Keith Makowski
Faces of Five Wars
Story by Karin Orr

Historical original interview; not a current biography.
Recovered original Word document: Corporal Keith Makowski.doc

Corporal Keith Makowski
U.S. Marines
Desert Storm

Corporal Keith Makowski’s official marine status may have ended in June of 1997, but he still looks war-ready.  Athletically trim, the muscles of his face taut, his hair still regulation short and stiff, Makowski is coiled energy.  Even when relaxed in a chair, he seems like an automatic weapon waiting for the safety to be released.  

	“To be a Marine I’ve always felt is the utmost honor,” Makowski says with pride.  “It’s band-o-brothers.  There’s no black; there’s no white; there’s green.”  To protect a comrade, or when given a job, “you do what you’re ordered to do.  You’re trained to do it; you do it, and you don’t do it with any kind of resistance.  

	A member of the 2nd Assault Amphibian battalion, Makowski joined the Marines in 1989.  He spent nine months in the Gulf of Arabia and was in on the Liberation of Kuwait City during Desert Storm.  For going into a minefield to retrieve sensitive equipment from a disabled tank, he was awarded the naval Achievement Medal with Combat V for Valor.  “The Marine Corps straightened me out,” Makowski affirms.  “I was a wild kid,” and they “taught me a lot of discipline.”

	Makowski is especially proud of being an assault amphibian battalion, traditionally the first to any tough situation, anywhere, anytime.  Of course that has always meant, “we were expendable,” he frowns.  As “the first actual strike into the hostile country, we were slated to die,” and “I didn’t like that at all.”  He is not afraid to admit that in Saudi he was afraid, either.  Because chemical tape indicators revealed the presence of dangerous agents, the troops slept in their “claustrophobic” gas masks.  But Makowski fears there still may be lasting effects from enemy chemicals, as well as the nerve agent and anthrax pills issued by the United States. 

	“I went to (the military hospital) in battle Creek eight times after I got back because I had breathing problems,” he reports.  His 2 ½ -year-old daughter, Samantha, also had breathing problems and throat infections, just like the two young sons of a friend who was in Makowski’s platoon.  He wonders if he could have “passed something on.”  Yet Makowski isn’t sorry he was there, in the hot, 100-hour battle, or going across that minefield.  “You might weigh 180 pounds when you’re walking across there,” he says, reliving the tension.  “But then you grab a couple of packs, or a machine gun over the back, or a couple of boxes of ammunition, and you’re a lot heavier.  And you wonder:  Is there a mine underneath me?  Am I going to be heavier now and set this thing off?”

	What mattered to Makowski in such times was his faith and his family.  A Catholic lay leader in boot camp, he “read prayer every night, regardless of anything.”  Always folded up in his pocket was “one of those cross prayers” from his Grandma, “my little guardian angel,” barely five-feet-tall and the “biggest Catholic woman in Grand Rapids.”  In his heart were memories of ice cream, baseball cards, and going to John Ball Park or Michigan State football games with his grandpa.
	
	Makowski’s voice softens when he talks about his grandparents and the rest of his clan.  But he is all energy again, promising to put his camouflage on, grab a gun, and take care “of anybody who might be assaulting my Grand Rapids metropolitan area,” if the need ever arises.  And he is not entirely joking when he asks, “Who’s guarding the gates of Heaven?  The Marines!”  For Corporal Makowski, it’s “God, Country, Corps” all the way.  Always.