Marine Robert Richards Life Remembered

Marine sniper saluted as more than the controversial video that defined him 
The Washington Post
By Greg Jaffe
Published: February 24, 2015

He was still recovering at Walter Reed when he learned that one of his Marines, Josh Desforges, had been killed.

"That was the only time I heard him crack," his mother said. "He was begging to go back to Afghanistan, even though he had a hole in his throat."

Edward Deptola, center, was Robert Richards's platoon sergeant. Deptola and others gathered to remember Richards on the night before his interment.
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — His three combat tours in Afghanistan had been boiled down to a 38-second video clip, played and replayed on YouTube more than a million times. In it, Rob Richards and three other Marine Corps snipers are seen urinating on the bodies of Taliban fighters they had just killed.

"Total dismay" were the words then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used to describe the video when it surfaced on the Internet in January 2012. "Utterly deplorable," agreed then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Richards's career in the military was finished.

More than two years later — long after the rest of the country had moved on to other scandals — Richards, 28, died at home and alone from an accidental painkiller overdose.

Now an ammunition can carrying his cremated remains sat on the table of a hotel bar in Arlington, Va., as his family, friends and fellow Marines swirled around it.

Almost everything about war is complicated, messy or morally fraught; in this case even more so. A Marine vilified by his country's leaders and court-martialed for "bringing discredit to the armed forces" would soon be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the country's most hallowed ground. On this mid-February night before the funeral, dozens who knew Richards beyond those 38 seconds gathered to celebrate his life.
read more here