In Ohio, town residents shaken as battalion is bloodied twice in week
BROOK PARK, Ohio -- The rash of violence in Iraq this week has taken an especially brutal toll on a Marine battalion based in this working-class town: Twenty members from the unit were killed over two days.
Grief and anger shook the town as families and residents anxiously awaited answers after learning that 14 Marine reservists were killed yesterday by a roadside bomb -- one of the heaviest blows suffered by a single unit in the war. Two days earlier, six others from the battalion were killed while on sniper duty.
The sorrow in Brook Park, a Cleveland suburb of 21,000 people, was clear yesterday among the line of customers sipping their morning coffee at a doughnut shop down the street from the battalion's headquarters. Nearly everyone said they knew someone connected to the battalion.
''You never know who it could be. It could be your best friend. It could be your husband -- it could be anyone from here," Eleanor Matelski, 69, said as she angrily tore up a paper cup that had held her coffee. ''Tell Bush to get our soldiers out of there now before any more of our soldiers die. This is getting to be ridiculous," she said.
A few steps away, near the gates of the Third Battalion, 25th Marines, residents piled red roses, American flags, handwritten notes of condolences, and white crosses for the victims.
Names of the Marines killed yesterday were not immediately released, but nine of them came from a smaller company of the battalion based in Columbus, said Master Sergeant Stephen Walter, a spokesman for the company. The battalion was activated in January and went to Iraq in March.
Military officials told the family of Lance Corporal Edward Schroeder, 23, of Cleveland, that he was one of the Marines who died yesterday. His mother, Rosemary Palmer, said he joined the military in 2002 despite her opposition. She said she would not even let her son play with toy guns while he was growing up.
The risk that the same geographical area will suffer multiple casualties has been heightened in Iraq because reserve troops train and fight together -- unlike in Vietnam, which was fought largely by active-duty troops who were replaced by individual soldiers from around the nation.
The Third Battalion, 25th Marines, was first activated on May 1, 1943, and fought in several battles in World War II. It helped capture a key airfield at the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific. Before this week's dead, the unit's website listed 25 of its Marines had been killed this year. The battalion has units in Brook Park, Columbus, Akron, Moundsville, W.Va., and Buffalo. The West Virginia unit said none of its members were among the casualties. 