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War should not be taken lightly. Despite what we read in books and see in movies, war is a horrible act. The men who go to war do not return the same. The story of Joshua Marcellino illustrates the effect war has on a man’s psyche. As the adage goes, that which doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger. I came across Joshua and his story through my radio show, Morning in America.
Before Joshua Marcellino became a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps and lost his innocence, he was the oldest of six children—brother to Elyse, Cassie, Jeremiah, Johnson, and Josiah—and son to Jerry and Dawn.
His father was from Los Angeles, California, played football at the University of Hawaii, “got saved,” and became a Reformed Baptist pastor. His mother came from a Louisiana farm, had a classically trained voice, and held sway over the home with a spark of French-Cajun elegance.
Jerry led a church in Laurel, Mississippi—a town with tall pine trees, hot summers, and more than a few quiet roads. Dawn sang on Sundays and enrolled the children in the private Christian school.
Joshua could grow a beard while his classmates were teasing out fuzz—blame his Italian heritage—made decent grades in school, and while he was never the tallest on the court or the fastest on the field, Joshua never stopped competing. He wielded a foil, a saber, and an épée at a young age, fencing his way to the Junior Olympics.
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Boys playing soldier runs deep in the American psyche—but Joshua seemed to live for a higher struggle. Camouflage, flight simulators, and civil war strategy games—Joshua ate and drank warfare. Put the VHS copy of The Battle of Midway—filmed on the ground in shaky black and white—on repeat; Joshua couldn’t get enough of the Stars and Stripes.
September 11 happened when Joshua was in high school, cementing the future that people could see coming, and a boy playing with guns turned quickly into a man shipping off to Parris Island, pushed to the cracking point by screaming drill instructors.
“You have to want it, this life, and you better want it bad,” said Joshua, “because they’re going to do everything they can to break you.”
And then there was war. Joshua deployed in February 2007. Members of the church made T-shirts with “We’re praying for you” and his Marine Corps picture, put his name in the bulletin each week, and kept writing him in Iraq.
But that’s the person Joshua was—before he hit the ground in Iraq.
Corporal Joshua Marcellino served in Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marines, 4th Marine Division—in the town of Haditha in Anbar Province. There were eight hundred to nine hundred missions in nine months. Days that he was on detail, it was up at 5:30 in the morning, stay up till 11:00 at night. There were sweeps for bombs—IEDs—detaining suspects, and the pressure that at every moment, the person watching you on patrol might make the phone call that would result in your death.
“No one wears any uniforms. They watch you for every single day, and when they go into town, they tell their buddy. If you looked like you weren’t paying attention, they would pass that on . . . If you went the same way, turned in the same spot, even more than once, there’d be a bomb next time and you’d be killed.”
And then there was the time in between.
“War isn’t what I thought it would be. It was boring. There was so much of the hurry up and wait. You’d go do a mission, and your blood would be pumping. Then there’d be a month and a half before anything else happened . . . Marines are a different breed; we’re made to go after people. If you’re not killing someone or being killed, you’re not happy.”
War makes a man different. The change comes in different ways. There can be the things one is forced to do, one is forced to see—the strain of fighting an enemy without uniform or respect for human life—and change can come looking in the faces and at the bodies of the least of the members of humanity.
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“Innocence gets killed in war. No matter how much you try to keep it, it just dies,” Joshua said, then paused. “There were so many kids getting killed.”
From the time of his youth, Joshua heard and believed in a faith that made much of kids. Christ told the little ones to come unto him. Joshua’s own church saw children as a blessing and was brimming with squealing toddlers, grubby-faced youngsters playing games of tackle football outside, and families that needed fifteen-passenger vans.
But on this continent, things were different, and the images burned into Joshua’s mind.
“You’d be in combat, and you’d see a kid get hurt, or you’d find one on the ground. You’d want to run up, check on the kids, and make sure they’re okay. You wanted to try and help them, but they would set bombs in kids’ bodies, in the dead ones . . .
“You’d have a guy run up with his kid, blood shooting everywhere out of the kid’s body, asking for help, so you’d say, yeah, let’s take him to the hospital, and then he’d run past you, and explode himself.
“There was this one time, they took this child—mentally retarded—and they filled his wheelchair with bombs on it, and then they told him to go toward the Marines . . . And then you have to try and decide what to do.”
Those images don’t leave his mind when a serviceman returns home.
“You put your whole life and effort into helping these people, try to give them something better; you watch people die, and then you leave.”
No one moment defines that shift, that loss of innocence in Joshua. In many ways, he’s still the same person who left Laurel in 2007. He still is a Christian. He says that the struggle in Iraq was as much spiritual as physical: “Each day you realized God is in control of every second, and if it’s my last day—oh well. In civilian life, you don’t see prayer answered every day, but when you’re in combat you see prayer answered.”
He helped in the handover of power to the Iraqi people, watched as the Anbar Province woke out of the depths of lawlessness and defeat and was transformed into a jewel of order and stability.
But like so many of the veterans coming home from wars in the last few years, Joshua returned changed. In some it comes in violent fits, sleeplessness, and other neurological disorders, but in Joshua, the lurking effects of combat stress came in what he calls “a fog,” one that made living and interacting on a college campus anything but easy.
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“The hardest thing was putting up with civilians . . . I was in a fog for almost two years before I became myself again. I didn’t want to talk to people; I just wasn’t the same. People would try to talk to you about it, and they’d want to understand, but they couldn’t understand—they hadn’t been through that. They didn’t know what it was like, and it would just make me mad.”
Joshua found some rest in working with his hands on his grandfather’s farm in Louisiana.
Now, when he’s on campus or at a soccer game and sees the American flag flying it brings back somber and bitter memories.
“I really love my flag, but it’s different. I just know that when it looks like the world is going to collapse, if you go anywhere else, you’re going to think that America is the greatest thing on earth.”
For Joshua, warfare was different from the films and stories. There wasn’t this “band of brothers” mentality that had defined previous generations of servicemen; rather it was an immediate, day-to-day, hour-by-hour struggle for survival.
“All you knew [was that] if I survived this day, and if my buddy makes it through with me, it’s a good thing.”
And when that struggle was over and the soldiers came home, well, each one went their separate ways and just didn’t talk about what had happened.
“It’s different,” said Joshua, who won’t pursue a career in the military. “Things are different, and freedom, freedom just has a different taste to it.”
Joshua Marcellino graduated from Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2011.