces to the doctor. A massive crash somewhere outside shook the ground.

The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Christopher Conlin, knelt over Tiderman's face. "You married yet?" the colonel whispered. "Because wait until you see the Navy nurses on that hospital ship."

Tiderman, his veins coursing with pain killers, laughed weakly. His face was caked with blood from his forehead. I stood off to the side, unable to help or say anything useful. Instead, I scribbled.

The colonel stepped away and stared up at the gaping hole in the roof. "This guy is lucky to be alive," he said quietly to the gunnery sergeant beside him.

"Will I still look pretty?" Tiderman asked of no one in particular.

The men lifted Tiderman on a special stretcher and carried him out into the sun. A helicopter, emerging from the smoky distance, circled once and sank down onto the dusty lot. They loaded Tiderman inside and the chopper lifted off, banking and nosing hard toward the horizon.

On the helicopter, slipping in and out of consciousness, Tiderman knew he was hurt badly, but had no recollection of the accident. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the medics strapping his leg into a traction splint, trying to align the bones. His leg looked oddly elongated, he thought, as in a cartoon.

Several hours later, I wrote the story of Tiderman's fall without using his name. A 21-year-old sniper, I called him. In case he died, commanders didn't want his parents to read it first in the newspaper. I turned on my satellite phone and sent the story through the ether to the Chicago Tribune.

Within a day, the 1st battalion was battling its way into Baghdad and by nightfall it had set up camp on the battered campus of the University of Baghdad. After a couple of days, I found the time to use the satellite phone to read several weeks' worth of e-mail. There was a message about my article on the sniper.

"I am writing to obtain any information about the 21-year-old Marine who fell through the roof on Tues. morning," the message said. "I believe it is my son, Patrick." At his home in Florida, the author of the e-mail, David Tiderman, had received a phone call from the Marine Corps telling him that his son was hurt, but they had provided no details.

In Illinois, Ann Stephens' 12-year-old daughter, Cassie, got the call. A Marine on the other end asked to speak to her mother, and Cassie immediately thought that her brother was dead. Their mother was out, she managed to say, but she'd have her call back when she got home.

Cassie ran upstairs and found an enlarged photo of Patrick that her mother kept beside the bed. It was a shot of him in his crisp dress uniform, standing beside a Christmas tree with an angel on top, the angel visible just over his shoulder. It was silly, Ann thought, but somehow the picture with the angel gave her comfort. Cassie held the picture and cried.

When her mother got home and called the Marines, she learned that Patrick had suffered injuries to his skull, arms and legs. She tried not to imagine the worst, but her mind returned to her son's own morbid vision: She didn't want to be feeding him through a tube for the rest of his life.

I called David Tiderman from Baghdad and unloaded all the details I could remember - quotes, smells, medical tidbits - not pausing much to hear his replies. My retelling ended with the chopper taking off with his son. I'm sorry, I said, but that's all I know.

He asked me if I had children. No, I said.

"Until you do, you'll never know what this call means to me," he said.

Three weeks to the day after Tiderman fell, I called him. I had returned to the United States a week earlier and was resettling into my life in New York City. I was paying the bills, eating good food and dodging the well-meaning questions: What was it like? How did it go? What do you think of the war? I didn't have quick answers, so I let them pass.

Like many injured Marines, Tiderman was at a naval hospital in Maryland. When I called him, he answered the phone with a weak croak. I'm amazed you can hold the phone, I said, by way of introduction. It was the first time he had tried to pick it up, he said with a laugh. He sounded good. We arranged a time that I could come and visit. Before I hung up, he asked me one other question: "My platoon, do they all think I'm an idiot?"

"An idiot?" I asked, puzzled.

"For falling through a roof. Sometimes I feel like an idiot."

The National Naval Medical Center is a tidy, lush campus of hospitals in Bethesda, Md., just outside Washington, D.C. Tiderman's room was in a pin-drop-quiet ward on the fifth floor.

I arrived just before noon. He smiled and reached out to shake my hand with a big swollen right arm covered in plastic and metal. I asked him how he was doing.

"I'm happy to be alive. I should've been dead," he said. "In a couple of years, I'll be back to 100 percent, so I don't have much to complain about."

He looked like a skinny, bionic version of the Marine I had met in Kuwait, his arms and leg now laced with stitches and sprouting metal rods. On the outside of his right arm, a robotic-looking hinge ran parallel to his arm and elbow, the pinholes sinking into the skin between the tattooed words, "U.S. Marine." The innards of his right wrist were no longer his; they were all metal now.

He had a fresh scar above his left eye where they inserted 15 stitches over a hairline fracture. His left kneecap was broken. Rods and plates held together his left leg and his left arm. On his neck was a small scar left by a filter that had been inserted in an artery after he had circulatory complications at a military hospital in Germany.

He faced months of rehabilitation. Some of it would be in military hospitals, and some of it would be at home in Illinois. His future with the Marines was unclear. He wanted to go back to his sniper platoon, even if it meant inventorying other people's gear and keeping track of vacation days.

