Marine finds a future after falling apart

– Supporters help him out of addiction, into success.  Tetloff’s story is not a cautionary tale of a good Marine gone bad. It is, instead, a story of one young man’s struggles, his rebound and his unusual allies. –

By Joe Swickard

Midland, Michigan — Going from combat camo and Kevlar armor as a Marine in the Middle East to an orange jumpsuit, chains and shackles as a defendant back home was a hellacious four-month journey for Andrew Tetloff. 

“We got off that bus, and there was all this screaminm and cheering,” Tetloff recalled of the parade he and his comrades received in Lansing after returning from their deployment. “It was one of the best moments of my life– if not the best.”

That was late April 2007, and Lance Cpl. Tetloff, of Charlie Company, 1/24th U.S. Marine Reserves, was home after seven months in the middle of violent Fallujah, Iraq.

“Then it was, ‘OK, you’re done,’ ” now what? he said.

By early September 2007, scared, strung out on opiates and struggling to readjust to life stateside, a 22-year-old Tetloff was snatching money from startled customers at a Midland ATM. Quickly arrested, he immediately owned up to the crimes and soon stood ashamed before a Midland County judge, pleading guilty and accepting the blame and punishment.

 Tetloff’s story is not a cautionary tale of a good Marine gone bad. It is, instead, a story of one young man’s struggles, his rebound and his unusual allies.

 In an extraordinary journey with lawyers, civilian and military prosecutors, his former sergeant and Judge Jonathan Lauderbach, Tetloff is now drug-free and is re-launching a college career for himself — and in honor of eight fallen comrades from Charlie Company.

Tetloff said he knows life will continue to challenge him and his recovery. “I think I’m ready,” he said.

He served his country in combat in Iraq, then his country returned the favor

As an infantryman maneuvering through the shelled streets of Fallujah, Iraq, Tetloff always tensed for that God-awful killing crack of a buried roadside bomb or sniper shot.

He made it through that murderous maze thousand of miles away from his Michigan home only to stumble horribly in another minefield back in Midland.

 But a surprising team is helping Tetloff pull himself back together. Now, the 25-year-old Marine combat veteran is preparing for classes at Michigan State University in the fall.

It is a remarkable journey for one of the men of the 1/24th Marine Reserves, a unit whose seven-month 2006-07 deployment to Fallujah was chronicled in the Free Press as Michigan’s Band of Brothers.

Most of the men of the 1/24th — cops, firefighters, students, bankers and assembly-line workers among them, who gave more than a year of active service — returned to their previous roles or moved on with their lives with relative ease.

For others, like Tetloff, it has been a harder passage.

To reach the East Lansing campus — and he’s not there just yet — Tetloff has had to pass through Midland County Circuit Judge Jonathan Lauderbach’s court on robbery charges, a stint in jail and drug addiction.

  ‘I was with the best guys ever’

  In 2004, Tetloff was at loose ends after a year at Northern Michigan University, so he signed up for the Marine Reserves.

 “I was 19,” he shrugged, “and naive.”

  Tetloff was part of Charlie Company. And when the unit shipped out to Iraq in 2006, it was assigned to a war-torn school administration building in the center of Fallujah — one of the most dangerous cities in the war zone.

“I did a lot of patrolling,” he said. “It was hard, but Iwas with the best guys ever.”

Led by Maj. Mike Mayne, a go-get ’em fighter, Charlie Company rolled through the city snapping cars and making house calls — sudden inspections and searches in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with insurgents.

The Marine didn’t allow mean-mugging: Any Iraqi giving a passing patrol a dirty look would get the Marine’s full-contact stop and frisk.

 Charlie Company had no illusions where they were. The patrols rolled out past concrete blast walls with the bright red “KILL ZONE” reminder.

 The streets were a lethal mix of bullets and bombs that claimed eight of Charlie Company’s Marines. Outside their armored Humvees, the men did the sniper dance, a shifty little shuffle to disrupt a hidden gunman’s aim.

Even inside their perimeter the Marines had to wear full armor and helmets to use portable toilets because of rocket and mortar attacks.Tetloff said the uncertainty gnawed at him.

“You think, ‘Well, I’m leaving the base and if I don’t come back, that’s it,’ ” he said.

 He did come back to base and then to the U.S. in 2007.

 At Twentynine Palms, a sprawling Marine base in the Mojave Desert in California, he rushed through debriefing and, like a lot of returning service members, he minimized his anxiety.

A week later, Charlie Company flew to Lansing where parades and cheering crowds met them.

 ‘I had to pay for what I’d done.’

 Then came the quiet of Midland.

 “You go from having to view everyone as a threat, to nobody as a threat,” he said.

  And there were “the silly questions: Did I see any explosions? Or people shot at?

