While students were making Super Bowl plans during the weekend, Christine Sanchez was riding a bus to California. When students woke up for class this morning, Sanchez was spending the day training at Camp Pendleton, Calif. And when students are studying for finals in March, Sanchez could be headed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
At age 25, Cpl. Sanchez has put down her textbooks and picked up a rifle. A junior at Oregon State University, Sanchez is one of roughly 135 Oregonians in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves who were called up for active duty Jan. 14 to participate in Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. government’s worldwide effort to nip terrorism in the bud. Many of the reservists are students — including some from OSU and the University of Oregon.
“In watching the world situation, we’ve known this has been coming,” Sanchez said. “We just didn’t know when. In some ways, it’s almost a relief because that sense of uncertainty is gone now.”
But she still has unanswered questions.
Sanchez doesn’t know how long she’ll be at Camp Pendleton, where she’ll be deployed for duty, or how long she’ll have to stay before she gets to go home. Her exercise and sports science major will remain unfinished; once she returns, Sanchez hopes to get her bachelor’s degree within five terms and then head to Oregon Health & Science University or Portland State University for a physician’s assistant program.

“There’s a lot of things that are up in the air,” she said. “Most of us are just looking at this as ‘OK, let us go, let us do our job and get us back home. We’ll pick up our lives when we come back.”
Meanwhile, Sanchez’s family is picking up after her. Her mother and stepfather, Marilyn and Terry Lorance, spent Saturday cleaning out the OSU student’s apartment; after all, they don’t know how long she’ll be in the field.
“It’s an interesting thing to be a parent or the spouse of a reserve,” Marilyn Lorance said, “because people who are reservists have jobs and lives and homes that are not focused on the military. So when they are called into active duty, those parts of their lives have got to be put on hold.”
Lorance said her daughter was only given three days’ notice before she had to report to the marine reserves in Eugene.
“There are incredible demands placed on family members of the reservists to take care of the other pieces of their lives for them,” she said. “We have to trust her to go there and do her job and come home safely, and she has to trust us to take care of the rest of her life so she has something to come back to.”
As a female engineer in an all-male platoon, Sanchez is something of an anomaly. She’s spent her past two years in the reserves getting used to being one of the very few among the few and the proud.
“The way I see it for females, if you’re doing your job correctly, there will be very little differences,” Sanchez said. “To the majority of the guys in my platoon and in the company, I’m just another marine. I go there, I do my job, I pull my weight, I carry my own pack.”
She acknowledged that there are plenty of difficulties. Sanchez participates in combat exercises but has a separate area to shower. She spends all day tiring herself with drills and procedures but has to sleep in a completely separate area from her fellow marines. She knows how to fire a rifle but isn’t ever allowed to be on the front lines. And she’s always having to buck the stereotypes that some people have with females in the military.

“There are other girls who give it a bad name,” she said. “They either sleep around or get flirty and have the guys carry their pack for them or whatever. But (the guys) aren’t going to respect that.
“My goal personally is to not have them look at me and say, ‘There’s the female.’ Instead, it’s to say, ‘There goes another marine.’
Sanchez seems almost anxious to fight terrorism somewhere — anywhere, if it will keep her country safe.
“Think back to how you felt during Sept. 11,” Sanchez said. “If I can have a part in stopping that from ever happening again, you bet I’ll be there. Even if they want me back in the rear, cleaning tools … it’s the right place for me to be.
“None of us wants to go into combat; it’s an ugly thing. None of us are saying, ‘Yippee, let’s get into a gunfight.’ It’s something nobody wants, but sometimes you have to do it because you have the other side who isn’t giving you another option, no matter how hard you’ve tried.”
She added that no matter what faults President George W. Bush may have, she’s glad that he’s made a decision to fight terrorism and is sticking with it.
Bush has “got the guts to call right ‘right’ and wrong ‘wrong’ and say you don’t get away with this kind of behavior,” she said.
Lorance agreed. While she naturally worries about her daughter’s safety, she said there are higher powers at work.
“We’re pretty much at peace because she’s in the Lord’s hands, no matter where she is,” Lorance said. She added that she thinks Sanchez is doing the right thing.
“I think back to what happened prior to World War II when Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, thought that appeasing and talking reason and giving into pressure a little bit then and there would forestall a war — because certainly (the other side) would see common sense,” she said. “But I think it’s naive to think that somebody who has no history of compassion or common sense or reason would all of a sudden see what we would call reason. That past has not worked historically, and some things are worth fighting for.”
Steve Arntt, a Portland-based lawyer and one of Sanchez’s close friends, said he also supports her commitment to doing what she feels is right.
“She has a tremendous amount of determination, great worth ethic and tremendous loyalty,” said Arntt, a captain in the Oregon National Guard who has not been called into active duty thus far.
He added that the situation is a bit strange.
“It’s kind of odd. In 13 years, I haven’t been deployed to a forward area, and here’s someone who’s been around for a comparatively short time, and that just goes to show in a lot of ways it’s just about timing.”
Sanchez said she knows things will be different when she returns to Oregon.
“One saying we have is Semper Gumby — we’re always flexible because everything changes and we have to roll with the punches,” she said. “I know when I come back things will be different. But everything has a price. I would have paid a price if I hadn’t done this because I would have been sitting back, thinking, ‘There’s something I should be doing here to support my country.’”