By Phill Courtney
Although for many years the motto of the U.S. Marines was their continuing quest to find “a few good men” (which now, of course, has been expanded to include “a few good women”), one of those “good men” has struggled for many years to define for himself just what it means to have been one of those “few good men.”
This, after he’d already killed a number of “bad men,” before walking away from a life as one of our nation’s frontline killers. This is the journey of that “one good man”—Mark Lewis, former U.S. Marine.
Born in 1960 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of a General Motors supervisor in Detroit, and a mother who’d taken a passionate interest in civil rights issues at a turbulent time in the 1960s when the rights of minorities were beginning to boil over on the front burners of U.S. domestic policy, it wasn’t too long before Lewis’s parents decided to heed the call westward and headed to California.
It was 1963, and they’d found three acres in Yucaipa, where Lewis attended elementary and secondary schools before deciding to “one up” his father, who’d served in World War II, and a cousin who was, by then, already a Green Beret, by joining the Marines at age 19 in 1979.
Although he’d sported that era’s long-haired look for many years, he says he immediately got a taste of what he was in for when he was quickly shorn of his swirling strands by a Marine barber who’d announced with what seemed to be a satisfied growl: “There. Your golden locks are gone, bitch.”
Today, Lewis maintains that close-cropped look atop his head, as well as a body still trim and muscular, reflective of his military background and a desire to keep in shape; avoiding those easily acquitted spare-tire waistlines, and general flabbiness so many middle-aged American men sink into.
That imposing physique also served Lewis well during some stints as a bouncer at various local watering holes (which is where the author first met him), while today he puts in most of his time at a supermarket in Redlands, employed there since 2016 as a general merchandise clerk. It was there that the author reconnected with him several years ago after yet another reencounter during 2011’s Occupy movement.
Keeping in shape was also vital during four years of rising in the Marine ranks before being ordered in 1983 into the jungles of South America fighting our “war on drugs” then being waged in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration.
With 40 men under his command, it’s perhaps indicative of how much Lewis was steeped in the “just following orders” mindset, that, when asked now, he frankly admits that he wasn’t sure then and even today just what country he was in.
All he knew was this: he was somewhere in South America—he was somewhere in a jungle—and somewhere, hiding in that jungle, were people he needed to kill before they killed him. Even today, he isn’t sure why.
“I’m killing this person,” he asks, “and for what?”
And, yes, there were others. How many? He’s still not sure. But this he knows: they’re dead; he’s still alive; and some drug labs were destroyed.
Besides battling the shock troops of the drug lords, Lewis and his troops also had to battle all the storied hazards of survival in the jungle, including other inhabitants that could kill them, like a water-born parasite, with methods of transmission we will not go into here, followed by effects even worse.
Lewis and his men also spent some time lost in the jungle—completely out of touch with those higher up—and Lewis says the standard routine then was to report men as missing in action and possibly dead after seven days.
For a while his family didn’t know if they’d ever see him again, and, when the military informed them they would, his mother was “elated” when Lewis’s sister shouted: “Mark’s still alive!”
After some rest and recreation, it was off to the small Caribbean island country of Grenada in October of 1983, where, it was being said by the Reagan administration, the lives of American medical students enrolled in a college there were at risk.
Reagan was asserting the medical students were being threatened by a government then headed by the Prime Minister and newly-installed leader of the Marxist-Leninist People’s Revolutionary Government, Bernard Coard, who had just had the previous prime minister and People’s Revolutionary Government leader, Maurice Bishop, executed along with more than a dozen other government officials. The Reagan Administration had previously accused Bishop of cozying up to the Soviet Union.
After landing from the carrier U.S.S. Kearsarge, Lewis proceeded inland with other Marines. Their mission: secure the area and capture the governor’s mansion. Although resistance was light, with Grenadian government troops aided by some Cuban forces sent by Castro, there was resistance—so the operation was by no means a cakewalk.
As Lewis closed in on a building fortified by metal sidings, he used his infrared rifle sites to zero in on several figures positioned at windows, then fired a number of rounds. He isn’t sure now whether it was two or three of those shadowy figures he, in our military’s terms: “neutralized,” but he is sure he hit one man “dead center.”
On the way to the mansion, he “popped” two more men and then, after that, most of the resistance just “melted away.” After three days most hostilities ended, but not before 19 of our men were lost, either through direct combat, or by accidental fatalities, which, ironically, could have risen by one when Lewis almost shot an American student on the list. Lewis, who was on the brink of squeezing the trigger on that student when he encountered him, held his fire, fortuitously forgoing that kill.
