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As his ship, the USS Carter Hall, moved endlessly back and forth through the waters about three miles off Liberia's coast, in support of the roughly 200 soldiers who had gone ashore, Calvin passed the time by giving what he called "Catholic information" classes to fellow Marines, and led Sunday communion services. He also found comfort in saying the rosary every day. Among his prayers was that he wouldn't have to go ashore. "Our commanders said if you go into Liberia, there's a possibility you'll have to engage in combat with kids, with teenagers." He dreaded the thought of doing that, and luckily never had to.In Iraq, he had far more to do while helping secure the airport at Mosul. Usually, he worked the front gate, searching the hundreds of people who showed up every day looking for work. Did he feel like a stationary target? "In the daytime you felt a little better, with a lot of your fellow Marines there, but at night you were more concerned."
"Didn't you tell me there was shooting in the background all the time?" his wife says.
"It makes you think, " he answers. "It happens -- suicide bombers." But he believed "we had a good hand protecting us." On a couple of occasions, he was sent to patrol villages near the airport. "They were telling us a lot of guys from the regime had gone into the villages, so it was our job to do recon."
Calvin had no trouble admitting he was scared. "I guess if you're not, you're going to get somebody killed."
His recon party took along a translator, who spoke to the men in the villages. They hadn't seen anyone at all, the villagers insisted. Some of them said, "Don't you have family? Go back home."
Home, in Calvin's youth, had been Decatur, Ga., where his father was drafted during Vietnam. But his mother sounded like the real soldier. After his parents divorced when Calvin was ten, she supported him and his two sisters by working in the school cafeteria, as well as part-time in a photo shop and a grocery store. Each day, he watched her do what had to be done.
"Do I take after my mother, dear?" he says to his wife with a laugh.
He says when he first signed up with the Marines, right out of high school, he was just eager to get away from home. He never saw combat, and served most of his four-year tour as a member of the Marine Corps color guard in Washington, D.C.
This time, though, he was compelled by a more somber sense of duty, and was happiest when he had fulfilled that obligation and could head home. "We felt we had done something for the operation," he says, "and that was good enough."
Operation Desert Smile
What do 312 pounds of jellybeans, 11,000 bottles of salad dressing and 5,000 containers of shampoo have in common? Give up? These items, and many more, were donated to Operation Desert Smile -- Reader's Digest's holiday gift of love for troops in Iraq.
Last September, when we asked advertisers and suppliers to join our "bagathon," they responded with more than $500,000 of merchandise. (The biggest surprise -- literally -- was the arrival of 51,840 servings of pasta from Ragú Express!) Some 500 Digest employees volunteered 2,000 hours and stuffed 5,000 sacks with products and edibles. Reader's Digest added magazines, books and music. We also included 6,000 patriotic letters from schoolchildren, courtesy of QSP, our school fund-raising division.
All of this would have been for naught if the USO hadn't made arrangements with our most generous donor, Maersk Line, Limited. The shipping company sent our gift bags overseas in two 40-foot-long containers, all for free.
"Our troops are risking their lives for us and spending the holidays without their families and friends," says Reader's Digest Editor-in-Chief Jackie Leo. "Operation Desert Smile is our small thank-you for their great sacrifice."
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