Troops: Suicide or Prison better than returning to Iraq

Three recent stories (Jan 05) highlight just how bad Iraq is- that some soldiers would rather go to prison or die than return to the carnage that is the US occupation.

A 19-year-old US Marine committed “suicide by cop” rather than return to Iraq.

Raya was finally gunned down as he ran towards a group of officers, and apparently reached for a second weapon.

Julia Cortez Raya told the newspaper that her son served in Fallujah.

She said: “He came back different.”

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm...

Marine Lance Cpl. Andres Raya told his mother that he wanted just one thing for Christmas, relatives say — to stay in Ceres instead of returning to military duty in Iraq.

Raya took a rifle into a liquor store, he did not steal anything, but his crazy behavior was enough for the employees to call the cops. Raya shot the two cops when they arrived, then fled.

"By the statements the suspect made at the scene, it was clear he wanted to die and take as many cops down as he could in the process," said Lt. Bill Heyne.

For Raya’s friends and relatives left behind, it’s hard to fathom why a teenager they said had never been in trouble with the law could turn so violent.

One Marine said that despite the stories of house-to-house combat Raya told his family, he had seen little or no fighting during his time in Iraq last year.

That man on the liquor store surveillance cameras wasn’t our cousin. He wasn’t Andy anymore."

Raya’s lifelong friend Lalo Madrigal said Raya "just wasn’t the same after the war — he couldn’t hold a conversation anymore."

Raya was eager to graduate from Ceres High School in 2003 so he could join the Marines, said his recruiter, Staff Sgt. Robert Tellez. He pegged Raya as a possible career Marine, based on his family support and his participation in Marine activities before he left for boot camp.

But when Raya returned to his family last fall, he was questioning the purpose of the war and encouraging his relatives to see Michael Moore’s anti-war movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," said his 24-year-old cousin, Alex Raya.

"He showed us pictures of this guy’s hand hanging off," he said. "He told us about going into homes and shooting them up, and he said he wouldn’t pull the trigger a lot because he didn’t want to kill anyone."

At Thanksgiving, he told his family he had seen Marines commit suicide rather than continue fighting in Iraq.

"He kept saying it was a war that had no point, that it was all for oil, and it made no sense that we were after (Osama) bin Laden but went after Saddam Hussein instead," Alex Raya said.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c...

details of the shooting incident
http://www.modestobee.com/local/sto...

A U.S. Marine scheduled to return to Iraq next month is now behind bars in a Kentucky jail, accused in a violent case of road rage. The active-duty Marine, Abraham Cerpa, is on leave and was headed to Chicago with his family.

Police say the targets of Cerpa’s rage were two other Marines who just happened to be traveling through Kentucky at the same time.

It appears all three marines — Cerpa and the two inside the other car — were all stationed at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia.

http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.a...

After a traffic transgression of some sort, the occupants of the two cars drove side by side for 90 miles, exchanging insults and gestures at high speed.

Somewhere in eastern Clark County, Abraham Cerpa pulled out a MAC-90 assault rifle and shot off three or four rounds, shattering a window of Wilkinson’s car and flattening a tire.
<>The two MPs called 911 from a Winchester service station.

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentuck...

Was this ’road rage’ over a traffic incident, or was this marine travelling with his family to Canada and the MPs caught up with him?

On Friday, January 7, 2005 Sergeant Kevin Benderman, stationed with the 2-7 Infantry Battalion at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, refused an order from the Command Sergeant Major of his unit Samuel Coston to deploy to Iraq and requested a General Courts-Martial.

Benderman, 40 is a combat veteran, having served one tour in Iraq in 2003 during which a Captain in his command ordered soldiers from Benderman’s outfit to fire on children throwing rocks at unit personnel. Having personally witnessed this and other illegal acts by military personnel during his tour, Benderman now says that under no circumstances will he participate further in the war in Iraq, a war Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan has labeled "illegal".

In further developments this weekend, it has been confirmed that Specialist J.R. Burt and Specialist David Beals, also of 2-7 attempted suicide rather than deploy to Iraq, and an additional seventeen soldiers in 2-7 Infantry Battalion have gone AWOL for the same reason.

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/p...