Alison Dellit
On January 9, 19-year-old Andres Raya, just returned from Iraq, decided to utilize his US marine training to take on his town's local police department, and hundreds of police units from the neighbouring area. By the time he was finished, one cop was dead, another in the casualty department and Raya was lying dead in an ally with 18 shots in his body. According to GI Special, Raya had told friends he didn't want "to go back to commit murder in Iraq".
"He came back different", Raya's mother Julia told the Modesto Bee. Raya had returned from Iraq to his hometown of Ceres, notorious for anti-Mexican racism, in September for leave. He told friends that he did not want to return to Iraq, that it was "nothing but a war for oil", and that it was "unjust".
He encouraged his friends to see Fahrenheit 9/11. His cousin Alex Raya told GI Special on January 13: "He showed us pictures of this guy's head hanging off. He told us about going into homes and shooting them up, and said he wouldn't pull the trigger a lot because he didn't want to kill anyone."
Nevertheless, he returned to Camp Pendleton on January 2, but disappeared on January 8. He turned up at a Ceres liquor store the following day, carrying an assault rifle, telling the store clerk he had been shot and asking him to call the police. When two police officers arrived, Raya had set up an ambush, and shot each in turn, seriously wounding one and killing the other with two bullets in the back of the head.
As the local police called in all available units from the local area, Raya ran into an alley, telling residents, "Don't worry, you're civilians, you won't get hurt." After a three-hour serach and gun battle, Raya dropped his weapon and charged at the police. It took 18 shots to bring him down.
Raya's attack has received little media attention in a country where shoot-outs are usually milked to death. The reason is not obscure: Raya is one of the victims of the Iraq war. He may not have been shot there, but the mental injuries he received have proven no less fatal. The pro-war US media has no intention of highlighting the horrific toll that the war is taking on those who participate in it.
What corporate media coverage there is has attempted to downplay the Iraq war angle, claiming that Raya was a gang member — an accusation his family defiantly denies — and that he had cocaine in his blood. The marines have also claimed that he did not participate in combat, despite what he told his family and friends.
We will probably never know what it was that made Raya decide to kill himself — and to take as many cops with him a he could. It may have been, as GI Special has speculated, influenced by his experience of anti-Mexican racism. It may have been because he could not live with what he had experienced in Iraq: an unjust, and oppressive war. But we can say that he is not an isolated case.
According to the November edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, one in six soldiers returning from Iraq suffers from full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. By the end of the year, around 100,000 soldiers may need treatment. Late last year US Congress allocated the only funds to treat this: a measly $5 million.
From Green Left Weekly, January 26, 2005.
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