Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 29, 1992 TAG: 9202290075
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
POSTWAR MEMORIES
It was several weeks before Steve Garman stopped worrying about the M-16 he kept so close at hand during his stint in Operation Desert Storm.He'd given it back to the Marines after the ground war ended and year and two days ago. But back home in Catawba, far from the weapons of death, he would ask himself, with a start, where he'd put it.
When the U.S. Marines are at war, "your gun is your life," Garman says.
That's one of the few aftereffects he and his family have experienced following the most frightening months of their lives. Steve Garman, now 26, made it back safely from the Persian Gulf without firing a single round of live ammunition.
He survived the air war, the ground war and the postwar questions and congratulations from friends and neighbors. He even survived the birth of his daughter, Laura, about a month after he came home.
Now Garman, who left his Marine Reserve unit last summer, can joke about what he went through.
For Jennifer, his 23-year-old wife, the months he spent in the Persian Gulf preparing for and then fighting a war were no joke then and are no joke now. "It's almost like a bad dream," she says.
Indeed, the story of the war is as much the fear and worry it created at home as it is the Allies' aerial pounding of Iraqi troops and quick victory on the ground.
For many post-World-War-II babies, this war was the real thing - not Vietnam, which many were able to avoid thanks to their age or draft deferments of various kinds.
Watching it on TV was bad. Having a friend or relative over there was worse.
Perhaps the best way to tell this story is through the eyes of those who lived it.
It begins with Steve Garman's mother, Louise, recalling how she prayed that her son's Marine unit would not have go to the gulf, though she figured it was inevitable.
It continues with the Garmans and their then-pregnant daughter-in-law, Jennifer, carrying a cedar tree from the family's Catawba farm to a motel room near Camp Lejeune, N.C., so Steve could join them for Christmas - on Dec. 16.
It continues with Steve and his 120 fellow Marines from Company B, 4th Combat Engineer Battalion, flying to Saudi Arabia on Dec. 27. Saddam Hussein was at full bluster by then, and his threats about a "Mother of all Battles" in which Allied soldiers would boil in their own blood "seemed very real," Louise Garman says.
Steve suddenly was a world away, and his family didn't know exactly where. He called home infrequently, in the middle of the night, and he tried not to tell them that he was in the front lines by the Kuwait border or that he and his fellows would be among the first troops in if the ground war began.
At their ridgetop farm in Catawba, the Garmans planted themselves in front of the TV news until they couldn't take it any longer.
"It was on your mind when you went to bed and when you got up the next morning," says Frankie Garman, Steve's father, who himself left with Company B in 1950, when he was 18. That was during the Korean conflict. Luckily, he spent his tour in the States.
There was a frigid Sunday morning early last year when Frankie Garman attended a Methodist men's breakfast at the church in the center of Catawba. About 10 men sat at a long table over eggs, bacon and coffee, and naturally the subject of the possible ground war came up.
Frankie Garman, looking paler and older than usual, sat at the far end of the table and listened but didn't speak.
"It was hard," he admitted the other day. "It got a little easier, but it was real hard to talk about it. In fact, sometimes you couldn't talk about it."
Nobody could bring Steve home. But they could pray for him and call his parents and wife, and tell them how much they, too, worried and hoped for his safe return.
It was a testing time, and one of the most serious tests came when the activities of war protesters were pictured on television. The protesters didn't know her son, Louise Garman says; and, besides, he had no choice but to be there. He signed a contract with the Marines, knowing that facing war might be part of the deal.
You bet the protests bothered her. But then she came to an acceptance, thinking, "They have a right to do that. That's why he's there - to fight for their right to do it."
Steve's involvement reached its peak two days before the ground war began. The young sergeant and his squad swept 12 miles into Kuwait to explode some drainage tunnels that looked like they'd been used as passageways.
Later, safe in camp, he was told the mission had drawn fire from nearby Iraqis, but he hadn't noticed it. He does know that Iraqi soldiers came up to surrender - anywhere from 60 to 200 of them, he says.
The whole thing was a long way from the meat department at the Blacksburg Kroger store, where he works, and from his parents' rolling cattle farm.
Now, when he talks about the war, he is more likely to tell how he and his fellow Marines at first had tents in the desert but no cots. Then they got cots, but had their tents taken away. Finally they ended up sleeping in a bulldozed ditch - 20 or 30 Marines with a tarp over their heads.
He got so used to it that when he awoke next to Jennifer his first night home, he asked who she was.
Her response: "What's wrong with you?"
He tells how excited he and his buddies were when, at Camp Lejeune, they received their desert camouflage fatigues - and how they came to hate wearing the one pair each of them had, day after day in the desert sun.
He talks about the day in the desert when they were given live rounds of ammunition to replace the dummy ones they arrived with; how everyone grew solemn; and how he said a prayer, asking God to let him, when the war was over, turn in as many rounds as he received - which he did.
And then there was the first day of the ground war, when his convoy, the seventh one through, would speed along and stop suddenly, over and over again, in a battlefield version of the famed military procedure of hurry up and wait. And of the time they sped right past a group of Iraqi soldiers, who had to chase them to surrender.
And how those Iraqis and Americans approached each other warily, the Americans dropping down and taking cover, the demoralized Iraqis doing the same; the Americans rising and walking toward them, the Iraqis doing the same, again and again - a comic dance that made everyone feel ridiculous.
He remembers the yellow ribbons and the welcome-home signs hanging off trees and bushes lining Virginia 311 where it crosses into the close-knit Catawba Valley, and how lush and green the valley seemed in comparison with the sandy battlefield.
"I'll never take these mountains for granted again," he says.
He thinks of the desert only at odd times now, like when he's driving down the road and Reba McEntire's song "Rumor Has It" comes on the radio. He listened to that one on his Walkman while waiting for the ground war to begin.
The same with Clint Black's "Killin' Time." He did a lot of that, too.
"You get a funny feeling sometimes," he says.
But it's nothing like it was.