Father of slain soldier speaks out.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Nine months after his only son was killed in the war, Fernando Suarez del Solar traveled from his Southern California home to Iraq to find the exact spot where 20-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar Navarro had died.

Guided by Iraqi journalists, Suarez found an empty patch of ground - barren, nondescript and unmarked in the sandy desert outside Baghdad. A herd of camels wandered nearby, tended by a boy.

"When I arrived, the journalists told me, `It's around here, somewhere,' ' he said in Eugene on Saturday, as he sat outside and patiently recounted his son's death for what must have been the thousandth time. "I see this area. I feel something, and I walk to a specific place. I say, `It's here.' '

On that day in December, Suarez looked down and found a little bottle of Tabasco sauce. He had given his son a box of 20 bottles like it in California before the young man shipped out to war. Sifting through the sand, he found a blood-stained pack of Marlboro Lights - his son's brand.

He planted a 2-foot Catholic crucifix in the sand and took photos. Later, worried the Christian icon might be offensive to his Muslim hosts, he removed it and replaced it with a smaller, metal cross, which he buried in the sand, safely out of sight.

Suarez, a short, balding, round-faced man of 48, was in Eugene doing what he has done almost nonstop since Cpl. Jesus Suarez stepped on an unexploded American cluster bomblet and died on March 27, 2003 - speaking out, telling anyone who might listen that the war is wrong, and that U.S. military recruiters use lies and deceit to get young men to enlist.

Saturday night, wearing his dead son's dog tags, he spoke to a sympathetic crowd of about 150 gathered at Cozmic Pizza. "Why do I keep going from city to city and repeating the story of my son?" he said. "I am not just repeating the story of my son. I am repeating the story of more than 730 innocent young men and women."

Suarez has given this speech, or one like it, something like 200 times, crisscrossing the country from city to town, speaking, in the first weeks, always in Spanish with a translator but gradually learning English as he went. He has lost his job, twice, and is supported by an indulgent wife. In careful, accented diction, he listed the places he's been this past year: New York. Philadelphia. Illinois. Arizona. Texas. "California, all over." Massachusetts. Delaware. He was in Ashland, where he spoke at Southern Oregon University on Friday, before arriving in Eugene on Saturday. He was headed to Washington state today.

"We need to change the system," he said simply. "Not only to remove Bush from the White House in November. We need to change a lot of the rules."

Jesus Suarez signed up, the grieving father said, only because a military recruiter promised he could enlist in the Marines for a year and then go into the FBI or other federal law enforcement. The young man hated drugs and wanted to help work to combat the drug trade.

Now an American citizen, the elder Suarez grew up in a privileged family whose life straddled the border. The son of a Mexican politician, he was a successful community organizer in Tijuana, where he won a civic award for his work in 1995. Despite his own reservations about the military, Suarez moved his family to Escondido so Jesus could go to high school there - and enlist.

Jesus never bothered to read his enlistment contract - the father says he himself never got to see it - and the young man was shattered when he discovered in boot camp that he was in for four years.

"I am very proud," he told his father the last time they met. "But I made a mistake. There is a lot of discrimination here. And a lot of lies."

Trained as a sniper and a scout, he died in the first week of the invasion as his unit unknowingly entered an area that had been hit by an American cluster bomb, which spews small explosive bomblets over a wide area. The bomblet he stepped on shattered his right foot and injured his leg and stomach.

Though he was tended in the field by his Marine buddies, young Suarez wasn't evacuated for two hours because of the danger from other bomblets, and he died in the helicopter on the way to medical help.

In his grief, Suarez is bitter about what he sees as government lies. He was first told his son was shot in combat; only later did he hear on television, and then had it confirmed by the Marines, that the young man was killed by American ordnance. He is bitter that the military would not pay the full cost of a civilian burial for his son.

In December, he went to Iraq for a week on a trip sponsored by peace activists. He talked to Iraqi journalists and briefly met U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer. At the time, he says, the Iraqi people were happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein but were already getting impatient with the U.S. occupation. Iraqis told him there might be attacks against American troops soon if they didn't leave the country. Now, he said sadly, American soldiers are dying again, every day.

At the spot where his son was killed, Suarez gathered a bag of desert soil, which he would take home to California and mix with Mexican soil and American soil and plant a tree in honor of his "guerrero Azteca" - his Aztec warrior - and "in honor of all the boys and the Iraqi victims of the war."

"I feel my son's energy is with me now," the father said. "I have become my son, after going to Iraq."