http://www.ocregister.com/articles/cox-374101-taliban-football.htmlO.C. player knows difference between football, combat
Santa Ana College’s Nate Cox survived a five-month tour of Afghanistan, courtesy of the U.S. Marines.
SANTA ANA – Twenty months ago, the current captain of Santa Ana College's football team was a sergeant.
Nate Cox has stared at the ceiling, wondering whatever propelled him to Marine boot camp.
He has been handed a signup sheet for five months of Afghanistan duty, just two months from the finish line.
He has landed a rescue helicopter in the highlands of southern Afghanistan, a wounded Marine on one side, Taliban guns on the other.
He is 26 and he's surrounded by 18-, 19-year olds, some as aimless as he used to be.
"You'll hear them talk about how they might want to go into the military," said Santa Ana coach Geoff Jones, amused.
"So Nate tells them, look, here's what it's really like. And most of them turn away. But some don't."
Junior college football is filled with searchers, drifters, late bloomers. Not all that many leaders.
"Here's a guy who's on time for everything," Jones said, "because that's who he is."
Cox began as a linebacker but is now on the defensive line. He is a near-perfect student whom Jones says "would be perfect at a place like UC Davis, not that he can't play anywhere."
Cox himself is playing for a quaint and maybe unique reason these days. He likes it.
"I hadn't played football since high school," he said, referring to his days in Plainview, Ind., outside Indianapolis. "I hadn't done anything in five years, except running long distances with a pack on."
He came to Huntington Beach with a buddy, after his discharge, because he figured there were more opportunities here. He had no trouble selling himself to Jones.
Cox is still a squad leader. He, of all people, knows that it's just football, but when the pads start popping, he starts to feel responsible for everyone.
"The camaraderie is very similar," he said. "But when a lot of people say, 'Hey, you're on the field, you're in a battle,' I say, 'Yeah, whatever. Because you've never been there.'"
Cox came within two months of not being there.
He had been accepted at Indiana State, but he wasn't looking forward to it. When a Marine recruiter came to his high school, Cox felt an unfamiliar pull. He was off to basic training in San Diego.
"If I'd gone to school I'm sure I would have been back home before long," he said. "I didn't have much direction. I'd lost one of my best friends in an auto accident. I didn't really know what to do."
He suffered the usual buyer's remorse at boot camp, but then adjusted to an infantryman's life. He had toured the world — Djibouti, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand — training his own troops, working humanitarian assignments, guarding embassies, cooperating with foreign forces.
"In my mind I was done, but then we got to Hawaii on our ship and they gave us a sign-up sheet," he said.
"There were 180 volunteers they needed for Afghanistan. Some of my guys wanted to go. But there was no way I could have let them go and be led by someone else. I had trained them. I couldn't have lived with that."
Cox never had seen a dead person before Afghanistan. He saved some lives, couldn't save others. The Taliban knew the U.S. forces sent up smoke to help locate the victims. It would set its own deceptive fires.
"The worst scenario was picking up a little girl," he said sadly. "One of our squads had been in a firefight with Taliban guys. Little kids were in the street playing soccer. One of the Taliban fired an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), and the back blast, all the pressure that comes out of it, she was behind it.
"I still don't know if she made it. She was alive then, but she had TBI (traumatic brain injury) ... her eyes were all swelled up. Her dad was with her, and you feel bad, but I had to stop him, search him, get him in the helicopter, he's trying to hold her hand. That was a tough one."
Cox is holding no seminars on the value of the Afghan war.
"Was it working? In certain areas it was," he said. "But you'd clear areas, and the Taliban would move right back.
"My opinion is that the people there don't necessarily want what we want. They don't want the Taliban, but it's a different world. I didn't see TV or running water. You just try to build rapport with the elders in those towns. But whether it's working as a whole, honestly, it's irrelevant to a sergeant in the Marine Corps. You're trying to do the job in that little town. That's all you have time for."
Mission No. 1 was to do what he could to bring 180 guys back alive. And Cox did that.
Now he plays.
