When the fighting stops

Kabul, Dec 11: After surviving four tours of duty, a suicide bomb and a bullet wound to the chest, Sgt. Karl Martin wonders whether he'll ever again feel so intensely alive now that his war is almost over.

Sgt. Martin, a 27-year-old Marine, has been going off to fight his entire adult life, and, in frank moments, he admits he's going to miss it.

"In a way, it just feels like what I was supposed to do," he said at his base in Sangin, Afghanistan.

The sentiment is shared by his commander, Capt. Sean Ramirez, who said he felt aimless after returning home from Afghanistan last year. He hit the bars, played videogames and gained 20 pounds. He began looking for a way back to the war before it was over.

"When I was in Afghanistan as a platoon commander, I had a task. I had a purpose," said Capt. Ramirez, a 28-year-old from Lakeville, Pa., who led three dozen men in near-daily firefights. "Every day I knew what I was going to do."

The U.S. has withdrawn from Iraq and is winding down in Afghanistan, with a plan to pull out most troops by the end of 2014. Some 2.4 million Americans have served in the two conflicts, many deploying three, four or five times since the Sept. 11 hijackings triggered the U.S. engagement abroad.

For troops who grew up at war, the coming peace may prove complicated. Many combat veterans are only too glad to shed their uniforms. There is relief at making it back to the comfort of family and friends, to beer and baths.

But with peace looming, many others fear they will never again experience the vividness and sense of mission that war offers. There also are practical anxieties. Some worry about landing civilian jobs that pay less or offer fewer benefits than their military positions.

Capt. Ramirez dreads boredom most of all. He spent his second tour under attack almost every time he and his men left their Afghan outpost. "That was everything I wanted," he said. "An infantry platoon in the closest thing there is to a front line."

On the captain's current tour—his third—he and Sgt. Martin have been in Sangin, one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. But it has been a disappointment and, Capt. Ramirez fears, a taste of what to expect in a peacetime military. Instead of patrolling fields along the Helmand River, he and his men have stayed largely in a secure base advising Afghan troops who do the fighting, a big step in the handoff of security responsibilities to Kabul.

During the many slow moments of his days, Capt. Ramirez adds to his iPhone list of future peacetime pursuits: cliff diving, big-game hunting, ice climbing, riding motocross and running with the bulls.

"The war's over," he said. "Now is the rest of my life going to have to be turbulent for me to enjoy it? I think so."

His commander in Sangin, Lt. Col. Tom Przybelski, has gone to extraordinary lengths to prolong his wartime service. He was on patrol in Fallujah, Iraq, in October 2006, when he approached a metal push cart in a field of rubble. Hidden inside was an artillery shell with a radio-controlled trigger. Lt. Col. Przybelski was 10 feet away when it exploded. Shrapnel and grit peppered his legs. Flying rocks pulverized his right eye and temporarily blinded his left.

His later nightmares weren't of the explosion but of the insurgent shelling that pounded the base as he lay naked and blind at the field hospital. He did sit-ups in his hospital bed to stay in shape.

He recovered vision in his left eye. Technicians at the Naval hospital in Bethesda, Md., painted a blue iris on a white plastic insert and taught him to position it convincingly in his empty right socket.

Gen. Michael Hagee, then-commandant of the Marine Corps, visited him at the hospital. "Keep leading Marines," Gen. Hagee told the colonel. Lt. Col. Przybelski recalled thinking that the remark "felt like an order or a request."

When the regimental commander, Brig. Gen. David Berger, later called Lt. Col. Przybelski into his office and asked about his plans, the colonel said he wanted to return to combat. It was, in part, because of the commandant's words. He also missed his job.

Gen. Berger, then a colonel, paused. "Well," he said, "an officer has to shoot, move and communicate."

Lt. Col. Przybelski, a 40-year-old native of Spartanburg, S.C., taught himself to shoot a rifle left-handed and to aim a pistol with his left eye. He passed the physical-fitness test and resumed long-distance trail running and solo winter camping, hobbies that forced him to rely on hard-earned skills.

Two months after he was wounded, he was back in Fallujah. "I wanted to come back to the war, to the most warlike piece of the war," he said. "I think a person misses the intensity, the seriousness of purpose, having the authority."

Sgt. Martin, who is from Chelsea, Ala., may feel more trepidation about returning to peacetime life than any of the other Marine advisers leaving Sangin this month after a yearlong tour.

The 6-foot, 175-pound sergeant with dirty-blond hair and a boxer's forehead was the high-school quarterback who dated a cheerleader. After high-school graduation in 2004, he waited tables at Applebee's and sold hunting and fishing gear at a sporting-goods store.

He was an easy catch for the Marine recruiter who worked out of a local strip mall, next to a barber shop, a nail salon and the Food Lion. The young man wanted to fight. "I just joined the Marine Corps to get over here," he said in his Alabama drawl. "I didn't join it to get an education." He married the cheerleader, Donna, in 2006, before he left for Iraq on his first tour.

The deployment was a letdown. His job was processing detainees.

On his second tour, to Fallujah in 2007, he saw his first firefights. But the deployment was marred when one of his Marines flipped a Humvee. Sgt. Martin was held responsible because his man didn't have a driver's license. The Marines docked him a month's pay and put a blot on his record.

Three months into the seven-month stint, he was driving through downtown Fallujah when a man wearing a vest filled with explosives walked up to Sgt. Martin's Humvee and blew himself up.

The sergeant suffered no visible injuries. But the next day his appendix ruptured, unleashing a wave of bacteria in his abdomen. The Marines concluded that the suicide attack and his burst appendix were unrelated. He underwent three operations and missed the rest of the tour.

