Lt. Col. Chris Lozano, USMC

Interviews

Black and gold amid fatigue green
St. Louis Marine takes a piece of home to Iraq
The Columbia Missourian
By PATRICK HEALY
April 13, 2003

Chris Lozano — Marine, landmine clearer, Tigers fan — carries a piece of Missouri across the Iraqi desert, tucked inside a beat-up briefcase.

It left the United States with Lozano, crossing the ocean in the metal gut of a transport plane. It weathered sandstorms and rolled across the Iraqi border on the second night of war, with bombs and gunfire thundering all around. And two months before the war, Lozano and a crew of intelligence officers ran into the demilitarized zone on the Iraqi border, unfurled it and snapped a photo — a black-and-gold Mizzou flag in the middle of the Persian Gulf.

“The flag has been with me the entire trip,” Lozano said.

As Lozano’s First Marine Expeditionary Force treks across Iraq, the lieutenant colonel and former MU student has been snapping digital photos of the flag and e-mailing them home to his brothers in St. Louis. Lozano’s brothers said he is committed to his duty, but he’s also a piaso — a born clown.

“It just seemed goofy enough to be fun,” Lozano said Saturday in a midnight e-mail from Iraq. “Who else would bring a college flag into the DMZ then a war zone?”

Right now, the Mizzou flag and 43-year-old Lozano are stationed at Support Activity “Chesty” camp, somewhere south of the Tigris River. On Saturday, the Mizzou flag hung in Lozano’s makeshift office as Marines whittled away the 80-degree afternoon. They did laundry, played cards, read and tried to enjoy one of their first low-key days of the war, Lozano said.

“Work still goes on, though, and this is just a breather,” Lozano said. “We have a lot of things to do to finish combat operations and then help with the rebuilding of Iraq.”

Lozano has only snapped two photos of the flag so far — the one taken at the barren Iraqi border in January and another in front of a Hummer somewhere in southern Iraq two weeks after the invasion— but they’ve already ricocheted across Missouri on mass e-mail lists. One of the photos was spotted taped to the wall at a Columbia parking garage.

Lozano’s brothers said Lozano will take more pictures of the Mizzou flag if he drives into Baghdad. The flag is a loaner from a friend, but Lozano said he hopes to bring it back to Columbia and present it to MU or the Alumni Association at a fall football game.

“The Mizzou flag reminds me of home,” Lozano said. “Of listening to Mizzou beat Notre Dame in 1973, then Notre Dame and Nebraska in the same year in 1978; of fall days; eating at Shakespeare’s; Norm Stewart and always feeling like the underdog; and watching basketball games with my brothers.”

Lozano’s connections to MU go beyond the evenings he and his brothers crowded around their transistor radio. Lozano attended MU for two years, but dropped out in the early 1980s after his father died.

Lozano was still young and immature, said his brother Bob. He needed direction, and found it with the Marines.

After six years in the Marines, Lozano left the military to finish college. He received his undergraduate degree at St. Louis University and earned a law degree at Washington University.

Lozano stayed active in the reserves and was recalled to active duty after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He headed up mine-clearing operations at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base before being whisked to the Persian Gulf, where his job is “recommending what to blow up.”

He has only been home for days at a time since 2001, and likely will still be in Iraq when his seventh child is born. His wife, Nancy, and family live in St. Louis.

The Mizzou flag is more than a gag, Lozano’s brother Rich said. It helps remind Lozano of home.

“It’s a way of bringing a little bit of home to a hostile environment and a foreign place,” Rich Lozano said.

And other troops are amazed to see it, Chris Lozano said.

“A Mizzou flag? Where the hell did you get that?” they tell him.

Or they lament: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Lozano said sports memorabilia has been scant in Iraq. In Afghanistan, Lozano saw an Oklahoma University flag and a University of Kansas sweatshirt.

Lozano said he wanted his to be the first Big 12 flag in Iraq, but he’s got competition.

Historians will have time to argue about who was first, but on April 5, the Lawrence Journal-World dispatched a photograph taken “somewhere in Iraq recently.” In the picture, Army Capt. Brad Loudon stands next to a portrait of Saddam Hussein. Loudon is smiling and holding a blue KU flag.