Recruiting Volunteers

In junior high school, having a father who was a drug pusher and a weightlifter could be a blessing. When anyone tried to mess with Chris Magaoay, "I flashed my dad's name around and people shut up. My dad was their drug dealer." But when Chris got to high school, some of that reputational protection service began to come apart. Maybe it was because he was just a bit smaller than others, or maybe he experienced the sting of teasing more than they did, but he felt bullied. At home no one understood or could help, especially his father: "My dad was this huge guy who never was scared of anyone and always told me that you can kill anyone if you want to." He didn't want to be a bully or hit back, so he dropped out of school.

Born in 1985 in Wailuku, Hawai'i, Christopher Scott Magaoay lived with a grandmother and an aunt who did housekeeping at the Maui Seaside Hotel in downtown Kahului. He had also lived with his grandfather, a retired irrigation worker from the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company plantation. His father was in construction for a short while before focusing on drug sales, mainly crystal methamphetamine in the neighborhood, and dipping in himself. "My dad was very abusive. Very. I can remember one time, he got really pissed off and threw me across the room. But that was the drugs getting to him, and I understand that."

When we talked in May 2008, Chris still had his U.S. Marine buzz cut, and it was obvious he was as full of energy and a spirit to tackle whatever obstacles he encountered as his stories would indicate. Compact and wiry, he seemed to greet the interview with an intensity that was at once earnest and apprehensive. He wanted to find the right way to put things, to make sure we understood who he was and what he'd been through since he'd joined the Marines in the fall of 2004.

The way Chris put it, "I was raised by my entire family. We never had a central core thing. It's kind of the Filipino-Hawai'ian way. You don't have a central parental unit." He went to Pukalani Elementary School and later the Kalama Intermediate School. Chris was only four or five when the First Gulf War occurred in 1990–91. "I heard that the war was coming on the news and I started panicking. My dad told me, 'You don't have to worry. We have two aircraft carriers parked out front.' I didn't know what that meant, but later in school we studied Pearl Harbor, the whole history of Hawai'i and its military significance." In elementary school they had gone on a field trip to the Combined Arms Exercise Center on the Big Island. He and his classmates even slept overnight in the barracks there and were impressed to see tanks rolling by. It was not surprising, then, that at Henry Perrine Baldwin High School one of the first things he did was join the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC).

Chris stayed at different family homes until one day in ninth grade, December 14, 1999: "I tell everyone that was the day my life took a turn for the worse. I remember the day very clearly. I ran away from home." He had been living that fall with his mother, but she started doing drugs, as she had often in the past, and ultimately was arrested on charges of stealing a car. By December she was about to go to jail. Chris didn't want to live with his dad because he was a drug addict too, "and I didn't want to go through that anymore. I lived on the beaches for about a year. The police would pick me up every so often. That was about until I was fifteen."

To make the money he needed to survive on his own, Chris picked opihi, a local snail delicacy, and sold them for twenty dollars a gallon ziplock bag. For clothing he went to the Salvation Army. But the law finally got a solid grip on him, putting him on probation and sending him back to high school. He went for about two months and then decided to take the GED. His high score allowed him to graduate nearly two years ahead of his class.

Done with school at sixteen, Chris decided he needed a change of scenery. As he was considering what to do, he learned that his girlfriend, Erika Lea, was being molested by her stepfather at home. He wanted to help. As he said looking back later, "I already had the Marine inside of me. Had to save somebody." After they reported him to the authorities, the stepfather was removed from the house, but Erika and Chris remained frightened that he might return in another of his furies. Erika Lea's mother decided to take her to the Philippines and invited Chris to come along. He jumped at the chance to get out of Hawai'i, at least for a while. He went online to order his birth certificate, picked up a state ID, paid $65 for his expedited passport, and received the document without anyone in his family knowing what he was planning.

Within a month of arriving in the province of Luzon in the Philippines, Erika Lea was pregnant, and, remembered Chris, "I had to grow up real fast." Before long, in November 2002, their son, John Luke, was born.

Over the next intense year and a half, he said, "I learned pretty much everything that I know today." He and his wife, wife's mother, and son were all in the Philippines in March 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq. To his shock and dismay, some local people threw rocks at his house because he and Erika were Americans. After a series of bomb attacks on Philippine civilians in which an American missionary was killed, the U.S. Embassy in Manila issued a travel advisory from the State Department to all U.S. citizens warning them that it was no longer safe to be in the Philippines and that those who wished to remain did so at their own risk. "It got pretty rough," Chris remembered, and he called his family back in Hawai'i for help getting home. His great-grandmother sent him the money they needed.

The only problem was that once he arrived back in the United States he was arrested for having "fled the country" while on probation, the sentence he had received for running away from home before. Court-ordered to get a job, Chris found one at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. After a few months he realized there was no way he could go on working there and began to think about other possibilities. The military was clearly a more than acceptable and somewhat familiar option after his stint in JROTC. On top of that, Chuck Norris had had many fans in his household, and his dad's favorite movie had been Full Metal Jacket: "I remember he used to say over and over to himself when he was upset or joking around, 'What's your major malfunction?!' That's what the drill sergeant screamed at the private who commits suicide in the movie."

His dad, he said, "had the drill instructor mentality that respect comes through fear and pain." Chris did stomach crunches to protect himself from being hit in...