Ernesto Guerra joined the Army to make a home for his family in America. Two years after his death in Iraq, Ernesto lies in a Mexican cemetery, his mother grieves and his 12-year-old brother is a target of Army recruiters combing the streets of Long Beach
By Rachel Powers

ACCURATE, TIMELY, IN PERSON
When a U.S. Army soldier serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom is killed in the field, members of his unit record the death and its details on the “Casualty Feeder Card,” DA Form 1156. They send the card to the battalion commander and the battalion’s legal department, and then to the Casualty Assistance Center (CAC). The CAC notifies Army Human Resources Command by telephone, and drafts a report for the Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operation Center (CMAOC).

Unless battlefield conditions make reporting unusually difficult, casualty notification is expected to reach the CMAOC within 12 hours of death. Within one hour of that notification, the paperwork piling up like volcanic ash, the CMAOC contacts a Casualty Notification Officer (CNO). The CNO has just four hours to familiarize himself with the details of death, locate the next of kin, and notify them in person. Then the CNO has mere minutes to phone the Casualty Assistance Center to declare the job complete.

These are painful assignments. CNOs explain, through tears, that they have never forgotten a family—or that family’s reaction to the news the CNO is charged with communicating. But the requirements are simple and absolutely inviolable: notification must be accurate, timely, in person.

‘KILLED’
On July 29, 2005, Private Ernesto Guerra, of the 4-3 B rigade Troops Battalion, Third Infantry Division, died of massive internal injuries sustained in a Humvee accident in Baghdad. Late in the evening of that same day, a CNO arrived at the Springdale Apartments in West Long Beach. A security guard escorted him to Ernesto’s mother, Maria Valadez. The CNO discharged his duty: he told Maria of her son’s death.

On this occasion, accurate, timely and personal notification produced confusion: Maria speaks little English, the CNO spoke no Spanish, and Maria was already in shock at the sight of a uniformed officer at her door.
But there’s no country in the world in which a strange soldier at your door is good news, and in all of the English pouring from the soldier’s lips Maria heard clearly one word: “killed.”

Baffled, the CNO turned to Ernesto’s little brother Juan, who is bilingual. So Juanito—who had celebrated his 11th birthday only 12 days earlier—began to translate: he told his mother that her oldest son, Juanito’s brother and best friend, was dead.

This didn’t make any sense. Maria had just spoken to Ernesto, she told the officer, had talked to him at the very hour the CNO said Ernesto was supposed to have died. For an instant, Maria clung to this hope—that the officer had simply confused her Ernesto with some other family’s Ernesto, that her son was still alive. And then the CNO explained that her confusion hinged on the 11-hour time difference between Long Beach and Baghdad, and Maria began to understand.

The next-door neighbor looked in and saw Maria alone at the far end of the room, weeping. Juanito sat bewildered at the dining room table, surrounded by paperwork, the CNO explaining that Juanito needed to fill out the forms to document the notification.
The neighbor had seen enough. She stepped into the living room and took over. “Don’t you dare write anything on that paper,” she told Juanito. “I don’t care what it is. Don’t sign nothin’.”

SHALOM
I’ve driven Long Beach Boulevard a thousand times, which means I’ve passed Centro Shalom just as often without ever noticing. It’s a community center, and though Director Amelia Nieto cheerfully refuses to summarize its function that neatly, she’ll admit that for decades it has been a crucial resource for the poor in Long Beach.

Amelia has agreed to translate for Maria and me. They met years ago when Maria came to the center as a client; these days Maria volunteers there.

When I first visit the small storefront I am asked to sign in—my name and the reason for my visit. Previous entries include “phone turned off” and “SSI”; I print my information under someone who has written “restraining order.”

A battered table stacked high with loaves of bread dominates the back of the room; a few steps away there’s a well-stocked clothing bank. A few families—maybe four—wait for assistance; someone has given the kids bananas. I take a seat in the waiting area. After a few minutes a girl in her late teens, wearing a black T-shirt that says “I Love My Boyfriend,” asks me, “You doing your community service here?”

