‘Sorry Won’t Bring My Husband Back’

CAMP PENDLETON —  There will be talk this Fourth of July weekend about sacrifice and bravery. Elena Zurheide knows all about those things.

On April 12, her husband, Marine Lance Cpl. Robert Paul Zurheide Jr., was killed in Fallouja, Iraq, when a mortar shell landed in the middle of several Marines hunkered down in an abandoned schoolhouse during a firefight.

On May 1, Elena Zurheide gave birth to the couple’s only child, named for his father.

Now, just weeks after her 21st birthday, Zurheide faces an uncertain future as a widow. Her grief and anger overwhelm her on occasion as she struggles for answers, answers that are not forthcoming.

This much she knows: There is more pain coming, particularly when her husband’s unit, Echo Company of the 2nd battalion, 1st regiment of the 1st Marine Division, returns this fall to Camp Pendleton.

“It hasn’t really hit me yet,” she said during a tearful interview Friday as she cradled her sleeping infant. “It will hit me for real when the rest of the guys come home and my husband isn’t with them.”

She also will have to deal with the possibility that the shell that killed her husband was “friendly fire,” a mistake by a fellow Marine.

Zurheide said she had a premonition that her husband of two years, her high school sweetheart, would not survive a second tour in Iraq. Her husband had the same ominous feeling. He asked his brother, also a Marine, to help raise his son if he was killed.

As it does with the families of all Marines who die in the line of duty, the Corps has offered to help Zurheide through her first stages of grief with counseling and emotional support. For the most part, she has declined.

She doesn’t want to see the base chaplain (“I’m mad at God right now”) or join a support group. She doesn’t want pity.

“If I hear the word ‘sorry’ one more time, I’m going to hit somebody,” she said. “I hate that word. ‘Sorry’ won’t bring my husband back.”

Encouraged by other battalion wives, she attended a recent party meant to boost family morale. Wives were gathering to celebrate that the deployment to Iraq is half finished. There was Hawaiian music and dancing and dinner. Zurheide won a door prize, a blanket with the Marine Corps logo.

Still, the evening was traumatic.

“My heart was pounding all night,” she said. “I felt out of place. They all had their husbands and I didn’t.”

Robert Zurheide was an infantry Marine, a “grunt.” He had served last year during the mission to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. One of his closest friends, Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, was killed on the first day of the war by friendly fire.

In the battle for Fallouja, no group suffered more casualties than the 2nd battalion’s Echo Company. In nearly a month of daily combat, three Marines and an Iraqi translator were killed, and more than 50 Marines, more than one-third of the company, were wounded.

Elena Zurheide, in the final months of a difficult pregnancy, had tried to protect herself and her baby from the bad news from Iraq.

She was careful not to watch television, lest there be reports about Marines being killed. A year earlier, during the Marines’ assault on Baghdad, she had watched the news every day and night and found it frightening and exhausting.

Then on the warm afternoon of April 13 came the visit that is the nightmare scenario of every Marine family. The front door of the couple’s tiny apartment on base was open. Zurheide was folding baby clothes she had received at a shower.

She looked up and saw a hand about to knock on the screen door, a hand wearing a white glove that is part of the Marines’ dress uniform. Regulations require that Marines making casualty-notification calls wear their dress uniforms.

“All I saw was the white glove,” she said. “He started to say, ‘On behalf of ... ‘ But I wouldn’t let him say anything. I was so angry. I wasn’t angry at Robert or the Marine Corps. I was angry at those bastards [in Iraq] who don’t want us over there. That’s who I was mad at. The poor chaplain, I was really cussing. I told them: ‘If I could get an M-16, I’d go over there and kill those bastards myself.’ ”

The same mortar explosion that killed her husband killed a second Marine and wounded nine others, several grievously.

Recently, the Echo Company commander, Capt. Douglas Zembiec, called Zurheide to prepare her for the possibility that the mortar round that killed her husband was friendly fire, the result of a miscalculation by a Marine who fired the round from several hundred yards away.

The investigation has not yet finished, and no final determination has been made. With combat casualties, some family members want the details; others do not.

“I want to know what happened,” she said. “I want to know. I have to know.”

Part of her anger is at demonstrators who use pictures of troops killed in Iraq as part of their protests of U.S. policy in Iraq. At a recent anti-war rally in San Diego, protesters displayed pictures taken from local newspapers of Robert Zurheide and other Marines.

“I don’t want his picture used by people against this war,” she said, her voice rising. “My husband died to provide freedom for our son, freedom for me, freedom for those who protest the war.”

While she has declined to meet with a chaplain on base, she has e-mailed Navy Lt. Scott Radetski, the battalion chaplain who accompanied Marines to Fallouja and into combat. He had provided marital counseling for the Zurheides before his deployment to Iraq.

Her question for him is the classic one, the unanswerable one: Why my husband?

“It’s so unfair, “ she said. “I know some Marines out there who are not good Marines. But my husband was a good Marine, a great Marine. It’s not right.”

She is determined to stay strong for their son, who looks like her husband and who, after her tough pregnancy, has proved to be a well-behaved infant, already sleeping through the night. Elena Zurheide is already preparing for the day when she will tell their son about his father.

On the wall of her apartment is a framed certificate signed by the secretary of the Navy: “In grateful memory of Lance Cpl. Robert Paul Zurheide Jr., who died while in the service of our country ... this certificate is awarded as a testimonial of honest and faithful service.”

Like others who have lost loved ones, there is something in Elena Zurheide that thinks it’s all a dream from which she will soon awaken.

“Part of me thinks he’s still coming home,” she said. “I want him home so much. He never got a chance to see his boy. He’d have been so proud of him.”

She and their son, Robert III, will remain in base housing at Camp Pendleton until October. With her husband’s life insurance, she has put a down payment on a house in Tucson, near her parents, Robert Zurheide’s parents and the cemetery where her husband is buried.

Tucson, she said, will always be home.

“My husband is there,” she said. “I have to be close to him.”