SAN ANTONIO – Gary Qualls worried a lot after his son went off to war, so he went hunting recently to take his mind off it. When he got home, a letter was waiting.
His son, Marine Lance Cpl. Louis Qualls, wrote about the Fallujah offensive, that it was expected to include some of the fiercest battles of the war, and that his unit was in the thick of it.
“I fear it’s a fight for my life,” he wrote. “Dad, I need your prayers and advice more than ever. I know you’ve always been there for me, and I know you always will be.”
About an hour later, there was a knock on the door. Qualls’ other son, whom the retired soldier raised as a single father, answered it.
“He came back and said, ‘Three Marines are on the front porch and want to talk to you,’” Gary Qualls said. “I started to cry and I went ahead and opened the door for them and said, ‘Don’t tell me it’s about Louis,’ and they nodded their heads. It was the first time in my life that my knees totally collapsed.”
Louis Qualls, of Temple, was killed on Nov. 16 – the latest of 12 soldiers and Marines from Texas killed in combat that month, 10 in the province that includes Fallujah. It was an unusually high toll for one state, even in this deadly month of warfare.
At least 108 U.S. soldiers and Marines have died in combat in Iraq in November. It was the second-deadliest month for American troops since the Iraq invasion, surpassed only by last April’s 135 deaths.
Texas has borne many casualties. Of about 1,265 military members who have died since the beginning of the war, at least 110 were from Texas, or nearly 9 percent. The state has about 7.5 percent of the U.S. population.
Among the Texans killed was Army Capt. Sean Sims, a “soldier’s soldier” who once had his wife, a schoolteacher, arrange for her students to send cards and presents to a soldier who hadn’t gotten any care packages.
As Sims’ company went door to door in Fallujah on Nov. 13 to clear out pockets of resistance, a reporter from the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader tagged along.
“There’s always going to be some (insurgents) left,” Sims told the reporter. “They’ll hide out and snipe at us for two months.”
Within hours, Sims and another soldier were hit in an ambush.
He leaves behind an infant son.
Marine Staff Sgt. Gene Ramirez, who grew up in San Antonio, could have opted to not return to the war zone because he had already served there and was his family’s only surviving son.
His parents – his father Pedro also served in the Marines – urged him to use that option, but his cousin and fellow Marine Ruben Hernandez Sr. says Ramirez, 28, never would have.
“Gene was a hard charger, man, let me tell you,” said Hernandez. “There’s nothing I could have told him, or his dad or his mom.”
For Hernandez, whose son Ruben Jr. is a Marine sergeant scheduled to be sent to Iraq early next year, Ramirez’s death reverberated on several levels. Not only were they related by blood and uniform, Hernandez was also the recruiter who signed up Ramirez for the Marines back in the mid ’90s.
“I felt guilty at first – ‘Maybe if I didn’t put him in and had him do something else … ‘” he said. “Well, he would have gone somewhere else and joined. That’s the only thing that I say to myself right now.”
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