MASTER SERGEANT MARTINEZ
This is the first thing I learn from Maria: like any surviving parent or spouse of a soldier, when she lost Ernesto she inherited the U.S. Army. These are complex relationships: exhausting, infuriating, but frequently sustaining and lifelong. Initiated by that single visit from a CNO, it continues the following day with a visit from a Casualty Assistance Officer, or CAO, and lasts for as long as the next of kin desires. During this time the Army may coordinate access to crucial counseling services, yet deny the bereaved the opportunity to view files related to a casualty investigation. Survivors often feel as if the Army administration is Byzantine by design, the sole objective being to thwart any desire for information (and therefore closure); the same survivors will frequently come to regard their CAO as family. On one day, the sight of a soldier in uniform is unbearably sad; on another it is singularly comforting.

Maria’s CAO was Master Sergeant Anthony Martinez, and he quickly revealed himself to be, in Amelia’s words, “a godsend.” Aided by an Army translator, he apologized for the manner of Maria’s notification, guided her through confusing paperwork, and worked to secure her benefits. Most importantly, he coordinated Ernesto’s burial in San Francisco del Rincon, a city in the center of Mexico, and arranged for Maria’s safe conduct through international checkpoints despite her undocumented status. Then on August 12, two weeks after the notification, Sgt. Martinez escorted Maria to LAX to collect Ernesto’s remains.

LOSING A CHILD
We’ve been sitting on the back stoop of the Center for 45 minutes—Maria, Amelia and I—and Maria knows we are bound for the subject of Ernesto’s death. There’s no other place to go, and she is quiet, tense, sad.

I ask about LAX and she says, “It is like a movie that keeps playing in my head.”

Amelia urges her forward, but when Maria resists Amelia takes over the story herself.

ERNESTO COMES HOME
Coffins of Iraq war dead almost always arrive on the last plane of the night, and so it was late—after 10 p.m.—when Maria arrived at LAX, accompanied by Sgt. Martinez, Amelia Nieto, Juanito, Ernesto’s best friend Ismael, and Jose Anguiano, Juanito’s father and Maria’s partner of over 15 years, the man who helped raise Ernie from the time he was five. Sgt. Martinez walked straight to the Delta ticket counter, explained why they were there, and asked for help. Within minutes they were escorted through security to a gate. It was so odd, Amelia said, to march right in, to walk with such certainty, quickly, as if one knew exactly where one was going.

It was a typical LAX terminal gate—floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the ticket counter and people coming and going. Sgt. Martinez asked the gate attendant if there was a discreet place from which they could view the arrival of the coffin. The attendant ushered them to a door next to the jetway entrance. It opened onto a metal stairwell leading down to the tarmac; everyone stepped out into the night air and descended the stairs to a landing halfway down.

As she relates this story, Amelia turns to Maria and asks, in Spanish, what she felt on that landing. Then Amelia turns back to me and says, “Her feelings were, ‘This is somebody else’”—that this surreal event was all wrong, that the body in the coffin could not be her son’s.

The plane pulled up to the terminal. The coffin’s military escort appeared, a fellow officer who stood at attention by a conveyer belt on the tarmac. Maria began to cry. Sgt. Martinez turned to look up at the terminal behind him. He saw noses and hands pressed against the glass, perfectly still. He turned back to the plane. Everyone was silent. Soon, a white box came down the conveyer belt.

‘YOUR BABY FOREVER’
Amelia explains that though she and Maria talk every day, they’ve never spoken of that night.

“She says she doesn’t like to think about it, but I tell her she needs to,” Amelia says.

Maria takes a few deep breaths, trying hard to stop crying, but can’t, and manages to speak anyway.

“I feel horrible and empty, because I promised,” she begins. “We are afraid to go to the airport because of immigration. But Ernesto told me when he got home from Iraq to go look for him at the airport. He said, ‘Mama, wait for me at the door when I come back. And I’ll come back, and we’ll go home.’ But it was different. I never thought he would be like that. But I had promised him I would be there and I had to do what I promised.”

She stops, the sadness overwhelming her, and she says, “I am sorry. There are things I still can’t get over. I don’t know when I will be able to talk about this, without being . . . .”

Amelia abruptly stops translating, pulls Maria’s hand to her, and bends forward so she can look into Maria’s face: “Nunca. Nunca.” She shakes her head, and tells Maria in Spanish, “You’ll never be able to talk about this without pain. Never. He is your baby. El es tu bebe.”

THE MIRACLE OF ERNESTO
Someone collected Ernesto’s coffin, placed it on a cart, and drove the cart to a waiting hearse. The little party lingered until the cart disappeared. Amelia, closest to the bottom of the stairs with Maria, turned to go and was struck by the sight of Sgt. Martinez and the gate attendant weeping openly with everyone else.