Unfortunately, our forces did commit one high-profile incident of “collateral damage,” during the “fog of war,” and although it was nowhere near the total dead when our planes hit a bomb shelter in Baghdad during the 1991 war with Iraq some eight years later, incinerating over 400 men, woman, and children, in Grenada they mistakenly targeted a mental hospital and killed 18 patients.
Besides the “collateral damage,” the war was also undertaken while covered beneath a cloak of prevarications. Then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Lawrence Eagleburger, later acknowledged that the “rescuing the students” story was just that: a story.
They were never truly endangered, and a lie was used, as they often are, as a pretext for what was actually going on: the forceful elimination of a Marxist government.
Just as President William McKinley had waged in those still memorable words of our then ambassador to London, John Hay: “a splendid little war” with Spain in 1898 of three months, three weeks and two days, so too had President Reagan with his three-day war, besting, by far, his Republican presidential predecessor.
Later, Reagan stated explicitly that he’d hoped his own glorious little war with Grenada would help to end the “Vietnam syndrome;” a sentiment which had taken hold in America, with many then opposed to “policing the world,” following that agonizing debacle, which had torn our country apart in a way we hadn’t seen since the Civil War.
But, since we had, in the kind of “off-the-record” type words a “folksy” Ronnie Reagan might use: kicked the keister of both the Grenadian government, and the syndrome, Reagan then declared “on-the-record” that “our days of weakness are over. Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall.” This despite the fact that the United Nations had passed a resolution calling the invasion both a breach of international law and their charter. But, as far a Reagan was concerned, none of that had “upset my breakfast at all.”
In retrospect, it’s also clear that President Reagan was badly in need of a quick and easy “victory” right about then. Perhaps some “splendid news” from Grenada, could help to bury, in American minds at least, the horrendous news from Beirut when, just a few days before, 241 Marines had been buried beneath the rubble of their barracks after an attack by a suicide truck bomber.
Tellingly, Lewis says that he and his fellow Marines heading for Grenada hadn’t even heard of the bombing (perhaps so higher-ups, could, through the use of a news blackout, shield them from being demoralized?), and even before he’d been able to catch his breath after the invasion of Grenada and enjoy any of that “standing tall” time, Lewis was headed for Lebanon.
After arriving in Beirut, Lewis says he helped to sight ground targets for a F14 fighter plane as it swept in, launching four of what are called Hellfire missiles aimed at the insurgents opposed to the government in Lebanon, which the U.S. was supporting during its years-long civil war. All this during his midnight patrol near a seven-story command headquarters.
Later, after it was recommissioned, the World War II battleship, New Jersey, was ordered offshore, then opened up with high explosive rounds of its own, lobbing 2,600-pound shells the size, it was said, of Volkswagen Beetles. (Lewis still recalls seeing the flashes at sea.) Even today, many older Lebanese civilians talk of the “VWs” flying overhead, many of which, it was later determined, veered far off-targetm killing some civilians.
However, the next year, it all came to an end for Lewis when his “hidden life” in the Marines was exposed by a fellow Marine who’d learned of his “secret”—a secret that had to be closely kept in those days before President Clinton’s 1993 “Don’t Ask—Don’t Tell” policy came into effect.
Yes, Lewis is gay and had recognized that since the time he went with a friend to a certain nightclub in San Bernardino when he was 17 and felt he belonged there. In 1984, though, he was told he didn’t belong in the Marines.
While he was initially “outed” by a fellow Marine, a sympathetic commanding officer took Lewis under his wing and then made sure he was given a medical leave, along with an honorable discharge and full benefits. After that, he went to his parents’ house to sort it all out.
Unfortunately, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had also followed him there, and for a time the only place he could sleep was in a sleeping bag on the ground in his parents’ backyard.
“I couldn’t stop seeing the weapons,” he says, remembering the flashbacks with obvious emotion still choking his voice, “and I saw them all the time.”
Fortunately, his father (whom he lost in 2004), who’d had his own experience with brutal combat while serving in the Pacific islands campaign against Japan, helped him immensely by both accepting his son’s lifestyle and understanding the PTSD.
“You have to own it,” he told his son, and today Lewis speaks of a moment when he and his father went out to observe the wildlife at a bird sanctuary near Banning, and having, while there, a feeling of profound serenity sweep over him.
Although Lewis still has moments of sadness and some regret that while his father’s “service to his country” in “The Good War” is seen now as “having had a purpose” (ridding the world of tyrants), he’s still not so sure if his did.
Nevertheless, he does feel he’s “owned” his life now in all its complexity and has embraced the idea that just living each day to its fullest is reason enough to go on as a former U.S. Marine, and—another survivor.