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This tragic tale is months old,
but I met her cousins last night at the Yankees game. This story highlights the overwhelming majority of the type of people who wind up fighting and dying in this illegal ocupation of Iraq. Without a draft most affluent American don't give a damn about the Iraq occupation body count. It dosen't affect their lives at all; the have "no skin in the game". My 17 year old just hit-me-up for $2,100. for a fully loaded new Dell Inspiron E1705 Duo Core notebook computer. I reminded him again how fortunate he is.
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Out of the Bronx, To Iraq,
And Never to Come Home</font>
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<font face="arial" size="2" color="#000000"><b>Corporal Ramona M. Valdez</b></font>
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<b>by Jennifer 8. Lee
Jun 29, 2005</b>
Cpl. Ramona M. Valdez grew up within roaring distance of Yankee Stadium. The screams of the fans could be heard from her family's seventh-floor apartment on Sheridan Avenue. But while she loved her local baseball team, she wanted to get out of the Bronx.
It was too noisy, too crowded. ''She didn't like New York,'' said her mother, Elida Nunez, in Spanish. ''She wanted something different.''
The Marine Corps was her way out. Even in elementary school, she told relatives that she wanted to join the military; it was a desire that became stronger after the Sept. 11 attacks, her family said.
Last week, Corporal Valdez was one of three women killed in an ambush by suicide bombers in Falluja, Iraq. She died last Thursday; she would have turned 21 on Sunday.
In 2002, when she was still 17, Ms. Valdez went to the Marine recruiting station on Fordham Road and signed up. Her mother did not want to sign the parental permission papers, but Ms. Valdez insisted.
''She wanted to be in the Marines, so we supported her and let her go,'' said her father, Louis Valdez.
She gave up shopping for Pepe Jeans and Nikes on Fordham Road to wear stiff, scratchy uniforms, said her sister, Fiorela Valdez, 19.
Her flip-flops were put away for combat boots. She grew out her thick, black shoulder-length hair so that she could pin it up in a bun, to conform with Marine regulations. The clubs in the Bronx were replaced by those near Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
Corporal Valdez was deployed to Iraq in March. When she was killed, she was working as a communication specialist, assigned to Headquarters Battalion, Second Marine Division.
She was eight months from the end of her four-year tour. She had filled out application forms to become a highway patrol officer in Pennsylvania, her sister said.
Corporal Valdez met her husband, Armando Guzman, who was also a resident of the Bronx and also in the Marines, in 2002. They married nine months after they met. She wanted to have a baby, and to be there to see her child grow up, relatives said.
Corporal Valdez was separated from her mother in her early childhood. She was born in the Dominican Republic, and her mother, who had immigration papers for herself but not her daughter, left her with grandparents there when she came to the United States. Corporal Valdez was 6 before she could join her family in New York.
Years later, Corporal Valdez used her military service to persuade her mother to leave the Bronx. If her mother did not move, Corporal Valdez threatened, she would sign up for another four-year tour, her sister recalled.
''And my mom said: 'You know what? I'm moving,''' Fiorela said.
Her mother moved to Reading, Pa., in March. She got a job in a poultry factory, cutting meat off bones.
The $700-a-month Bronx apartment was traded in for a $550-a-month red brick house with white and yellow flowers in the yard.
Corporal Valdez never saw the house.
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