Back at Camp Lejeune, N.C., he taught infantry skills to junior Marines but lost the job over an extramarital affair, a violation of military rules. His marriage survived. The Marines knocked him down from sergeant to corporal.

Sgt. Martin earned the rank back before he deployed to Afghanistan for his third tour at the end of 2010, with Kilo Co., 3rd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment. He led a squad of Marines in Marjah, a farm village crisscrossed by irrigation canals.

On Feb. 4, 2011, Sgt. Martin and his squad were walking on patrol when villagers, who had been going about their business, suddenly vanished from view. One man remained, talking on a cellphone, a likely spotter for insurgents. The patrol fired a small flare in the man's direction, and he fled.

Moments later, as the Marines angled across a field, they came under heavy fire. They were seeking cover in a dry irrigation ditch when the bomb exploded. It was a buried metal tube aimed along the irrigation ditch and loaded with explosives, bullets, ball-bearings and spark plugs.

The wave of shrapnel hit the first two Marines in the legs. Sgt. Martin was third in line. A bullet, shrapnel from the bomb, missed his body-armor chest plate, slammed into the flesh just beneath his left shoulder and pivoted into his lung. Air leaked out into his chest cavity, crushing a lung.

He started to radio for a medevac helicopter. The next thing he remembered was waking up in the operating room at a rear base.

After a week, he was moved to the Army hospital in Germany, where doctors kept the wound open to avoid infection. Weeks later, he arrived at Camp Lejuene. His wife, Donna, and his infant son, Mason, were waiting.

Mrs. Martin, age 27, worked from home handling payroll for an Alabama thrift-store company. After her husband's return, she learned to pull bloody packing out of his wound and stuff in fresh gauze with a long swab until the hole closed. It was "gross," she said. Sgt. Martin talked her through it.

Surgeons had cut away muscle under his Sgt. Martin's left arm, leaving it so weak he couldn't lift a soda can. He was also diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress. When he slept, his mind wandered back to the ambush, the ditch and the explosion. Military doctors recommended a discharge from the service.

Sgt. Martin, however, set a goal of returning to full duty by the time the men in his company returned home in July 2011. To avoid being discharged, he would have to run three miles in less than 33 minutes, do 100 sit-ups in two minutes and manage three pull-ups.

After his prescribed physical therapy, Sgt. Martin would hit the weight room on his own. Three days before his self-imposed deadline, he successfully completed the run and sit-ups. He also did 14 pull-ups.

A few days after the return of Kilo Co., Sgt. Martin joined the other men in formation outside the redbrick headquarters building at Camp Lejeune. As the formation broke up, Sgt. Martin made a beeline for the company commander, Capt. Justin Huber. "The best thing for me to do right now is get back out there," Sgt. Martin told him.

He learned he could return to Afghanistan as an adviser to the Afghan army and pitched it to his wife as a good career move. Sgt. Martin didn't mention his urge to get back to the fighting, but Mrs. Martin had suspected for months that he was itching for war. Still, she said, she was "quietly shocked" when he told her at the kitchen table that he was signing up for a one-year tour.

Mrs. Martin gave her husband a leather-bound journal. On the inside cover she glued a photo of Mason in a plaid shirt and blue-jean overalls. In neat printing she wrote: "So, here we go, Deployment #4. This is going to be the longest one yet, but I'm counting down the days until we're together again." She coated the sole of Mason's foot in black ink and stamped his footprint on the page.

In December 2011, Sgt. Martin returned to Afghanistan. From there, he addressed his journal entries to his wife. In January, he wrote how much he missed dressing Mason and fitting him in his high chair. "We should somehow live like I'm about to deploy so we don't take any moment for granted," he wrote.

On Feb. 3, he wrote: "What I can't believe is tmrw will be a year since I got hurt. If you told me that day I would be back here in Afghanistan I would have said, 'Yeah right, that's crazy and will never happen.' But I guess you never say never."

Over the summer, Sgt. Martin began planning his next career move in the Marine Corps, applying to teach again at the School of Infantry.

In September, he received an email from regimental headquarters informing him that the Marine Corps had rejected his application. The note cited a "pattern of misconduct"—in other words, the extramarital affair and the Humvee accident. It felt like a betrayal, Sgt. Martin said. After eight years, four tours and a Purple Heart, the Marine Corps didn't want him anymore.

He hesitated a day before he emailed Donna with the news. "It feels like I was just told I have Cancer and will die in a couple of years," he wrote.

Mrs. Martin felt sick to her stomach when she read the email. They had bought a house near Camp Lejeune, and a second son is due Dec. 26. She feared he would face a daunting civilian job market. Some 10% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were unemployed in October, compared with 6.3% of all veterans and 7.9% of the overall workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mrs. Martin had been hoping for a promotion. "Why are they doing this to us?" she asked her husband. "What can you do so we can stay in the Marine Corps?"

Lt. Col. Przybelski and Capt. Ramirez pledged to help. Sgt. Martin appealed to the regiment's sergeant major, who made inquiries on his behalf. The message back: Sgt. Martin's Marine Corps career would be over when his enlistment ends next year.

During the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the military was hungry for experienced combat leaders, his commanders said, and Sgt. Martin could have easily re-enlisted a few years ago. Now the Marine Corps is shrinking to fit the new peace and will cut forces by 10% from its peak of 202,000. Under the circumstances, the sergeant major said, one blemish is too many.

"I want you to be mentally prepared in the event you are not retained," the sergeant major wrote to Sgt. Martin.

Soon, Sgt. Martin will begin hunting for a position in the workaday world to replace his $59,000-a-year job leading men into battle.

"Guys and girls back home go through the same thing every month," he said. "Seasons go by and they do the same thing. I guess that's something I'll have to get used to."

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