Five Years In: Tracking A Marine Lost At Home

PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — A week after Eric W. Hall disappeared into the woods of Southwest Florida, his mother stood in a parking lot overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. She had asked for volunteers. Would they come?

Articles in this series are examining crucial facets of the Iraq war.

A blog looking at daily life inside Iraq, produced by The Times’s Baghdad bureau.

Kevin and Becky Hall.

Becky Hall’s son had experienced a flashback, fleeing a relative’s home after sensing that Iraqi insurgents had surrounded him. He was 24, a former Marine corporal from Indiana who had been medically discharged after a bomb ripped through his leg. Here, among the retirees and strip malls, he was a stranger.

And yet his absence spurred a community to action. More than 50 people stepped forward that first day in February. Others came later, young and old, contributing four-wheelers, pickup trucks, boats, horses, search-and-rescue dogs, and even a small plane.

They searched day in, day out for weeks because Mr. Hall’s story broke their hearts and, many said, because his case inspired them to look past arguments over whether the war was right or wrong. It was a mission, not a debate: A marine was missing and had to be found.

“He has these issues as a result of what we asked him to do,” said Kathryn Preston, 52, a botanist who spent time in the Army as a young woman and used her pontoon boat for the search. “It felt like we were responsible for him. People in the United States. All of us.”

Here in Southwest Florida, the Iraq war is no stranger. Tampa has both the headquarters for Central Command, responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of four hospitals that care for the nation’s most severely wounded soldiers. Since 2003, at least 34 families from Clearwater to Fort Myers have endured the chest-crushing pain of a knock on the door that leads to a funeral.

Mr. Hall’s story, to many, sounded familiar. And in the end, it connected military families from coast to coast. He was among the thousands who had been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq more than once. When he came home in 2005 after being wounded by a bomb that killed his close friend, he was forced to endure repeated surgery, post-traumatic stress and the loss of his career in the Marine Corps.

At his parents’ home in Indiana one day, he told his mother that he no longer fit in.

“Everyone is moving on,” he said. “Look at me. I’m not.”

Among marines and soldiers recently returned from Iraq — including men like Billy Huether who helped search for him — Mr. Hall’s combat horrors rang true. His failure to readjust, in a society that often seems more concerned with Britney than bombs, also made him a brother to Vietnam veterans here, like Charlie Shaughnessy, who camped out for several nights looking for Mr. Hall.

And in the struggle of Mr. Hall’s loving Midwestern family, many here and outside of Florida came to recognize a sad and unavoidable truth: that wars do not always end when the warriors come home. On the home front, they last a lifetime.

An Iraq Veteran

Mr. Huether, an outgoing father of two, worked as an Army recruiter from 1998 to 2003 in and around the town where Mr. Hall disappeared. He had served for more than a decade when he received the assignment, and the task became easier after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when scores of Americans signed up to serve their country in the fight against terrorism.

Even then, he said, the war in Iraq seemed inevitable and area residents seemed ready for its consequences.

“The American flags went up, the yellow ribbons came out,” he said. “Instead of Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ flags outside their windows, they were flying the American flags.”

One in five of Port Charlotte’s 46,000 mostly middle-class residents is a veteran, above the national average of 12.7 percent, according to the 2000 Census. In neighboring Punta Gorda, a smaller community, the share of veterans is even higher, 29 percent.

But it didn’t take long for support of the Iraq war to fade. When Mr. Huether, 40, came home from a yearlong deployment to South Korea in the spring of 2004, he noticed that the community had become more skeptical, describing Iraqis as squanderers of freedom or outright killers. Even members of his family began to question whether the war could be won.

The change could be seen in the neighborhoods, where tracts of one-story homes opened onto screened-in patios. Some of the American flags had come down. A few weeks after he returned, he noticed signs on light poles and on plywood at construction sites, which appeared to be memorials for someone named Michael.

“Who’s Michael?” he asked his wife.

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting.

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