He will regain most of his strength and his mobility, doctors say, but never achieve the snipers' top fitness levels.

"I'll never be able to run like that again," he said, with resignation. That means he will never become a fully certified sniper, a "hog." His battlefield commander could grant him the title by fiat, but it's too soon to know if that will happen, he said. He changed the subject: What did I remember about the day he got hurt?

I scribbled a primitive diagram of the warehouse, with a stick figure sprawled out on the floor with squiggles for arms. He held it and smiled, but didn't say much.

Being at the hospital was overwhelming at times for Tiderman. The assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. William Nyland, had arrived one day and pinned a purple heart to his T-shirt while the nurses clapped. Another night, they wheeled him and some other patients down to the Hooters restaurant in town, and the waitresses planted big kisses on their cheeks.

It was nice, he said, but most of all he just wanted to get home.

He knew he was lucky. All he had to do was think of the Marine down the hall who was paralyzed from the waist down. Sometimes, he would go down to the visitors lounge and talk to the Marine's father. "But what do you say to someone like that?" he asked me on the phone, some weeks later. "I'm sorry?"

He couldn't help thinking that if he had twisted a little in the air on the way down and landed a few inches to either side, that would be him in that chair for the rest of his life. And why shouldn't it be? He hadn't done anything differently than anyone else.

In hospitals, there is too much time to think.

A few days later, Tiderman rolled slowly out from the airport security gate into an applauding crowd of relatives. He leaned on the armrest of his wheelchair, smiling, in a gray T-shirt and black-and-white athletic pants.

His grandfather, Jim Stephens, had arranged for some painted signs: "Thank You Patrick. We are so proud of you." "Thank you for what you are doing for our country."

More than a dozen relatives were there. His 14-year-old brother, Luke, and his sister, Cassie, were there. She gave him a weak hug, as if she half-expected him to break. "You look skinny," his aunt said.

A television reporter put a microphone under his chin and asked him some rapid-fire questions. "I'm really happy to be home," he replied, his eyes darting around the nervous faces around him. "Too bad my buddies are still in Iraq. But hopefully they'll be home soon."

The family made its way out toward the curb while someone ran to get the car. Then their questions began.

"Did you hear bullets going overhead?" asked his uncle.

Before he could answer, someone else asked: "Did you hear bombing?"

"Was there a lot of support from the citizens?"

He started to answer some of the questions, but let others float by.

They pulled up to his mother's two-story white house with its yellow trim. There had been too much to think about to remember to take down the Christmas lights. But someone had been sure to put a big yellow plastic bow on the squeaky porch door.

I stopped by a few days later, on a Saturday morning, when the house was filled with the smells of coffee and the sound of kids.

Tiderman was in the dining room, flipping through construction-paper get-well cards sent by some schoolchildren. Ann Stephens poured me a cup of coffee. She has her son's large eyes and bright smile. She said she had aged 30 years in three months, that she and Patrick had been through a lot together, like marriages breaking up and loved ones dying. But nothing had prepared them for this.

"He's going to be fine," Ann said. "I can tell. He's my son."

She thinks a lot these days about the mothers whose sons did not come back. She was almost one of them. She wonders if a 21-year-old really understands that life itself can be a blessing.

"He'll go on with his life. He's lucky," she said.

Tiderman was having a hard time with the hero stuff. People called him a hero all the time now. They told him he had served his country and served it well. On the one hand, he appreciated it. But it stung. He would much rather be back in Iraq, sweating out the last tense weeks overseas and dreaming of being home. He never asked for this, he thinks.

Sitting in the dining room, I asked him again why he had wondered if his platoon thought he was an idiot.

"I came home early because I got hurt, because I fell through a roof," he said. "They're still over there in Iraq, and I'm here. It's tough."

Most of the time, he keeps such thoughts to himself, knowing that other Marines are worse off or dead. Besides, those aren't the things people want to hear about the high-tech war they watched live from the battlefield, the war they debated at dinner tables. Instead they want answers to the big questions: Was it just or unjust? Was it worth the cost in lives and money? Was it really successful?

But up close, the war was not a sweeping historic event in which people could draw clear conclusions about difficult moral issues. For Tiderman and others like him, it was a tangle of private successes and failures, small stories of young men and women who hoped to go home honorably and unhurt. For them, the Iraq war will always be a chaotic and imperfect memory. Tiderman didn't ask for that memory, but that is what he got. That was his war.

He gets out of the Marines in September 2004. "I'd like to go to college," he said. "I'd like to study business, maybe become a Chicago firefighter."

Sometime this summer, doctors will carve a piece of bone from his hip and use it to strengthen his right arm - one of an untold number of surgeries still to come. For now, he spends his days doing physical therapy, catching up on reading and listening to the fish tank bubble away the hours. He scribbles in a coloring book to strengthen his left hand, in case he will no longer be able to wield a pen with his right.

In the evenings, mother and son take walks along shaded sidewalks where kids ride bikes. Ann watches the ground for trouble spots that might trip him up. He walks slowly, favoring his good joints. In his legs, he feels flashes of both strength and weakness. He is getting used to it.

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