The party made its way upstairs. The gate attendant opened the door to the terminal, and everyone stepped back inside.

“Now, I have been to LAX a billion times,” said Amelia. “But this . . . .”

The terminal was hushed. A number of people stood by the windows overlooking the spot where Ernesto had returned to California. The sergeant and gate attendant walked Maria from the gate. One stranger, then another, and then a small crowd approached and offered their condolences. More and more people came to her, many of them crying, some taking her hand, some embracing her, strangers joining in her loss.

Amelia, who had never seen anything like this, was struck by the spontaneity and solemnity of the gestures; Maria, who had always been terrified of the airport—of the security officers and airline officials—and who would not really believe her son was dead until the next day when she was able to see his body, was moved, caught completely off guard. She absorbed goodwill she had never expected or experienced from the English-speaking community, and they slowly made their way out of the airport.
Sgt. Martinez describes the moment as something approaching the miraculous: “I felt like I met Ernesto that night,” he told me later.

MOTHER & SON AS CHILDREN
Maria Valadez was 17 when she came to the United States with her father. Her mother and siblings stayed behind in San Francisco del Rincon, but “we came to work,” she says. She and her father picked lemons in Oxnard, and then moved along the coast, sleeping in barracks and following the harvests of tree and field crops. She went on to work in hospitals and nursing homes—she enjoyed the elderly—and married Ernesto’s father a few years later. By the time Ernesto was two she was a widow. Ernesto went to live with his grandfather in Mexico for a few years. When he returned to the United States and Maria, it was with strict orders from his grandfather to learn English and to be strong for his family.

It’s difficult to write about Ernesto without sounding like one of the authors of The Lives of the Saints. I might suspect the stories about him are fables but for the unanimity of the praise from those who knew him, and from the enormity of their grief.

If he ever cheated a friend, jilted a girl, said something unkind to his mother, or even socked Juanito hard in the arm once—and surely he must have done something—there is no record of it. In his Army portrait he looks disarmingly eager, like a fifth-grader who wants to smile big for the class photo. He has a sunny, open face, and his ears stick out. If he looks like a boy it’s because he was: recruited at 15, he enlisted at 17, began basic training and shipped out at 18, dead at 19.

As a teenager, he spent a fair amount of time fixing his hair in the bathroom, listened to a lot of music, and was a generally noisy presence in the home, in part because girls were always calling; Maria marveled that they always seemed to know when he was home. “Radar,” she jokes. As a kid, he earned money selling candy bars and gave all of it to his mother. He babysat and split the earnings with Juanito. He and Juanito did homework at the dining room table each night, and he coached Juanito through difficult assignments.

People say he was sweet, funny, good with children: kids who lived in the same project would knock on the door and ask Ernesto to fix the skateboards he had taught them to ride. He made repairs using his own spare parts, and then sent them on their way.

CHOOSING A BURIAL PLOT
There’d been a two-week wait between notification and the return of Ernesto’s body, and in that time Maria had to make an enormous decision: where should Ernesto be buried? Ernesto’s grandfather—whom he had loved dearly—was buried in San Francisco del Rincon, but Maria wanted Ernesto close to her. Maria’s undocumented status trumped all sentimental considerations: Maria knew that if Ernesto was buried in the U.S. and she was deported, she could never visit his grave again. But if Ernesto were buried in Mexico, then deportation would at least serve to reunite them. And if she attained citizenship, then she would be free to go to Ernesto whenever she wanted, wherever he was. And so Ernesto was buried near his grandfather, with full military honors.

When the funeral was over Maria did not want to leave the grave, could conceive of little beyond sitting next to it for the rest of her life. Amelia wouldn’t permit it: “I knew that her heart was there. But Juanito needed to go to school, and Maria needed to return to her life.” You have to come home, she said.

WHY WE FIGHT
Maria had worked for years to attain citizenship—in vain, it turned out. Ernesto, who was born on U.S. soil, and therefore a citizen, could make his mother a citizen, but not until he turned 21. So before shipping out, he completed the necessary naturalization forms for Maria, put them in an envelope, gave them to Amelia and insisted they be submitted on his birthday—no matter where he was. And from the moment he enlisted, all of his pay—the beginning of a down payment for a house—went to Maria.

