Memorial Day was always special for Donna James and her family. It was her son Evan's birthday. Now the date carries a miserable irony.
A few years ago Evan joined the Marine reserves after graduating from high school in La Harpe, a town halfway between Macomb and the Mississippi River.
September 11, 2001, was supposed to be special too. Evan was starting a new job as a physical fitness trainer at a health club in Edwardsville. Donna James says the Marines turned Evan into a "health nut." During training, he devoured a book on body building and proper dieting, he gained 30 pounds of muscle, and he started to talk about opening his own gym. He exercised "all the time" and ate four to five meals a day to bulk up.
Early in 2003 the Marines pressed Evan into service. On March 24, a few days after the U.S. invaded Iraq, Evan drowned while trying to swim across the Saddam Canal. He was 21.
"He loved the Marines," says his older brother, Craig, whose birthday happens to be on March 24, making it one more poignant anniversary for the James family. Craig says Evan joined the reserves expressly to pay for tuition at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, where he was a sophomore studying physical education. "He wasn't too cracked up about leaving work to go over there," Craig says. "It wasn't that he didn't want to go. He was leaving a lot behind he wasn't willing to leave yet."
"The military probably doesn't like to hear that," says Donna of her son's plan to use the Marines to pay for college. "It was supposed to be one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer."
Evan chose the Marines because he considered them the "best of the best," Donna says. A former football player and lifeguard, Evan was known for setting goals and "charging full speed ahead at them," she says. The Marines liked that quality. He was already a corporal. During swimming tests, he ranked at the top of his unit, performing better than the leader of his outfit. On March 24, when four soldiers were asked to volunteer to swim across a 30-yard canal in southeastern Iraq to set up a water filtration system, no one second-guessed Evan when he stepped forward.
What happened next is sketchy, Donna says. Evan was ahead of the other three Marines, when the last one, Bradley Korthaus from Scott, Iowa, began to struggle. The two in the middle went back to help him, but were unsuccessful. Like Evan James, Korthaus drowned. When the two survivors finally reached the other side, they realized Evan wasn't there. They couldn't locate him in the canal either. Some in Evan's unit say he might have made it to shore before swimming back to help Korthaus; some say he never made it across. "No one saw him go down or knows the whole time span," Donna says.
Evan James and the other three Marines were in full combat gear, including a backpack and boots. The water was colder than expected, and there was a strong current running under the deceptively still surface, says Donna, who has read the Marine's official investigation of the tragedy. Like many others in his unit, Evan had lost a lot of weight while in Iraq--about 20 pounds, Donna says. Pictures he sent showed him looking noticeably thinner--he was probably fatigued before the swim. According to Donna, a commanding officer said there was "a lot of muck" below the surface, reaching up to the swimmers' knees. When Marines grow tired in the water, they're trained to sink to the bottom, rest for a moment, and push themselves back up to continue. Evan was found standing at the bottom, his boots stuck in the mud.
La Harpe had a hard time accepting the drowning, Donna says. Many of the children knew Evan as a lifeguard--how could this happen to such a first-rate athlete? One of the two Marines who survived blames himself for Evan's death--if only he had dived deeper into the canal to feel around for him.
Apart from pictures Evan sent back "we hadn't heard from him since he left," says Craig, a plumber like his father. "His girlfriend received a few letters. We got a lot of stuff back that we sent him--letters, a care package with batteries, diaper wipes, and health food junk."
Evan James was the 55th American casualty in the Iraq war. When his body was brought back home, Missouri State Police escorted the coffin to the state line, where Illinois State Police took over to finish the trip to La Harpe. The Marine officers who brought Evan home were surprised by the unusual attention--the town held a special ceremony in the high school gym. Captain John Bruzza, one of the Marines who accompanied the coffin, wrote about the final procession: "It would choke up the hardest Marine."
