Gratitude Friday 05 2 25 – A US Marine Hero José Antonio Gutiérrez Say His Name Remember His Sacrifice

I recently read a book written by the late Senator John McCain. US Statesman and Vietnam POW. The book was called The Restless Wave, Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations. I did not agree with all his positions as a politician but never once doubted his patriotism and that he was a person of conviction who fought for what he believed. For the record here, I don’t agree with anyone on everything all the time, even myself as confusing as that may sound. I have deep respect for people of conviction, even when at times those convictions are different than my own. I can’t say the same for transactional leaders who make decisions on some short term calculation of gain, detached from values, but I digress here. In that book, McCain wrote about José Antonio Gutiérrez a name that was unfamiliar to me before reading the chapter he focused on Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).

His views on what we did in OIF and OEF are important to me. Senator McCain was no chicken hawk. He had concerns about OIF and OEF as a vet. His also believed that we should not torture people, even those who may have done terrible things to us came from a place of authenticity that no one who was not a POW tortured in captivity can possibly match.

In the Restless Wave, he wrote about Lance Corporal José Antonio Gutiérrez as the first Marine killed in action in Iraq.  Gutiérrez was a lance corporal and died in a place called Umm Qasr, Iraq on March 21st, 2003, in service to our nation. He was the first allied soldier killed in action in Iraq. Another fact about Lance Corporal Gutiérrez was that he illegally entered this nation in 1997, was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, then received asylum through due process. He went to High School, graduated from college and signed up to serve his adopted nation, the one who had granted him and his family asylum a few years earlier.

I will make the observation here, that some of the most patriotic Americans are people who were not born here but faced tyranny and oppression abroad and come here to our country with a deep sense of what our values mean because they have lived in a world devoid of those values in ways few of us have. It is also not lost on me that Senator McCain, a senator of Arizona that has a 372.5-mile border with the nation of Mexico saw beyond how Lance Corporal Gutiérrez got into our country to recognize he was an American and one who should be held up for his sacrifices to our nation. I suspect that it was Senator McCain’s own experience with what it meant to face the inhumanity of man factored into how he saw Lance Corporal Gutiérrez. Illegal entry into our nation is not as black and white as it tends to be bantered about in our two dimensional oversimplified era of political rhetoric.

There is a Wikipedia page about a short movie on Lance Corporal Gutiérrez The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez the actual movie, which is 6.5 minutes long can be viewed here. Roughly halfway through the movie his teary-eyed USMC drill Sargent distinctly recalled Lance Corporal Gutiérrez. Each recruit or "Poolee" was asked why they wanted to be a United States Marine, and Gutiérrez answered that he signed up to be a Marine to serve the nation that accepted him as one of their own. I am not sure any of us who were raised here can understand the motivation he had.

My post here clearly has some relevance to our current political climate and how we are mass deporting people, changing green card statuses and having families ripped apart by masked men who show up at schools, hospitals and churches waving guns and throwing people in cars who then get deported with no form of check or balance. Allow me to state I do not have a clear answer here. I believe that immigration is good for our nation and much prefer it be done legally, but I note in the same breath that heroes like Lance Corporal Gutiérrez show us that the situations involved are much more complicated which is why we have the system of checks and balances we have, or had.

I see Lance Corporal Gutiérrez as an American Hero, many people born here would not contemplate the risk he took to defend our nation. We should remember him and others like him and understand that the truths of our world are complex and often defy simple solutions. We degrade the values of our nation when we fail to account for these complexities. On my father’s side, we were here before the formation of the nation. I am proud that I am a dependent of a revolutionary war hero, a farmer who preserved the Liberty Bell from the invading British. On my mother’s side we are natives of Ireland who survived the potato famine and were welcomed to our nation by Lady Liberty and Ellis Island. Lance Corporal Gutiérrez had a different pathway to US citizenship than I did through birth here or my ancestors had, but he was no less of an American than I. Perhaps in some ways he was more so than I.

At the end of this month on Memorial Day, he will be very much on my mind. . I am grateful for him, he was an American hero and one of the ways that we should honor his short life and the ultimate sacrifice he made for our great nation is to strive to more fully realize the values of honor, integrity, service and humility. The values that actually made us great and without which we are just another two-bit country.

What are you grateful for today?