Losing Cpl. Juan Rodrigo Rodriguez:
luto in El Cenizo & a cruel measure for the war in Iraq

By María Eugenia Guerra

Rodrigo and Juanita Rodriguez speak with an immense trembling tenderness of their son Marine Lance Cpl. Juan Rodrigo Rodriguez, Webb County's first casualty in the war in Iraq. Rodrigo calls Juan's death “the accident,” though in fact the 23-year-old reservist died in the Al Anabar province in an enemy fire explosion that killed fellow Marine, Lance Cpl. Matthew W. Holloway, 21, of Fulton and seriously injured four others. Rodriguez and Holloway were members of Charlie Company, First Battalion of the 23rd Marines.

“The last time I dreamed him was two days before the accident,” Rodrigo said. “I dreamed he was already here. I was so happy in the dream that he was home that I cried. I told my wife I had dreamed of Juan, and that my tears were of happiness, but the terrible surprise was that Juan would die.

“I had been resting the afternoon the car pulled up to the house,” Rodrigo, a native of Mercedes, recalled of the day he was notified that Juan had been killed. “From the window I saw the uniforms and the white hats. I answered the door, and I felt the world had fallen in on me, that everything would be over. I wanted to tell them to leave, that I didn't want them here, but of course they were just men doing their job, so I told them, ‘Dáme razón de mi hijo.'

“We were told the United States is indebted to us for the loss of our son. That will never be paid. This will be very hard, our life without Juan,” Rodrigo said.

Juan Rodrigo Rodriguez was deployed July 15, 2004. After about a month in San Diego, he came home in August for eight days. “Before he left, I went into his room,” Juanita said. “My heart has hurt ever since I knew he would go, and I prayed day and night that he might not go. I prayed with him and kissed him and hugged him and told him we would go to the shrine of San Juan in Jalisco to give thanks for his safe return. De esa manera se fué contento. I blessed him with prayer like I have blessed both my children all their lives when they leave our house. I told him, ‘I am praying to God that you will come home,' and I gave him a blessed scapular to wear. My son had a lot of faith in God, and he must know in the heaven he believed in how much we loved him.”

“When Juan left I did not want to think it was the last time I would see him. I could see that he was sad but that he was keeping it well hidden,” Rodrigo remembered. “I prayed with him and I told him in his room, ‘What I would give that you wouldn't go.' I'd have given my own life, my soul. And I told him, ‘I don't know what I would do if I got news that something has happened to you.' And then he was gone.”

“The night before he left I heard my parents talking to Juan. My mother told Juan, ‘I will die if something happens to you.' My father said, ‘And I will die without her to care for me,'” recalled Juan's sister Fatima. “They wanted him to know how important he was to us,” she said.

Juan called his parents from Germany and then from Iraq. “He said it was very dangerous there but that he was safe, and that it was a very hard reality,” Rodrigo said. “In another call he said there had not been a day of peace and that they were fighting in an area donde las casas éran muy humildes. He observed that many of the Iraqis were golpeados por la vida.”

Juanita remembered that when her son first called from Iraq, he sounded congested. “It was that way the second time he called and the third, and then I realized his voice was that way because he was sad and might be scared.”

Rodrigo said that Juan's calls were very short. “He spoke in a hushed tone and never gave his location. He said they had to keep moving and that they didn't have one place to sleep,” he said.

“This is a useless war,” Rodrigo continued. “It has no meaning. It has no honor.”

“Están enlutando hogares como el de nosotros,” Juanita said. “They are sacrificing our children like little lambs to the slaughter.”

“Se está peleando por petróleo,” Rodrigo said. “Un gobierno debe cuidar su casa y no casa agena. I wish they would pick up all our children and bring them home and stop spreading the blood of our sons and daughters on foreign soil. What kind of government sends its children to war without what they need to survive, in vehicles that offer no protection? If this was a good war, why don't the daughters of the President serve or the sons and daughters of Congressmen?”

Juanita remembered the death of her brother, a firefighter in Jalisco, who died many years ago at the age of 21. “My mother fell to the ground when she was told my brother was dead. When we lost Juan she told me how sad she was that I would know what it was to lose a child.”

