Even a homeward journey from Baghdad remains perilous.
By: David Campbell
For Maurice Harding, whose son, Justin, is a Marine sergeant serving in Iraq, worries linger despite the end of hostilities.
This week, President Bush declared that major combat in Iraq is over, but was careful to avoid declaring victory or an end to the war. The administration is seeking evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the country and sporadic resistance reportedly is continuing there.
For Mr. Harding, a resident of Fisher Avenue in Princeton Borough, the war won’t be over until his son, a 33-year-old Marine combat soldier who took part in the capture of Baghdad, is out of harm’s way.
Though he says his son’s platoon has left the Baghdad region and begun the withdrawal to Kuwait and eventually stateside, it’s clear from daily news reports of scattered shooting and grenade attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq that the homeward journey remains a perilous one.
"It’s been a nerve-wracking experience," Sgt. Harding’s father said this week. "The media’s saying the Army will be taking over from the Marines in trying to establish order there."
Mr. Harding said he received word a couple of days ago indicating that his son was until recently in the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriya, the site of fierce Iraqi resistance in the early days of the war.
"This indicates that he’s moving back toward Kuwait," Mr. Harding continued. "But there have been sporadic incidents of Marines being shot at, and there’s clearly a lot of variation in the response of the people there."
Mr. Harding said he has heard little from his son, a sergeant in Weapons Company 2nd Battalion 5th Marines, since the start of the war about six weeks ago.
There have been no e-mails from the military’s so-called morale computer. There have been only two letters, one from Kuwait following Sgt. Harding’s deployment in February, the other written in early April from a town called Diwaniya, south of Baghdad, as the Marines prepared to enter the Iraqi capital city.
"They were preparing for a MOUT assault Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain," Mr. Harding said, reading the second letter. "He says that kind of operation gets heavy casualties and he’s not sure he’s going to make it."
The April letter was the last word from his son directly, but he has since received occasional updates from the company chaplain, like the one a couple of days ago indicating he was heading south again, which are filtered back to Sgt. Harding’s home base at Camp Pendleton in California. The Marine has been on the move throughout the war.
But despite the limited communication, Sgt. Harding has conveyed some sense of his experience, which in at least one of his letters he referred to as his "personal Vietnam in the desert."
"He’s been shot at by Russian P-55 tanks, he’s been shot at by civilians and by soldiers dressed as civilians using AK-47s," Mr. Harding said. "He’s been shelled. I’ve only had one letter since he started out on this march to Baghdad. He says he’s seen enough bodies covered in ponchos to recognize that he’s mortal. In writing to me, he was trying to come to terms with it."
Sgt. Harding grew up in Princeton, went to Princeton High School and was a star on his soccer team. According to his father, he bounced around a bit after high school, finally earning a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.
How, then, did he end up in the Marines?
"He could have gone into teaching high school or at a university, but he decided he had had enough of school and wanted to do something different," Mr. Harding said.
There was a recruitment center in Bridgeport. "He looked at the Army and the Marines, decided the Army was too sloppy and he wanted something more disciplined," Mr. Harding quipped.
Just months before his 28th birthday, the cutoff for joining the Marines, he signed on for a tour of duty and last year signed on for a second. Why?
"He’s always been a bit ambivalent, but he just loves the people he’s with," Mr. Harding said. "He started off as a grunt, doing all the really challenging stuff the grunts get into. It was physically tough, and he was 10 years older than the other recruits."
Sgt. Harding did manage to get a call through from the war zone via a Red Cross satellite telephone, Mr. Harding added to his wife, Yuriko, in California, who gave birth to their third child on April 11. The son’s name is Maxwell.
The last he heard, Mr. Harding said, Camp Pendleton has suffered 23 fatalities so far and several hundred injuries.
He said there’s talk of his son returning home in July. "But I don’t think he knows," Mr. Harding said.