Concerns about money led him to set his sights on the Army relatively early. There doesn’t seem to have been much interest in actual combat: as a child, he shared a boy’s normal fascination for soldiers, and as a young adult he was drawn to service; raised in a different social class, Ernesto might have enlisted in the Peace Corps. His primary goal was a medical career, and the Army seemed his best chance for this and, by extension, home ownership for his mother. He planned to become a career soldier, imagining he would finish his service, receive an excellent medical education through the Army, and then practice medicine in the military.

‘WHY DID YOU GO?’
My first thought upon meeting Juanito is that, somewhere along the line, I had completely forgotten what 12-year-olds look like, how young they still are. He is a bit shy, and still has a few growth spurts ahead of him. When I ask him how he’s doing, he pauses and says, “The way that I feel different now that my brother is gone is . . . .” He answers almost every question this way, evidence that I’m talking to a child who has received a great deal of necessary coaching on how to talk about pain, and is still learning. When we talk about Ernesto he cries silently and doesn’t stop until the interview is over. He is gentle like his mother, but he tells me that he is often angry: after translating the news of Ernesto’s death for the CNO he went upstairs to his room, and began punching and throwing things, crying over and over, “Why did you go?”

When asked what he misses about his brother he says, “He was nice. When we fought I would say that I was sorry, and he would say that it was okay, that that’s what brothers do. I don’t feel the way I used to feel when he was here. I don’t feel like that anymore.” Juanito remembers his brother always smiling. “Even if he was sad and you asked what was wrong he would smile and say, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.’”

Perhaps it was the nine-year age difference, or perhaps Ernesto’s seriousness, but Ernesto very consciously mentored Juanito. When he returned home for the month-long break between training and deployment he had something important to discuss with Juanito. Ernesto knew that Juanito often spoke of enlisting himself, and so Ernesto sat his little brother down and told him not to enlist. He explained to the then 10-year-old boy that the Army was hard, that Juanito would have to do things that he did not want to do, and that training was not a matter of simply learning to be a soldier; it was something that you had “to pass through.”

And then Ernesto told Juanito that he was simply not meant for the service, that it was the wrong path for anyone who really liked people.

THE HOME WRECKER
Maria, Juanito and Ernesto knew perfectly well that any mission in Iraq would be dangerous. It is true that the slaughter reported daily was not yet epidemic, Baghdad was not yet the meat-grinder it seems today. But Maria and Juanito were proud of Ernesto, and when he shipped out they told themselves whatever families of soldiers have always told themselves, in this case much of it skimmed from the news and White House press statements: the mission was “accomplished,” elections were imminent, and there was soon to be nothing less than real freedom for all Iraqis.

Ernesto had been in Iraq a short time when he asked Maria to stop watching the news altogether. He didn’t want her to see anything that might upset her, and at the same time he felt that the coverage was a poor reflection of the troubled state of Iraq; American news coverage had certainly given him little preparation for the level of daily violence. He confessed disillusionment, and told his mother that the wellbeing of the Iraqi people had little to do with U.S. military operations. Maria says Ernesto came to believe the U.S. was “sticking their nose in there for something else in the future—for the oil.” It was clear that his work, which he couldn’t discuss in detail, troubled him. “I noticed that his happiness had changed, his joyousness was muted. He wasn’t the same,” Maria says. “He felt more distant.” Occasionally he would give Maria some sense of his life: he described 24-hour days, constant movement, and endless uncertainty as to when the next meal or rest might come. It was as if superiors wanted to keep the soldiers on edge, even angry, he said. There were missions he didn’t want to join, and when Maria asked him to explain he would tell her he couldn’t say, but that he was seeing things that “weren’t fair for the civilians.” He mentioned seeing fellow soldiers rough up Iraqi women, and once told his mother there were times when soldiers were ordered to fire into crowds where children were present. He had tried to speak with superiors about his objections, he said, but the result was a lot of yelling, and often there were unspecified “consequences” for Ernesto. The constant searches of private homes upset him especially, and the one thing Ernesto described at length: soldiers would enter a home, trash the interior, and terrify the residents.

“We’re poor,” he told his mother, “and we have to tear apart peoples’ homes that are even poorer than us. It isn’t fair.”

Maria listened, horrified, as her son told her about the crying children that he saw on these missions, and his inability to comfort them.

