Sent into battle, literally

Thousands of boys will charge onto hundreds of Illinois high school football fields this weekend, the first of the 2008 season.

Where will it take them? What will it lead to?

"Football built a foundation for me both physically and mentally," said Lance Corporal Mike Nickeas, a member of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Division operating out of Habbaniyah, Iraq.

"Whatever it is you do, you strive to be the best," he wrote in an e-mail from the field. "And to be the best you have to beat the best."

Nickeas is giving Iraqi insurgents the business just as he did disrupting West Suburban Gold opponents as a running back and cornerback on Addison Trail's 2006 conference-winning squad. He joins another of Blazers coach Paul Parpet's players, Bobby Mohr, serving in Iraq.

To Nickeas' father, Pete - whose youngest of three sons, Jack, is also preparing for the Marines - Mike's announcement that he was enlisting came as a surprise.

It came as somewhat of a surprise even to Mike. He'd considered prep football his "job," he said, hinting that early on he vaguely felt he would continue in that direction in college. Around the summer of his sophomore year his job search widened.

"I was telling my family and friends I would be working out, but really I would be driving to talk to ... my recruiter," he said.

The Marines' appeal, as Nickeas experienced it, sounds like something you could find on fourth-and-goal, or in the huddle, when you dig deep enough.

Marines "accomplish the mission, no matter what," he said. "It's not a job... It is a life."

Nickeas committed himself to a five-year contract with the infantry. When that's fulfilled he'll return to the forces as a drill instructor.

After his time is done in Iraq, he's fully prepared to be deployed to Afghanistan.

"We're ready for round two," he wrote.

Thinking back on his Addison Trail football days, and what they instilled in him, he believes his former coach Parpet "needs to get the chip back on his shoulder and quit being so nice to his troops. I think he needs to revert to his late-'90s days and start meat-grindin' again."

"Anything you do is only as hard as you want it to be," Nickeas said.

He's asked: Are we winning in Iraq?

"Tune in to CNN," he writes. He says he's joking. Even in an e-mail it feels like through gritted teeth.

Politics isn't Nickeas' bag. Maximizing potential is what's driving him in this heartily embraced realm, where his actions affect not only himself but the soldier next to him. In his prose he obviously relishes that responsibility.

"I feel like the soul was taken out of my body and I'm growing up all over again," he writes.

"I don't know if it's changed me or not. I know I'm learning a lot, as I always try to do, and I probably will act differently in different situations with the experience from this deployment.

"I hope I don't change, though. I hope people still look at me as the same old Mike they knew before."

doberhelman@dailyherald.com