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CHAPTER ONE
MY MARINE CORPS YEARS

        I joined the Marines at seventeen to get out of five years of probation I earned for getting caught breaking into houses when I was 16. See? Told you I was a New York punk. I'd been hitchhiking fifteen miles one way to Poughkeepsie once a month to report to a probation officer since I was sixteen, and they offered to wipe my slate clean if I signed up as a Marine. Lots of guys fell into that category at the time, and a lot of us made good on it.

        I had no idea what to expect from Marine Corps bootcamp. Other guys in my neighborhood who went in the Marines never shared their bootcamp stories with me, and I didn't know any of them well enough to ask. I'd never seen Jack Webb's movie, "The D.I." - thank goodness. It would not have prepared me at all. My bootcamp was a lot more like Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket", but fortunately no one killed anyone. It surely wasn't from lackawanna, on my part.

        This is a copy of a letter sent from Parris Island bootcamp in September 1972:

Mom and Dad,
        Hello. You know, I'm really changing. It's getting to the point where I'm no fun anymore. I still joke and mess around some, but I'm rapidly gaining control of myself, where if something is funny, I only laugh on command. I have to be extremely self disciplined, can't look around, move, scratch, nothing. And with all the bugs down here that is very difficult.
                I'll let you in on two little secrets: #1, you write more often than Sandy. I've received two letters from her and four from you, so don't say she writes more often. #2, I would rather hear from you because Sandy's letters only make me homesick, which I am desperately trying to overcome (It's getting easier).
                Your letters are brightening, informative, and fun to read, so keep them coming. Now don't get the idea that I don't want to hear from her, it's just that, like everyone else but you, she writes how boring school is, how I shouldn't be here, and all that, in every letter. I appreciate the fact that these people are concerned about me, but for instance, if a guy is sick, you don't write a letter and explain all of your little ills. You try to cheer him up. Your letters do this. (How I don't know) (Hee hee)
                Tomorrow we start running 2 miles. Yech. By the time I leave here I'll be running three miles a day with ease. (Yeah, right)
                Why, I don't know, but if I were to take this place, looking ahead all the time, time would be as slow as heck. But as it is, I'm taking this one day at a time, and it's going unbelievably fast.
                This Thursday will be one month since I left home. It's going quick. In no time I'll be leaving. Are you going to be able to make graduation? I sure would appreciate your presence. I know Dad would be kinda proud of me, watching me strut across the parade deck all dressed up.
        I made a mistake. I have the 5th highest I.Q. in the platoon. The others go 140, 129, 126, 125 and me. Ah, well, but I'm one of three privates that passed all tests with straight hundreds, including physical tests. At graduation, only 20% of the platoon are promoted to PFC and if I keep at this rate, I have it made.
                You should see the tests they give. It's an insult to my intellect. First, they have a class, then review, then the sneaky D.I. gets copies of the test to be given, lets us all read and study them, then we go to the classroom, have another review, then the test, and still 3/4 flunk. Do you believe it? This place is full of brawn, but no brains. I should have joined an intelligent service.

        "I should have done a lot of things" - famous words of the day

Love,
soon to be PFC - Donald

        After a pretty shaky start like everyone else - I hated it and thought I had to have been mentally ill to sign up for this litany of abuse - I ended up one of four squad leaders at graduation three months later - out of eighty guys. I was one of only seven asked to re-up for officer training the Bainbridge Preparatory School, followed by the Naval Academy followed by a six year obligation - quickly declined because I couldn't comprehend signing up for a total of eleven years. I was also one of eleven privates meritoriously promoted to private first class (E-2) at graduation.
        I went on to receive meritorious promotions all the way up to corporal (E-4) in eighteen months. Had I stayed in for two more months I'd have worn sergeant's stripes - even after getting into semi-major trouble. Not bad for a punk from Noo Yawk.

        On our way to Parris Island, I flew out of Albany, New York with several other Marine recruits. It was my first ride on a jet, and my second ride on an airplane - the other being a Piper Cub. I'll probably ride a Piper Cub the next time Buddy Holly does, but jet travel may again be necessary, as much as I absolutely dread it. Give me two working parachutes, an inflatable boat, some supplies, a cellular phone, an obviously working exit, and my own 9mm - and maybe we'll talk about warm fuzzies and flying in the same breath.