  “It’s war, OK” Tetloff said. “It’s not a nice story.”

  Sleep was elusive back home, and Tetloff said he had a hard time keeping busy. A high school buddy who was using pharmaceutical opiates offered to share with him to take the edge off Tetloff’s anxiety and help him sleep.

He took the drugs and “it knocked me out,” Tetloff said.

And he liked it.

 “It made me feel normal,” he said.

But soon, he was using drugs just to get through the day.

He said he felt terrible regret and knew he shouldn’t be doing drugs, but couldn’t help it.

 “It was 3-3 1/2 months from the time I got back,” Tetloff said. “I messed up pretty quick.”

Hooked on dope and despair, he had burned through all his ready cash. And robbery seemed like a solution.

 Lurking in the woods near an ATM, Tetloff battled with himself: “Oh, my God, what am I doing? I’m getting ready to steal money from people,” he said he told himself.

And he did.

He would run up on his unsuspecting victims and steal their cash.

“I’m very sorry to be doing this,” he said he told his victims as he grabbed their money and ran.

But Tetloff’s run-up-and-take-your-chances plan didn’t work.

 “What are you doing, guy?” one startled victim asked.

  Then cops swarmed the area, arresting him just minutes after the second robbery. In his pockets were twenty $20 bills and a pocket knife.

 “I was thinking about everything I threw away,” Tetloff said. “A good future, a good past … and now it just blew up.”

 Detectives interviewed Tetloff the next morning and he quickly confessed.

  “I came from Iraq with a bright future,” he said as shivers wracked his body, slick with a clammy sweat. “Now I sit here, 22 years old, looking at going to prison.”

  Held without bond, Tetloff kicked dope in jail. He didn’t fight the charges.

  “I had to pay for what I’d done. I told the officers what happened. I told everybody what was going on.”

‘And this is how you honor them?’

 His capitulation and his lawyer, Stephen Durance, caused Midland County Prosecutor Michael Carpenter to re-examine the armed robbery charges.

  “He is not the prototypical robber,” Carpenter said.

 “He admitted what he did and was willing to take responsibility immediately.

  “Much of this job is the weighing between justice and mercy.”

  Durance said everyone quickly agreed that Tetloff needed to be punished. But, he said, everyone also agreed that there needed to be some kind of rehabilitation.

  “Andrew is everyone’s son,” Durance said. “He’s not some sort of malingerer, he’s just America’s boy. … This happened here, and it doesn’t get more white bread than Midland.”

 Carpenter said he put Tetloff’s crimes, his service to his country and contrition into the scales of justice.

  With the victims’ input, the charges were reduced to unarmed robbery. It was still two felonies but not armed robbery, which carries a potential life sentence.

  Pleading guilty, Tetloff stood before Judge Lauderbach and spoke of his shame and his lost comrades.

  “And this is how you honor them?” Lauderbach asked.

  The question rocked Tetloff.

  In May 2008, he was put on five years of probation and released from jail.

  “It was all back to Square One,” Tetloff said — trying to re-earn his family’s trust, stay clean and get into school.

  But there also was the Marine Corps — which Tetloff still was a member of — with its values of honor, courage and commitment.

  “I fought to stay in,” he said, all the while knowing it wouldn’t happen.

  Standing with him was Master Sgt. Paul McGowan, talking through turmoil and helping him attend drills while his case was pending before a military panel.

  “He did fine in Iraq,” McGowan said. “But there was nothing I could do to save him; no way the Marine Corps was going to keep him.”

  But McGowan was determined to do what he could.

  “What is it about this kid that makes you like him and go to bat for him?” the sergeant asked.

  ‘It became clear he needed help’

  “There are field Marines, and Tetloff was a really good one,” said Maj. Christopher Kolomjec, who was appointed prosecutor to oust Tetloff.

  “Those guys find a sense of purpose in combat and Marine Corps life,” he said. “But once back in the community, there’s not that same intensity, camaraderie and brotherhood.”

  Kolomjec, like Durance, Carpenter and Lauderbach, was struck by Tetloff’s quick confession and remorse.

  And even though Tetloff couldn’t be a Marine anymore, “it became clear he needed help — medically and psychologically,” Kolomjec said.

  Tetloff was given a general discharge under honorable circumstances, keeping him eligible for veterans benefits.

 Released early from probation, his record remained an impediment. He wrapped up community college, but hesitated over the MSU application and the question of past crimes.

 So, Tetloff wrote Lauderbach asking for his help.

Lauderbach threw him another lifeline and wrote a letter of recommendation to MSU — the only time the judge said he has ever written a recommendation on behalf of someone he’s sentenced.

The judge said Tetloff had earned that trust through a strict probation and frequent drug tests.

Yet, Lauderbach said he’s a realist: “I’m still holding my breath.”