‘I hope you are proud of me’

The brief life and tragic death of a Jamaica Plain Marine

Howard Manly

“My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

— President George Bush, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln adorned with “Mission Accomplished” banner, May 1, 2003

Nearly 500 days later, on Aug. 25, 2004, militiamen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr were wreaking havoc on U.S. forces in the Iraqi town of Al-Najaf.

Fighting had been heavy for the last five weeks, and now a platoon of Alpha Raiders led by fire team leader Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo, known as Dondo by his fellow Marines, was about 250 yards away from a mosque filled with rebel soldiers.

The orders were to attack and clear a nearby four-story hotel. The official accounts tell a harrowing tale.

Enemy machine gun and sniper fire came from three different directions, and Dondo, already the recipient of a medal of valor for selfless bravery, returned fire.

It ended three hours later. A sniper’s bullet hit Dondo in the left temple as he moved from one hotel room to another, returning gunfire and checking on the defensive positions of other Marines.

He was 20 years old, not too long out of Blue Hills Regional Technical High School where he was known as the kid always smiling, always making others laugh. It wasn’t that long ago that neighbors saw his father Carlos with Alex, just a boy at the time, walking through Jamaica Plain, playing soccer on a nearby field or rowing on the pond.

Some remember the time that Carlos pitched a tent and a hammock for Alex and his younger brother Brian under a shady tree right next to the soccer field at the corner of Washington and Moraine.

That life was a stark contrast from where Alex died in a war that noisily marches along, most often in the background of everyday American life.

Unless it’s your son.

It’s been a little more than two years after his death, and it appears that his life, brief as it was, is still very much alive — a piece here, a piece there, all stitched together on different websites across the Internet.

It started with the emails that people have posted on the Fallen Heroes Memorial.

There’s one from a cousin living in upstate New York. Another from a Roslindale neighbor who knew Alex when their mothers were friends and they were kids. And there’s even a posting from Belgium.

“You probably know that the war in Iraq has been a major point of discussion over here in Europe,” wrote Lt. Jan van Gent. “For us, it has always been a war that was fought far away by people we don’t know.”

Leonard Wahl of Spring, Texas, wrote to tell of his meeting with Alex’s father Carlos. “Today I met Alex’s father,” Wahl wrote. “I am also the father of a fallen soldier, U.S. Army Sgt. Gregory L. Wahl.”

The young Wahl was killed in action on May 3, 2004 in Balad, Iraq, almost a year from that fretful day when President Bush announced the prevailing of American forces in Iraq.

“It was an emotional meeting to talk with Carlos,” Wahl wrote before making a poignant observation, given the acrimony over U.S. immigration policy, “… that many soldiers serving our country come from many Spanish countries.”

One writer readily admitted that it took him awhile before he could get his thoughts on paper.

“Dondo, sorry it has taken so long for me to say good bye,” wrote Cpl. Jarred Dorthauer of College Station, Texas. “I have been kind of thinking about this for the past couple of years. Now I’m out of the Marine Corps and all it does is make me look back on everything…

“I was standing right next to you when it happened,” Dorthauer explained. “I wish with everything in me there was something I could do…”

By all accounts, Alex wanted to be a Marine, chose to be one, a decision he made by enlisting through the Marine Corps Delayed Entry Program on Aug. 15, 2001.

Because he had turned 17 ten days earlier, the Marines required one parent to co-sign his papers. That person was Alex’s mother, now divorced from Carlos. He was the last person to find out.

The decision wasn’t his father’s choice. Carlos Arredondo had emigrated from Costa Rica to America when he was a teenager, working all sorts of jobs, a bus driver one day, a landscaper the next. He knew how America treated its veterans and didn’t want any part of that for his child.

“When I first came to this country, I saw Vietnam vets sleeping on park benches,” he told an interviewer. “This is the most powerful country in the world and they treat their veterans like that?”

His son saw the Marines as a way to pay for college. He knew both sides of his family — his mother, his father and stepmother — didn’t have much money. He didn’t want to burden his family. So he served. Not once but twice, from January to August 2003 and again in June 2004.

But Alex was conflicted. In a letter dated Jan. 23, 2003, he wrote about his turmoil.

“Just because I wonder ‘what-if’ doesn’t mean I’m not proud,” he wrote. “It doesn’t mean like I feel I made the wrong decision. It doesn’t mean I have any regrets. I’m still proud to be fighting for my country. I feel like, if I’m not helping one way I should still do all that I can to help Operation Enduring Freedom.”

It was all so weird. One day in Canton, Mass., the next heading toward Kuwait.