        When we arrived at the Charleston, South Carolina airport for further transport to Parris Island, this spitshined public relations poster boy Marine corporal was carefully and cheerfully herding everyone toward this one room. He was smiling and witty, carefully avoiding any of our direct questions. When he got us all in that room and shut the door, it was my first taste of actual demonic possession.
        I swear, this man's face physically changed. He started cussing us - calling us, our mothers, and our girlfriends terrible names. Hey, my sister didn't do any of those things, and neither did my grandmother! Poster Boy Gone Wrong went through the whole spiel on our parentage, bad morals, lack of intelligence, congenital ugliness - the works - while lining us up into semi-ragged rows.

        We were pretty much convinced we'd truly @#%$ up at this point, but it was only the beginning.

        We arrived at Parris Island Marine Corps Depot in the dead of night, and the bus stopped near this building. We could barely make out rows of yellow footprints painted on the asphalt.
        This sergeant gets on the bus, yelling of course. There was lots and lots of yelling, like 92 days worth of yelling and screaming. The sergeant tells us we have five minutes to get off the bus and line up on those yellow footprints - and four of those minutes were already gone. Then he got out of the way while we killed ourselves to obey. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, kind of an "abandon all hope ye who enter here" scenario.
        There was total confusion. Finding a pair of yellow footprints and standing on them doesn't seem too hard a task, but try it at three o'clock in the morning when you think you're going to be killed in the next second by possessed demons in Marine uniforms screaming obscenities. We settled on our own little set of yellow footprints and they continued yelling.

        We were eventually herded into the building, and everyone stood around tables facing each other at rigid attention. Another drill instructor came in and told us we had to empty our pockets on the tables in front of us. He gets sort of conspiratorial - more like threatening, to me - and tells us that now is the time to come clean. Now is the time to put that knife on the table - or those drugs - or anything else, because if we catch you with it later, well - I don't even remember what the guy said he'd do to us, but I know I believed him - and so did a lot of guys because when he walked out to give us a minute, people were throwing down knives, pills, bags of pot - some pretty big - rolling papers, roach clips, brass knuckles - the works. The fear of God was present in that room.
        Now, I gotta wonder - who in their right mind would bring an ounce of pot to Marine Corps boot camp. Can you imagine the lies his recruiter told him to get him to sign up? ("Why sure, son - and they'll provide you with your own green Marine bong, too!")
        After a few minutes, that same guy came back with a large brown paper bag and quietly collected up everything not allowed. What a collection! He never said a word, just bagged it all up and left. Probably had a hell of a party in the instructor's barracks that night, this being ten years before the advent of urine testing.
        After a while, someone else came in to yell at us, then herded us off to a nearby barracks to sleep for the night. Yeah, right - it's past three o'clock in the morning, and we're supposed to take a "nap" until wake up (reveille) at five. Needless to say, I did a serious re-evaluation of my life as I lay there in the dark, unable to sleep, listening to the sounds of a barracks full of what seemed to me like mostly scared young men - myself among them. This was the first time most of us had left home, other than me running away to New Mexico for a few weeks of 1971.

        The next 92 days are a bit of a blur, but one of my fondest memories is of double timing to our new barracks while laden down with new seabags full of new stuff we'd just been issued. It was August, and Parris Island is basically a swamp in South Carolina, so it was hot as hell. Having spent little time south of New Jersey, I was not prepared for South Carolina swamp weather in August.
        We arrived in the air conditioned barracks sweating like pigs, and I had the misfortune of standing directly under an air conditioning duct - which blew cold air directly on my sweaty upper body. It took about five minutes for me to pass right out on the floor.
        For some reason I don't understand to this day, I wasn't killed for passing out, though I fully expected to be. For days I awaited terrible retribution for having passed out without permission, but nothing was ever said. It gave me a false sense of hope.

        When I enlisted, I thought I was in pretty good physical shape. I never played high school sports - it wasn't cool for me and my friends to play school sports - but the guys I hung out with always played basketball, and we were pretty good at it. I could run wind sprints up and down a basketball court all day long, so I figured this bootcamp stuff would be a piece of cake.

        Yeah, right.

