Asim Karovadiya

Asim Karovadiya was born in India, in Mira Road, north of Mumbai. In 2013, in his teens, the family moved to the United States.

He went to Clements High School from 2013 to 2016, and graduated there.

No one in his family had served before him. He enlisted in the Marine Corps on 1 April 2019, six years after he arrived.

He held two military occupational specialties, and he served both at home and overseas. That is his own way of putting it, and it is the shortest true sentence about his five years.

The first was 1391, bulk fuel specialist. The work is the fuel an air-ground task force runs on: moving it, storing it, testing it and dispensing it, through tactical fuel systems laid out across dirt to feed a forward operating base or a forward arming and refueling point. The trade is half plumbing and half chemistry, and the chemistry is the part that grounds aircraft.

From 2019 to 2021 he was with the 7th Engineer Support Battalion at Camp Pendleton, in California. The battalion is the general engineering unit of the 1st Marine Logistics Group — roads, bridges, earthwork, and explosive ordnance disposal for the I Marine Expeditionary Force — and it is nicknamed Big Red 7. One of its companies is Bulk Fuel Company, activated in 1983. In Somalia in 1992 that company ran five Amphibious Assault Fuel Systems and a Tactical Airfield Fuel Dispensing System, and serviced aircraft from twenty-six different nations.

In 2021 he volunteered for Marine Security Guard duty, and became 8156. The program is volunteer only and screened, and it is a different trade in a different building: at an embassy the mission is the inside of the post, not the perimeter, and the Marine answers operationally to a State Department agent rather than to his own chain of command.

A tour is three twelve-month posts. He did his in Tokyo, then Baghdad, then Rio de Janeiro.

Tokyo is the posting Marines ask for. The embassy sits at 1-10-5 Akasaka in Minato, steps from the National Diet and the prime minister's residence; the chancery was designed by César Pelli and Norma Merrick Sklarek and finished in 1976. The ambassador's residence on the grounds dates to 1931, and on 27 September 1945 it is where Emperor Shōwa met General MacArthur.

Baghdad is the opposite of that in every respect. At 104 acres it is the largest American diplomatic compound in the world, built for sixteen thousand people and garrisoned by a few hundred by the time he arrived. He was there for the year after the perimeter was breached.

Rio de Janeiro was a consulate, not an embassy — a smaller detachment, a different city, and a different relationship with the host police.

He separated on 31 May 2024, after five years and two months.

He lives in Houston.

What this page does not yet have. The record prints what a man has said about himself, and there are things he has not been asked. They are listed here rather than guessed at:

• his rank when he separated, and whether he was decorated
• where he went for the bulk fuel school, and what it was like to be a Marine in an Army classroom
• recruit training, and what he was doing between high school and the day he enlisted
• why he chose the Marine Corps, and why he volunteered for embassy duty
• what he does now

The first four are a conversation. When they are answered, this page changes.