In 1991, when he was a gung ho 21-year-old marine, Jesus Jimenez marched off to fight in Desert Storm. “After that was over I didn’t think I’d ever go back to war.” But soon he’ll be heading back to Iraq as a member of a local national guard unit that’s being deployed to Iraq. “I’ll go and I’ll give 150 percent,” he says. “But I won’t lie–I don’t want to go. I feel like I was deceived. I’ll bet there are lots of other guys who feel the same way.”
In 1990 Jimenez was sent to Saudi Arabia as part of the buildup for Desert Storm. “I was an infantryman–my specialty was shooting a machine gun,” he says. “They based us in the middle of the desert outside an air force base. They told us, ‘You guys are the first wave of defense for this base. Your home is whatever hole you’re going to dig in the ground.’ It rained for three consecutive days. We were drenched. You just huddled under your poncho.”
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Jimenez was away from his wife, Marie, and their two-year-old daughter, Azaria, for almost a year. (His son, Elias, was born in 1993.) “When I got back Azaria wouldn’t call me dad,” he says. “She would call me by my first name. I guess she didn’t know me that way–you know, like a father. It’s hard to be away.”
One day last summer Jimenez was with his son at the Puerto Rican festival in Humboldt Park, where he saw a registration booth run by the Illinois National Guard. “They had this souped-up Humvee there with a PlayStation built into it–it was addressed to the PlayStation generation, and you had all these 17- and 18-year-olds hanging around looking at it,” he says. “I started talking to the recruiter. I told him I’d been a marine, and he asked if I was interested in coming back. I said, ‘No way.’ And he said, ‘It could pay for your education.’ He said, ‘All you have to do is give us one weekend a month for a year.’ I said I wanted to do something that would contribute to my architecture career. He said he had an opening in one unit as a generator-repair electrician.”
On November 12 he showed up for a training session in Riverside. “There was this speech by a colonel who said, ‘I’m the asshole who signs the order for your arrest if you don’t show up for deployment.’ He said, ‘I will send out the state police and have you arrested. The U.S. marshals will transfer you to Leavenworth. You’ll await trial in Leavenworth, and the minimum sentence for failing to report is 15 months.’”
Conceivably, a guardsman like Jimenez could be kept on continual duty. “In theory, yes, that could happen,” says Schuller. “But in reality it would not.”
In any event, Jimenez says he won’t sue. “I don’t want to go to jail. I’m just SOL. None of this is working out the way I thought. They said I’d get electrical training, but I won’t. They said I’d get out in August 2004, but I won’t. They said I wouldn’t go to Iraq, but I am. After all these years I’m back to square one–I’m a grunt. It’s almost funny, except I’m not laughing.”