        I had an opportunity to test this theory early on. I don't recall what I did to deserve it, but I was told by the assistant D.I. to commence jumping jacks "till I get tired."
        Uh, wait a second, sir. I'm supposed to do exercises until you get tired? How does that work? I found out the hard way, losing count somewhere around six hundred. Yeah, I thought I was bad to the bone - but not for long. My jumping jacks ended up looking like some kind of spastic reaction. The D.I. never even broke a sweat.
        But I was a young man with something to prove, and scared shitless and waiting to be killed any minute for the most part, so I never thought to tell anyone "no way am I doing that." We all obeyed orders, and we obeyed them in a hurry. There was no time to sit around and discuss whether the order was a good one or not, we just did it. Some of this came up later in a movie called "For A Few Good Men." Guys who couldn't or wouldn't obey orders didn't do well in the Marines, and probably should never have made it into - or out of - bootcamp. I was so scared I ended up doing exactly what they told me, every single time, without thinking about how pleasant or unpleasant it might be. Which was probably the point, us being Marines.
        Oops - sorry - not Marines. I could get wacked upside the head for saying something like that. We were Marine recruits, not Marines. Trust me, there was a huge difference at the time. We'd occasionally see Marine privates walking around who'd already graduated from bootcamp and been assigned to Parris Island as their first duty station. These guys would call our drill instructors by their first names - every time I heard that I waited for the ground to open up under that man and take him straight to hell - or straight back to bootcamp, whichever was convenient for the Commandant at the time. The drill instructors were "sir." Period. Not even "Sergeant" or "Staff Sergeant" was tolerated. We were at the very bottom of the totem pole - perhaps even below ground, in the beginning.

        I took a typing test. The night before I left for bootcamp, an older veteran at my going away party told me, "If they ask if you can type, say yes." Others veterans present instantly agreed. While it seemed a bit strange at the time - I'd never even sat down behind a typewriter - I never forgot the advice, and later it got me out of sleeping in wet foxholes on Okinawa.

        When things started to get bizarre in bootcamp, and I mean bizarre, I started recalling everything and anything anyone ever said to me about the military. During my pre-induction physical, a Navy corpsman made a remark about possible varicose veins. Believe me when I say I brought it up in the first few weeks at Marine bootcamp in a vain attempt to go back home where I thought I belonged. Let me da heck outa 'dis place! I think that any Marine who says he was totally sure of himself from Day #1 through Day #92 of bootcamp has an extremely convenient memory, or went through bootcamp with inexperienced drill instructors.
        The savages I had to cater to for ninety-two days of 1972 made Stephen King look like Walt Disney - savages who could and would slap the @#%$ out of you at a moment's notice - or worse, such as the time an assistant instructor gave me six or seven real good shots to my solar plexus and put me on my knees with the wind knocked out of my body.
        Savages who could make you eat cigarettes by the pack - without so much as a cup of bleach to wash them down. These people - if you could call them that - played favorites sometimes - but then their favorites received awful treatment as well - meaning there were no favorites. Hmmm... just like a war zone. Funny how this stuff is apparent as I get older.

        There was one sergeant I was in deathly fear of from the platoon above us, 394. I overheard him threaten, "I'll rip off your @#%$ head and @#%$ down your wind pipe" - it was the first time I ever heard that expression, and I'm from New York City. Immediately an unpleasant mental image formed in my head, and I believed him fully capable. I was quite convinced this man could kill recruits at any time. I was also convinced he would get completely away with it, and that he'd also enjoy himself thoroughly. This man made me @#%$ in my pants every time I heard his voice, and our own three instructors were no slouches.
        I had the terrible misfortune of having my rifle inspected by this crazed man in front of God and everyone one morning. Sure, any Marine drill instructor can rip a rifle out of your hands in a split second to inspect it, but never had anyone made it feel like he was also tearing out my lungs and stomping on them at the same time.
        It took about two seconds for him to start screaming in my face about how dirty my rifle was it was so dirty that he could see little creatures had evolved - and were now walking around inside my rifle barrel.
        At the top of his lungs, sounding like the dangerous lunatic he was, in front of the aforementioned God and everyone, this man ordered me to wave hi to the little creatures walking around inside my rifle barrel.
        You have to imagine me 18 years old, rigidly at attention, a generous load already formed in my diaper, nervously waving down my rifle barrel to imaginary critters brought into this world solely by my failure to adequately clean my rifle barrel. I suppose it would have been a priceless piece of film because I'll admit, the guy rattled the @#%$ out of me.
        You can't imagine how frightened most of us were of the people who controlled us. Had I the balls, I'd have said I was queer, crazy, or addicted to drugs, money, alcohol - addicted to love, had it got me out of that place, in the beginning.
        And before you think I'm some kind of commie pinko bed wetter, take a thirteen week sabbatical (that's 92 days, folks) and go through the 1972 version of Marine Corps bootcamp. Find a time machine and go for it, then we'll talk about my lame ideas of getting out of there at any cost. The closest thing I ever saw to what we went through in 1972 remains the first half of "Full Metal Jacket." Jack Webb had become demented.