“This is hard for me to comprehend,” Alex wrote. “It seems like my whole life changed in an instant. Yesterday I was in a classroom learning about trigonometry and history. I graduated, went to boot camp, went to school, graduated as a grunt. I was sent across the country to train. Now I’m being sent across the world to fight. Today, I’m in a classroom learning about tactical urban combat and nuclear, biological and chemical warfare…”

His father couldn’t be more proud, despite his misgivings.

“His reasons were beautiful,” Arredondo would say later. “He believed in helping the Iraqi people. He wanted them to be free.”

A few days before he was killed, Arredondo received what turned out to be the final telephone call from Alex. He had been fighting, Arredondo recalled his son telling him, “Dad, I hope you are proud of me and what I’m doing.”

Arredondo told him, “Alex, I’m proud of you no matter what. There’s nothing you could do to make me lose the pride I feel for you.”

That pride almost killed Carlos Arredondo.

It happened on his 44th birthday, when three blue-uniformed Marines showed up at his door. They were living in Hollywood, Fla. at the time, and Carlos was painting a picket fence he had just installed. Three months earlier, Carlos and Melida had finally bought a single-family home. Arredondo later explained the scene on CNN.

“I mean, I say, are you guys here to recruit some kids?” he recalled asking. “Because you guys are in the wrong house. The kids are next house, next door. And they respond to me by saying, ‘we are not here to recruit anyone’ … Perhaps it’s a nightmare. I need to wake up…”

After begging the Marines to leave for about 20 minutes, something snapped. All of a sudden Arredondo was running into the garage, grabbing a hammer and smashing the windows of the Marines’ van. And the dashboard. And the seats. Anything he saw, he hit.

He stopped for a moment, only to run back into the garage to grab a five-gallon tank of gasoline and an igniter.

Something happened. He was tussling with his mother. She was trying to calm him down, make him stop, stop pouring gasoline inside the car and splashing all over his body. But he accidentally pressed the button on the lighter.

“The next thing I knew,” he told CNN, the explosion “threw me out to the street, and I was on fire…”

That was on Aug. 25, 2004, his birthday, the day the Marines came to tell him that his son was dead. He turned 44 that day.

A month later, with second-degree burns over 26 percent of his body, Arredondo mustered enough strength to attend his son’s wake and funeral. He was in a stretcher, accompanied by two paramedics and heavily medicated on morphine.

“When I first approached the casket,” Arredondo told The Nation, “I thought it might be hard to recognize him, because we had not been told yet what killed him … But it was him. And seeing him laying flat in a casket, I thought, he’s not breathing and that he looks a little different, a little older.

“That his hair is a little bit longer. Wanting to reach him I was lifted off the stretcher and climb up to kiss him, to touch his head, his hands, his fingers, his shoulders, his legs, to see if they were still there. I lay on top of the casket, on top of my son, apologizing to him because I did nothing for him to avoid this moment. Nothing.”

The dead have a way of living.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino recently named a square on South and St. Rose streets in Jamaica Plain for Alex Arredondo. Several scholarships in Alex’s name have been started, and his father has taken to walking the streets across America, carrying a photograph of his son lying in a casket, dressed in his Marines’ uniform.

His wife Melida is right with him. She works at the Upham’s Corner Health Center. Armed with a master’s degree in public health, she works as program supervisor and has coordinated programs that help senior citizens, individuals who are HIV-positive, the disabled, linguistic and ethnic minorities and the uninsured.

Last weekend, she and her husband were invited to Crawford, Texas to celebrate a death, a birthday and a community of those forever linked by the Iraqi War. She too has a mission.

The way she sees it, there are two peace movements occurring simultaneously: the one against the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon; the other on the streets of inner city America.

“There needs to be a marriage,” she said. ”Those who are being recruited for the military are the same ones who are dying in their own neighborhoods due to over-proliferation of arms on the streets, due to poverty and due to witnessing the street violence that has become too commonplace.”

With little choices, some inner city teenagers are choosing the military as a way to get out. But that choice has real and often fatal consequences.

Arredondo sees it almost everyday. “I recently met a woman named Maria,” Arredondo said. “She’s also Cape Verdean. Her son was killed in Iraq on Feb. 4, 2006. She didn’t have anyone to talk to about her grief. People knew about me and somehow we managed to communicate. Grief has no bounds.”

Army Sgt. Daniel Londano died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He had graduated from Madison Park High School. There is a square in his memory on the corner of East Cottage and Dawes Street in Upham’s Corner.

Just last Saturday, the U.S. Army said that Spec. Edgardo Zayas, 29, died in Baghdad during combat operations. A roadside bomb exploded near his foot patrol, the statement said.

Zayas leaves behind a wife, two children and both parents.

He was from Dorchester, where his parents still live.