Laura Golembiewski
22, Northeast Philly
Corporal, Marine Corps
Deployed to Iraq Winter 2006
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Laura Golembiewski
22, Northeast Philly
Corporal, Marine Corps
Deployed to Iraq Winter 2006
Like many vets, Laura Golembiewski was motivated by the 9/11 attacks, which took place when she was a freshman at St. Hubert's High School in the Northeast. "I just wanted to fly the planes and bomb the motherfuckers," she recalls. Her initial intent was to join the Air Force, but she realized the Marines would provide a faster path to a war zone. She enlisted in 2005 and deployed to Iraq in 2006.
At Camp Al Taqaddum in Al-Anbar province, Golembiewski's job was to work on the ground alongside the very people she'd enlisted to bomb. Twice a week, she drove to a dump in the desert to burn trash with civilians. Her opinions on the population changed drastically. "It was a country full of people just trying to raise their families," she says. "I saw children playing in their front yards, and 9/11 was obviously not their fault. We are just in their country looking for the bad guys."
Golembiewski ruled out re-enlisting when her son Damien, now 21 months old, was born. After that, she says, "It wasn't an option for me." Shifting from her rapidly rising military career to a slumping civilian economy, though, she knew she would struggle to find work. "With all the graduates coming out of college, with a degree that I don't have, and all the military coming back — it's like rolling the dice." She rolled the dice hundreds of times; in April alone she sent out more than 100 applications with no reply. Her number finally came up this month, and she started as an assistant manager of her local Dunkin' Donuts. She doesn't think her rejections were due to her military experience, but worries that some places would be frightened by the hard image of "the Marines they see in the movies."
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