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A Centurion's E-mails
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Nov 05, 2006 07:54pm |
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| Category | General |
| News Date | Tuesday, November 7, 2006 01:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Through the eyes of a frontline fighter: The Marine captain asked for a tougher assignment. The one he got seemed all but impossible.
By Dan Ephron and Christian Caryl
Newsweek
Nov. 6, 2006 issue - Robert Secher had a passion for history. Until his death in Iraq on Oct. 8, the 33-year-old Marine could recount all the major battles of the Civil War. He studied the Holocaust, in which members of his father's family lost their lives. In recent e-mails home, he said he was reading about Vietnam and the Mexican civil war. But his favorite books were on ancient Rome: he was captivated by the centurions, who commanded from the front and led by example. "He talked about being a soldier since he was 6 years old," his mother, Elke Morris, told NEWSWEEK last week. "He wanted to be tested in battle." Secher signed up for the Marines when he was 17. He served on the Afghan border after the attacks of September 11 and later pressed for a transfer to the front lines in Iraq. He ended up in the insurgents' largest stronghold, Anbar province.
His job there was one of the toughest in Iraq: making raw Iraqi recruits ready and able to take over the fight against the militants. Secher found the task exasperating and often discouraging; in e-mails and letters home, he expressed doubt that the Iraqi military would ever be ready for a handover, and criticized the way the Bush administration had directed the war. "Without the U.S., this army will fail and get eaten alive by the insurgents," he told his father in an e-mail this past April. Chatting with a friend during a brief leave five months later, he spoke of suspicions that some of his trainees were loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr and would have no compunction about betraying their American instructors if the radical Shiite cleric told them to. |
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