She spoke of the comfort the memorial services for Juan offered them. She spoke of the school children at Juan's first school, Leon Daiches, lined up at the fence on Meadow St. as the cortege drove south from the funeral home in the Heights. “They were there to greet my son as we passed. They had made a sign that said, ‘We will always have you in our hearts,'” she said, her voice dolorous, soft with sentiment. She recalled that the front doors and the side doors of Santa Monica mission in El Cenizo had to be opened so that everyone standing outside the church could hear the Mass offered by Bishop James A. Tamayo. “We will never be able to thank all our friends who stayed home from work or school to be with us on the day we buried Juan. All his teachers were with us and so were the people he worked with before he left. There were so many people we did not know who were with us that day -- members of the police department, the Border Patrol. Up and down the streets the gates to houses had yellow ribbons tied to them. When we left the church for the cemetery, the hearse and the entire funeral drove past our house.”

Navigating through their grief, on a damp afternoon at their home, Rodrigo and Juanita remembered Juan as a boy. “He was obedient,” Rodrigo said. “He liked school and being with his friends. He liked school so much that he would not tell us if he was sick. He was a good student, both of my children are. Juan was an exemplary son. I was his father, his friend, his counselor.” Juan was a 2000 graduate of Cigarroa High School and a member of the Junior ROTC Marine Corps.

Juanita recalled, “His vicio was milk, a gallon of milk and four bananas. He drank four gallons a week. Era muy hogareño. He chose good friends and kept them throughout his school years. Our children wanted us close to them. Juan was very affectionate. Era muy alegre.” His pasatiempos, she said, were watching high school football games and hockey games at the Laredo Entertainment Center. Juanita and Rodrigo recently attended their first hockey game, a game at which Juan was remembered in a tribute of silence and at which photographs of him were flashed across the arena's massive video screens.

“Juan and Fatima were very close,” Rodrigo said. “She was a year younger. They made their First Holy Communion together and their confirmation. They were born in the same month so they shared birthday parties and piñatas. Juan was in ROTC and Fatima was in band.”

“My brother's life was big. He worked full time, he helped my parents, he was a Marine, and he had a lot of friends. I think my brother's life ended in greatness all around him. We had no idea he had so many friends who admired him and loved him,” said Fatima, a junior business student at Texas A&M International University.

“When we were children Juan was kind of quiet. When he was given work, he did it. When it was time to play, he threw himself into it. He had a lot of control that way. He was very responsible and helped my parents both financially and in many other ways. He helped my father build our house,” Fatima recalled.

“My parents wanted the best for us in every way. They raised us the best the way they knew. They wanted us to be happy. They told us not to have jobs we didn't like. They taught us respect. When Juan was little my father took him to work in the fields at San Ygnacio. I think he was teaching Juan how important it was to work for your money but also to try to end up working at a job that made you happy,” she said.

Juan would have finished his commitment to the government as a reservist in 2006. According to Rodrigo, his son had plans to go to college and to become a Laredo police officer.

Juanita opened a small red cloth sack that held Juan's dogtags, his watch, and the contents of his pockets at the time of his death. With great care she removed the cloth and string scapular she had given him, a laminated card with a prayer for soldiers, the images of two guardian angels carrying a child, a small locket of the Virgen de Guadalupe. “It is still marking the time in Iraq,” she said of the watch.

“I think he could have stayed out of the war because he was our only son, but he said he wanted to go.” Juanita said. “He said, ‘They are asking me to go. A lot of only sons have gone.”

“We were the first to lose our son, but we will not be the last in El Cenizo. There are at least 30 soldiers from El Cenizo fighting this war,” Rodrigo said.

“They never stop being our children,” Juanita said. “He will always be ours.”

Juanita said that since Juan died she has felt a loss of energy. “We get very tired,” she said.

“I think sometimes we are going to become old very quickly, because this is hard and it will always hurt,” Rodrigo said. “Things have lost some of their meaning. Time passes in an unordinary way. We look for our routine, but we can't exactly find the order of our lives. Juan was such a part of that order.”