War sparks Marine’s personal turnaround

Story and photo by Liza Porter

Bryan Bates enlisted in the Marine Corps right out of high school. He served in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, for a total of 15 months.

A self-professed “wild child,” Bates rides a Harley Davidson to school. Arrested several times as a teenager, he got in trouble in the Marines as well, usually while drinking.

Bates smoked while he talked, his tall, thin body perched on the edge of a cement bench outside the Santa Catalina building on West Campus. He wore Levi’s, a white shirt and black Converse shoes.

The Arizona sky glowed a deep blue. Several times the sound of a helicopter almost drowned out his voice, as if he were still in a war zone. He didn’t flinch.

“Starting school has calmed me down. Made me see that the time to raise hell is over.” He smiled. “And, you know, get on with my future.”

Near the end of his enlistment, Bates was transferred to another unit and got in trouble again. His commanding officer intervened and Bates got an honorable discharge.

“He’s the reason why I’m going to school right now,” Bates said. “He told me ‘you’re getting this, I want you to do something with your life. Don’t join the Border Patrol … don’t be a cop.’

“He’s, like, ‘go to college.’” Bates added. “He told me that and so I kind of took his advice. I owe it to him, you know.”

He also attributed his personal turnaround to his experiences during the two wars.

“To really function in that environment, you have to have a good level of compassion and a good level of violence,” Bates said. “You’ve got to be balanced.”

In Iraq in 2006, his unit helped turn the city of Haditha around after 24 civilians were killed by Marines in 2005 in one of the most controversial actions of the war.

“You can’t really tell what kind of person you are until you’ve seen the best and the worst,” Bates said. “And I’ve been able to tell that, you know, I’m not a bad person, and so that helps me care for people better.”

Bates wants to go back to the Middle East, this time as a photojournalist.

One thing that bothered Bates during the war was that Marines had to watch their backs when journalists were around.

“I think sometimes a reporter doesn’t truly understand what’s going on,” Bates said. “They can mix up the facts. And I think having the perspective, from somebody that’s been there and done that already, I can tell the story with more truth.”

A PCC photojournalism class gave Bates the “bug” to be a journalist.

“The teacher had been preaching to us to ‘always carry your camera on you’ and I was about to leave the house without the camera.” He decided to bring it with him.

As Bates drove down the road that day, he saw a boy standing outside of a motorcycle shop with a sign that said, “Lemons Sold Here.”

“I pulled over and I went and talked to the kid a bit and I snapped a picture of him.”

The boy’s bike had blown up after just a few hundred miles on the odometer, and the shop wasn’t going to fix it.

“What stood out for me is, when I took the picture, my hands were shaking,” Bates said. He felt the adrenalin rush that comes while doing something you know is right for you. It reminded him of his time in the Middle East.

“I miss being over there,” Bates said. “I don’t miss the bad things, I miss the good things. The sense that I was doing something important … was addicting.

“In war, there’s a lot of gray areas,” he added. “It’s made me a better person, it’s made me a more compassionate person, being in war.”

Bryan Bates relaxes with a smoke during a break between classes.