Marine says his goodbye to war

Chris Van Wagoner has the face of a teenager and the experiences of a war-weary soldier.

During an eight-month tour in Iraq, the 24-year-old Salt Lake City native was one of 54 men in a Marine military police unit assigned the dangerous task of protecting convoys traveling in and out of a central Iraq military camp.

Some days he traveled from the camp near Ar Ramadi to Baghdad, Tikrit and most of the other Iraqi towns commonly recognized now from news headlines. Some treks were short, such as the 25 miles between Ar Ramadi and Fallujah. His longest was a seven-day sleepless tour to the Syrian border.

It is one of the military's most treacherous jobs, because convoys are big, slow-moving targets for insurgents.

Imagine protecting a parade. Van Wagoner says that's what it was like securing the lumbering military convoys day after day. The shortest convoys were 10 to 15 vehicles — slow, heavy trucks carrying food, supplies and troops over rough, dirty roads. The longest stretched for a mile and a half and was nearly 30 vehicles long.

"We never had enough manpower to go around," Van Wagoner said. This left the platoon feeling naked and exposed and using next-best strategies for protection, Van Wagoner explained at his Glendale home. Military police were on the first and last trucks, and a mounted gun was in every fifth vehicle, he explained.

And 100-meter intervals between trucks is safest, he added. "So if one gets hit by an IAD, then it takes out that one truck and no one else."

Van Wagoner is soft-spoken, and he talks easily of bombs and bullets that fell and flew around him every day, of frequent ambushes, of the ways he and others went about "assaulting the attack" against insurgents who fired upon the convoys.

After eight months in the far-away country, war-front jargon still slips easily into his speech. The "impact area." The "kill zone."

Incidents from early in his tour are indelibly cut in his memory. "Like the mortar that hits right next to you when you are sleeping, and the roof starts caving in around you," he says. "You never forget those things."

So no way will he go back. Despite lucrative offers, he will not return to Iraq.

A private security firm offered him $12,000 a month to work in Iraq, and the Marine dangled a $20,000 offer to sign on for another four years.

But in March, Van Wagoner walked away from it all.

He says he was never so happy as the day he was discharged from the Marines. It's just a "crappy situation" in Iraq right now, he says, and he has spent enough time in the U.S. Marine Corps.

"It was a good experience, but it's just not for me any more," Van Wagoner said.