Sgt. Marc Golczynski

On the phone with my dad yesterday, I learned that a good friend of mine had recently passed away.

Marc Golczynski, a Sergeant in the Marines, was shot and killed on Tuesday March 27th while on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Stories here and here.

Marc was literally my oldest friend. We were born weeks apart from each other in the same hospital in Colquitt County, Georgia. Our parents were good friends, and both moved up to Lewisburg, TN at the same time to start working at Faber-Castell. We were close friends all throughout our younger years, but as we got older we started losing common interests. At some point Marc’s mother and my mother had an argument and I that was really when we stopped hanging out that much. It wasn’t really until our Junior or Senior year in high school that we started hanging out again. Marc was a really popular “all american” kind of boy, and I was a nerdy ass grunge rocker that started getting asked to hang out and help make crafts and crap for pep rallies and parties. Usually these where at Marc’s house.

Obviously Marc and I didn’t keep in touch after high school. Our only connection being the updates my mother would dispatch between us. “Marc’s married now to a girl he met at Ruby Tuesday.” “Brian’s dropped out of college to pursue professional yo-yoing.” “Marc has a baby on the way and he’s joined the Reserves.” “Brian’s business in ST. Louis was an utter failure, he’s going to close shop and move to Minneapolis to manage a store in the Mall of America.” etc.

After hearing about Marc’s death I started searching for more information about what happened. Several google searches led me to stories like this one, in which he visited Forrest Middle School to thank them for choosing him for their “Adopt A Serviceman” project. Marc’s mother, Elaine Huffines, has been a teacher at Forrest School for the last 25 years or so.

I also found this podcast from a middle Tennessee radio station that featured Marc as a guest on several of their shows. On it, Marc explains that he feels it’s part of his duty to go back to Iraq, and that he doesn’t regret volunteering for his second tour.

It struck me that the only things I could find about Marc were all related to his service in the Marines. I guess I first took that as saying that he didn’t really have much going on to his life, but I soon started to realize that the Marines was his life. He felt that service was his calling in life.

Last night and into this morning I tried catching news of the attack on the big news networks. Hoping to hear how it happened and how many other servicemen had been injured, but instead I saw were large doses of the Anna Nicole Smith trial.

Between online searches, I would check some of the message boards that I regularly post on. A friend announced that he might be going back into service in Iraq if he passed his physical and he couldn’t be happier. I wished him luck, and noticed a few posts later that another friend of mine had said that the only way to deal with people who disagree with the US is through violence. They went on with all that bullshit talk about how US Marines were dying in Iraq so that hippies in America could be free to complain about the war on online forums.

As I’ve said, Marc and I did not stay in touch throughout the years, but from listening to his podcast interviews I get the sense that he was a smart man. His speech was eloquent and thoughtful. He didn’t give much of his own personal beliefs on the war in Iraq, but he seemed to understand that there was much depth to the situation. I don’t believe he oversimplified the Iraqi people and the situation at hand. I was struck more with the feeling that he was not volunteering to finish a job, but more to protect the younger batch of Marines heading into hostile situations.

Marc had just recently turned 30, and was two weeks away from returning home from duty. He was the 3,243 casualty in this current Iraq war.