MOTHER, PART ONE
When Ernesto phoned his mother from Baghdad on July 28, 2005, he would say only, “They’ve just moved me again, to a place that I don’t want to be . . . . There’s a lot of dead, a lot of wounded.”

(Maria and Amelia put great emphasis on these words during the interview, almost as if Ernesto had said “I. Don’t. Want. To. Be.” Maria says she’s not exaggerating for emphasis, nor was Ernesto joking, being funny or cute. She is adamant about the fact that her son was adamant.)

Maria asked him if he was sick—it had become her way of asking if there was anything wrong or if something was bothering him—and he assured her that he felt fine. He told her again that he did not like where he was, and Maria asked him why. “There’s a lot of things happening that aren’t good.”

Maria could hear voices on his end of the line, other soldiers speaking English and urging him off of the phone, telling him, “Come on, we gotta go, we gotta go.” Maria told him, “Don’t hang up, talk to me,” and he reassured her, “No, Ma, I’m going to keep talking to you.” And they proceeded to have what must have been a lovely, wonderfully normal conversation, longer than usual and heartbreaking in hindsight, “about simple things, this and that, about the house,” Maria tells me. Ernesto lingered, and said he wished he could speak with Juanito, who was still at school. And then they said goodbye and hung up.

MOTHER, PART TWO
Early reports indicated that Ernesto had sustained injuries that made an open casket funeral impossible; officials recommended that Maria not see her son’s body. But she was adamant: “I told them that I would recognize my son, that it didn’t matter, that I wanted to look for the scars . . . . If I couldn’t recognize his face then I would look for something that would identify him, and make sure that it was Ernie.”

Finally, it was agreed that Sgt. Martinez would be the first to see Ernesto, and when he emerged he assured Maria there was no reason she shouldn’t see her son.

“Thanks be to God, I could see him, and he was like asleep,” Maria says. “His face was tranquil, at peace.”

THE TV STAR
One day, while watching a PBS documentary on Iraq, Maria saw a shot of her son. When the rebroadcast came she was ready with her cell phone. She wants me to see the video, so she wipes away tears and pulls out her cell phone. Within moments the mood has shifted. Maria is laughing, happily frustrated as she tries to find the right menu on her phone, and the three of us are bent over her small black cell phone: “What about this? Press that. Oh, no, sorry. Wrong one. Go back, go back!” Maria locates the clip, and we’re all silent, beaming at the grainy image of a relaxed Ernie doing something with his rifle—assembling it, cleaning it, loading it, we have absolutely no idea. The only audio is Maria calling to the rest of the house as she records the video, “Es Ernie! Es Ernie! Usted no puede decirme que no es el Ernie, que si es mi Ernie!”

“You can’t tell me that’s not Ernie, that’s my Ernie!”

GO ARMY, YOUNG MAN
A man in an Army uniform recently approached Juanito at school. The man handed Juanito a business card. Juanito expressed surprise, and told the man he was only 12. The recruiter wasn’t fazed. “Call me when you’re 18,” he said.

When I met Juanito he was wearing a black rubber bracelet that said “Army of One.” He explained that a soldier had been handing them to kids at Silverado Park. Then Maria turned to Juanito and said something in Spanish. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and disappeared. He came back with a small armload of black shoulder bags, each still wrapped in plastic. He shook one out: “Go Army” was printed on the side, along with a phone number and a recruiting site, GoArmy.com. Recruiters in a fully loaded Hummer had shown up with the bags at Silverado Park on Easter morning, passing them out to children collecting Easter eggs.

POSTSCRIPT
When Ernesto died, Amelia delivered on her promise. She sent his mother’s naturalization forms—the documents he had carefully completed before shipping out for Iraq—to the office of Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald. The congresswoman had expressed interest in helping Maria, but her death in April foreclosed that hope. So Maria submitted a new application, accompanied by a heartfelt letter of support from Sergeant Martinez; Martinez tells me he has come to love Maria as his own mother.

An answer, good or bad, could come in six weeks or six years; no one knows. But in nine years Juanito will be old enough to complete the job Ernesto couldn’t, and barring another war—or the continuation of this one—Maria may then attain citizenship in the country to which she proudly, if reluctantly, gave her oldest son.

Tags: army, Baghdad, Centro Shalom, iraq, Long Beach, Rachel Powers, recruitment, War