        We quickly got used to no privacy. No television. No women anywhere that we were allowed to go on the base. No hair on our heads - no little Mohawk you see in the movies - our heads were shaved because we didn't rate a Mohawk yet. That was a treat reserved for recruits a lot closer to graduation.

        We ate three times a day - period. I felt sorry for the poor slob who got caught eating in his bunk one night after the lights went out. He didn't have a restful night that night, and spent a respectable amount of time on the D.I.'s @#%$ list.

        We ran and marched and worked our asses to the bone. And all the while, someone was shouting at us, in shifts, so there was always someone fresh shouting at us. For three months! I think Marine drill instructors are hand picked because they can scream at the top of their lungs for hours on end. Some probably join heavy metal bands when they retire.

        At 6'2" tall and 160 pounds, I wasn't much of a force to be reckoned with when it came time for pugil stick training - man-to-man fighting without guns or knives. Two guys got dressed in protective clothing that included a football helmet, and each grabbed what looked like a padded kayak oar and tried to beat the snot out of each other. Like everything else, some were good at it and some were not - and the "not" guys were often just as entertaining to watch as those who were pretty good at it.
        We had a black kid from Newark, New Jersey - Private Vega - also my bunkmate, since the military also did everything alphabetically, the same as high school. Vega delivered serious punishment with that padded oar. He was solid muscle, and more than once I saw him walk out and club someone senseless in a matter of seconds using shear strength alone. Vega was the first guy I ever met who could literally use the statement preceding a fight: "There'll be two hits in this fight - me hitting you and you hitting the ground." Fortunately for me, we weren't selected for pugil stick training alphabetically.
        My opponent was this huge fat black kid who must have had a lot of trouble with the daily morning exercise run. I was thin and wiry, moved twice as fast as him, and was generally beating the @#%$ out of him with my padded stick - but it was like flies to Vigo - my hardest blow mostly bounced off this guy no matter where I hit him - and none of his lousy swings ever reached me or I'd have been buried on Parris Island 35 years ago last August. We went on like that for a while until an instructor stopped it, probably bored because no one was bleeding or being dismembered.

        We were also forced to become medical pin cushions. All of us. I have to wonder about anyone who made it through bootcamp and still retained any fear of needles. There just seemed to be so many of them. They gave us a bicillen shot in the butt cheek, and it was the worst shot any of us ever got in our lives. Most of our butt and leg muscles froze up for two straight days.
        Later as a sailor, I heard stories of Navy pukes getting medical bedrest during what passed for their bootcamp after enduring this same shot, but Marines were out marching and exercising minutes later, to "work it through your system." Try doing exercises with the lower half of your body simply not functioning. And where did Marine recruits find sympathy in those days? The same place submarine sailors found it - written in the dictionary somewhere between "@#%$" and "syphilis."

        In 1972, I was a free spirited, smart mouthed little punk with a lot to prove to myself, and a few others. I had a reputation for being a wise ass to local cops, so the culture shock of Marine discipline was overwhelming. I have the highest respect for anyone who made it through Marine Corps bootcamp, or any bootcamp prior to 1972 except the Air Force, which has always been Wimpville, USA from what I've been told. People who went through real bootcamps have seen sides of themselves no one should see. They've done things no one could believe. Endured pain and exhaustion and mental abuse. Before recent babyish times it used to be physical abuse too, but some obviously brain dead individual passed new laws. No, we can't just go around toughening up guys who have the highest casualty rate of any branch of service in war time - you just might weed out that chicken @#%$ mama's boy who deserts his post or falls asleep on watch and gets forty good Marines slaughtered. We have to push every one of the little darlings through bootcamp these days without so much as bruising them - or so I've heard.
        I also heard its gone so far that drill instructors can't even use profanity! How then do you turn teenage boys into Marines in thirteen weeks? By saying please and thank you? The idea was to break us down, then build us back up again into something that might survive a war zone. These guys are brutal for one reason: war is even more brutal. If you can't handle someone yelling at you, how are you going to handle someone shooting at you? I hated bootcamp and secretly wished every drill instructor would die an unnatural, lengthy, painful death - but I shudder to think of what kind of person I might be today had the United States Marine Corps not spent that thirteen weeks tearing me apart and putting me back together again. I'm sure a lot of guys know what I mean.

