LCpl. Joseph McCarthy (KIA)

(reprinted from the Arizon Republic September 9, 2004)

St. Johns Marine's mission to win hearts in Iraq ends in death

Mark Shaffer
Republic Flagstaff Bureau
Sept. 9, 2004 12:00 AM

It's the kind of warmhearted image that Lance Cpl. Joseph McCarthy's family says it will always remember.

In a newspaper photo last spring that received wide circulation, the 21-year-old Marine from St. Johns was hunched down on a dusty Iraqi road with his automatic weapon slung over his shoulder, handing a piece of candy to a smiling child. He told a reporter of his personal mission to win the hearts and minds of the people.

But that mission came to a violent end on Labor Day, when McCarthy and six other soldiers, including Lance Cpl. Quinn A. Keith, 21, of Page, were killed by an attacker who detonated a car bomb near Fallujah, where McCarthy had earlier passed out sweets.

"He was a Marine's Marine," said Paula Johnson of Concho, McCarthy's grandmother. "He couldn't wait to get out of high school to get in the Corps. He even did the paperwork to enlist before he graduated."

On Wednesday, flags were displayed throughout St. Johns, an eastern Arizona city, population 3,500, for the former football player, wrestler and all-around class clown, who dressed up as the Cat in the Hat for kindergarten reading programs. He graduated from high school in St. Johns in 2001.

Floral bouquets dotted the entrance to the Circle K that McCarthy's mother, Rhonda, manages.

McCarthy, who was raised in the sparsely populated rolling pinyon-covered hills between St. Johns and Snowflake, had been back in St. Johns last Thanksgiving after his first tour of duty in Iraq ended.

The year before, he had married his high school sweetheart, Amanda, said Erlinda Salazar, Amanda McCarthy's grandmother.

"You couldn't beat that kid's personality. He proposed to my granddaughter at the Marine ball in Las Vegas because he wanted all of his buddies to think of her as his fiancee, not just his girlfriend," Salazar said.

Salazar said that McCarthy left again in March with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force of Camp Pendleton, Calif., for another tour of duty in Iraq and was scheduled to return home, for good, in three weeks.

"He got wounded on Palm Sunday and just received his Purple Heart last month," Salazar said. "The story they told me, because I'm old, is that he had shrapnel in his leg. But then I found out recently that it was within inches of his heart."

Keith, McCarthy's fellow Marine, will be honored Oct. 9 at a "Support Our Troops" program for the Page community and surrounding settlements on the Navajo Reservation, said Page resident Carl Krigbaum. Krigbaum, a retired National Park Service employee who knows the Keith family, is organizing the program, which will feature patriotic songs, prayers and ceremonies. It will start at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Southern Baptist Church in Page.