OFF THE WIRE
By FRED SWEGLES /
STAFF WRITER
After two DUIs and a suicide attempt, Iraq War veteran Jonathan Hancock had hit rock bottom.
Deciding he needed to do something dramatic to restart his life,
Hancock made palns to walk across America, reconnecting with brethren
from the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines who had fought alongside him in
Iraq. He would visit mothers who had lost sons there.
On Monday, 15 months and 5,800 miles after he set out from College
Park, Md., on Sept. 11, 2015, Hancock, 33, completed his journey. He
walked the final seven miles from San Clemente onto Camp Pendleton, to
the 5th Marines Memorial Garden where a reception awaited.
“This is a healing endeavor,” he said. “This is how you start living again, after you go through combat.”
Joining the College Park resident on the final leg were about two dozen brethren, including Iraq War veterans who had served with him in 2004 during the battle for Ramadi.
“We lost the most amount of men out of the entire Iraq War in a
seven-month deployment to Ramadi,” Hancock said. “There were 33 Marines
and a Navy corpsman.”
Dianne Layfield of Fremont was the mother of one of those men,
19-year-old Lance Corporal Travis Layfield, who died on April 6, 2004 at
Ramadi.
“I heard about this walk and I told him if you come through San
Francisco you make sure you look me up,” she said. “He spent about three
days with me. I walked the Golden Gate Bridge with him.”
Layfield drove to San Clemente with several friends from the Bay Area
so she could walk the final miles within Camp Pendleton with Hancock.
“It’s a healing process for me,” she said. “These are my sons. I’ve
adopted every Marine in my life that I can. In every one of them, I see
my son. It helps me to heal, and it is so rewarding to know that they
are still here for me as well.”
Hancock said one of the most touching experiences of the entire cross-country trek was meeting Layfield.
“It was just an overwhelming flood of emotion,” he said. “I just had this vision in my head that she was seeing her son walk home.”