        Remember the part in the movie "An Officer and a Gentleman" where actor Louis Gossett Jr. rips up a bunch of "new meat" - officer candidates - at an air officer training school? He was Little Bo Peep compared to the real thing, primarily because the "real thing" was on your ass like white on rice for three solid months, 24 hours a day - not on the screen for two hours of fantasy video.
        I'll grant I'd heard the "ewe" analogy before - some poor fool would address the drill instructor as "you" and be screamed at, "ARE YOU CALLING ME A SHEEP?" No recruit was permitted the use of pronouns in 1972 Marine bootcamp. I was never "I" it was always "the private, sir.

        One of the worst things I ever did was handle a live hand grenade. Part of bootcamp training involved familiarization with hand grenades, and I waited the whole time to die. I guess I'd never felt comfortable around hand held bombs, even little ones like ashcans, M-80's, and cherry bombs - so when it came time to walk into the cement pit and toss the biggest bomb I'd ever tossed, I was as scared as I'd ever been. Shitting my pants is the proper terminology, I believe. Holding a grenade in my hand was like holding a thousand M-80's. At least you could see the fuse burn on the M-80 just before you flushed it down the school toilet. Years later, having a far broader understanding of "lowest government bidder", I thank God I survived hand grenade training at all.

        I had the opportunity to fire the M-16 rifle once during bootcamp. We'd been issued M-14 rifles and did all our training with them, but regular Marines were issued M-16's. We heard stories about guys who'd throw M-16's away in Vietnam and pick up sawed off shotguns, Thompson submachineguns, and Russian-made AK-47's because the M-16 worked flawlessly - until a speck of dirt got in it. Or mud. Vietnam was fairly muddy, or so I've heard.
        Well, the mostly plastic M-16 weighs a lot less than the mostly wood M-14 rifle, and fires more like a .22 shell than a .30 caliber. Easy on the shoulder. In Camp LeJeune, North Carolina for advanced training, we were allowed to fire the M-16 in the semi-automatic mode, which was easy for me. Every time you pulled the trigger, it fired one shot.
        Unfortunately, I was picked at random to be the first recruit to fire the M-16 in the fully automatic mode. The M-14 had full auto too, but it wasn't used too often and required the services of an armorer to switch settings. The M-16 could be set to fully automatic by the flip of a small switch on the side. (Fully automatic meant as long as you held the trigger down, bullets kept coming out - till you ran out. Your basic hi-tech machine gun.)
        With a lot of guys watching - of course - I set it for fully auto, put it to my shoulder (I was standing) and slowly pressed the trigger. Brrrraappppp!! Twenty rounds came out in a half a second, which startled the @#%$ out of me. Made me loosen my grip, which made the weapon's muzzle go up. I finished with the rifle pointing straight up, no small source of amusement for my fellow recruits. They got to try it too, but they had the opportunity to hold onto the damned thing, having seen what it did to me. And by the end of the day I wasn't the only one who looked like a dope firing the M-16 in full auto, but I'd been the only one not forewarned.

        Marine drill instructors had a sixth and seventh sense for noticing recruits doing things they were forbidden to do - terrible offenses, such as scratching your itchy nose while in ranks. I paid dearly for every high speed swipe at horrible little sand fleas who seemed to gnaw on my flesh for hours.
I'd be standing there sweating my ass off - August in Parris Island is not on any sane person's travel itinerary - and this tiny creature has been biting me for a half hour as I stand stock still at attention listening to the D.I. rant and rave about everything. I'd scan left - using peripheral vision that made me look like one of the Simpsons - we're talking maximum allowed limits - eyes bugged out left, eyes bugged out right - don't move a muscle! Great! He's over there yelling at Tony again! Now's my chance!
        And my hand would come up so fast, so smooth, so perfect in conservation of movement - I couldn't possibly get caught. But WHAMMO! Another drill instructor I didnt see is suddenly screaming in my face and I'm smelling breath that hasn't come up in twelve years. I "YESSIR!" and "NOSIR!" the guy at the top of my lungs - which is never loud enough for these near-deaf instructors. "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!" Yeah? Well, get a damned hearing aid!
        Then I'd have to drop down and give him the required and enormous number of his favorite, painful, repetitive exercises. It might be at 2:30 in the morning; it might be 10:30 at night. Didn't matter who was there, what was going on, or where we were. Retribution was swift - again, this has the familiar ring of the battlefield, doesn't it?
        Even at Sunday church services, which every one of us attended because of the "Please be seated" portion of the program, guys would be doing pushups in the aisles for falling asleep. There was no mercy. If you broke a single little rule, they always knew who did it. They were worse than any parent's mystical power of knowing which kid started the fight - and we paid a far harsher price. Gee, I wonder what this has to do with war? One guy messes up and gets six guys killed? Couldn't be some kind of message here, could there?

