By KEITH GRANT
Army SPC Marjorie Gutierrez left her base at Fort Stewart, Ga., last week for Kuwait, with Iraq as her eventual destination. It's the second deployment to a war zone in as many years for the 21-year-old Long Beach woman. Through 2001-02, then-PFC Gutierrez took part in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. She spent a full year there, and now her family is expecting she'll spend at least as long in the Persian Gulf theatre.
Though U.S. soldiers were entering Baghdad as she spoke, Gutierrez' mom said she was nervous for her daughter.
"I'm scared," Alina Gutierrez said. "But I know she's just doing what she does."
Her job in Iraq, the family said, will be to help rebuild homes and create make-shift hospitals.
"She likes to do that," said her sister Veronica, 24. "She doesn't like office jobs. She enjoys the fact that she's one of few women who go to the front. She likes being just one of the guys."
"She enjoys taking apart land mines!" Veronica added with amusement. "She says it's an adrenaline rush."
Before she found an adrenaline rush taking apart explosives, Marjorie Gutierrez was a regular kid at Long Beach High School, graduating in 2000. Her decision to enlistment into the Army took the family by surprise.
"I was in Florida at the time," Veronica said. "She called me at 3 in the morning and told me. I fell out of bed! She's a crazy sister."
Gutierrez initially joined the Army Reserves, but then decided to go full-time. Veronica said the military bug runs in parts of the family. Their cousin, she said, served in the first Gulf War, and their father, Washington Gutierrez, was in the army in his native Equador.
SPC Gutierrez will likely have a hands-on role in rebuilding Iraq. She is currently a carpenter with the Army's 22nd Engineer Battalion.
"She was pretty excited to go over there," her sister said.
With temperatures near 100 degrees in the Iraqi desert, she'll likely be greeted by a slightly different climate than the one she met in Afghanistan, where she got to make a snowman after arriving. The family hopes another difference will be that they'll be able to hear from Gutierrez more often than they were able to last year, when she could call only about once every two months from Afghanistan.
Her mother said that while Marjorie was in Afghanistan, she said she decided that the Army was not going to be the life for her. But as had happened before, a few months later she sang a different tune. "Then she says, 'Mommy I'm going to stay,'" Alina remembered with a laugh.
Marjorie was last home on Valentine's Day for a surprise visit. With her now half-way across the globe again, her younger siblings find themselves thinking a lot about their big sister. Luis, 12, said he's worried constantly, and nine-year-old Amanda hopes her sister will come home soon. Yet the entire family couldn't be prouder.