        I forgot to mention that if you did, indeed, manage to kill a sand flea - and had the extreme misfortune of being caught doing so - well, of course, you had to bury it. We can't leave the dead bodies of sand fleas strewn all over Parris Island now, can we?
        Forgetting for a moment where I was, I thought, dig a grave for a sand flea? Nothing to it. However, these must have been Egyptian sand fleas, because they required a six foot deep, six foot long, four feet wide hole - and all the decorum necessary for interment.
        And you'd work your ass to the bone digging - sure, it was sandy soil but add the temperature and humidity of a South Carolina swamp and by the time you'd done all the honors, it was a near-death experience.

        And now for the bad news.

        You'd report back to the drill instructor that you'd completed the burial, hoping you were done. He would, of course, immediately ask you what sex it was - "for the paperwork." Now, I don't care what you answered - yes, no, maybe so, possibly - it didn't matter - in the end you were going to be digging up that enormous hole again.
        And what are the chances of finding that same sand flea? Probably about as good as replying with something acceptable to the "what sex is it?" question. So you had to kill another sand flea - and may God help you if you got caught killing another one to substitute for the first one. Then you had to examine this tiny crushed flea with an expression on your face that bespoke years of experience in sand flea anatomy. Like a cat with a mouse, if the drill instructor was finally tired of making your life miserable, he might accept your answer. Or, he might say, "I thought it was a female. Maybe you have the wrong one" and send you off hoping to catch you killing a fresh one. After a while I became convinced that sand fleas were standard Marine Corps issue - meaning they came with uniforms and guns and meals - free - from the Marine Corps. And God help the recruit that didn't appreciate what The Corps provided his sorry ass for free.

        Let me tell you about Motivation Platoon. You may have seen the black & white photographs in Life Magazine many years ago, but I'm sorry pictures, and whatever words I write, are simply never going to impart what Motivation Platoon was really like. And I never even went through it, myself - I just stood upwind of some of the nastiest smelling human beings in the history of the world and lived to tell the tale. Mind you, I said "upwind", not "downwind."
        Motivation Platoon was a training tool that Marine drill instructors could invoke if normal methods were failing to shape a recruit into a Marine. Again, all my information is second hand because I was a good boy and quickly made a squad leader in bootcamp - over two ex-U.S. Army sergeants - but basically Motivation is Hell Week compressed into one day - or Hell Year compressed into one month. You were sent for one day or thirty day Motivation, depending on how much of a serious impression the instructor cared to make upon your bod.
        Marine Corps bootcamp was no walk in the park in 1972, but compared to Motivation it was like Club Med. There were far more nasty, mean people available and willing to scream at you all day. No possible amount of repetitive exercises could satisfy them. No amount of cleanliness could satisfy them. You couldn't satisfy them, no matter what you did or how you did it.
        And they all ended up in the ditch - a drainage ditch filled with raw sewage, garbage, mud, insects, probably snakes and carcasses of dead animals - and maybe even a few ex-recruits, I don't know. All I know was any man from my platoon who attended one day Motivation never had to be reminded why they went. No one ever progressed to 30 day Motivation that I met. I'm not sure a human could survive such a thing. Literally. It was probably just a threat they used.

        Yeah, right.

        Recruits were served three meals a day. The food was plentiful and good enough for me. I've always been a garbage gut, uh, "meat and potatoes man" anyway. Military cooking was great as far as I was concerned. I even loved the legendary "@#%$ on a shingle" - chipped beef on toast. As one guy I knew on submarines used to say - his highest culinary complement, "It'll make a turd."
        Unfortunately, when the drill instructor was in a hurry for us to get somewhere, we ate what he called "duck." No matter what was on the menu, the drill instructor would pass the word "we're eating duck today" and we knew we had to "duck the @#%$ in and duck the @#%$ out" - usually no problem for me. I could inhale food as fast as my 155 pound body could make it disappear. At one point my mother was convinced I had a hollow leg.
        But then there were days we ate "geese", which meant you could eat as much food as you could stuff down your throat from the end of the serving line to the trash cans by the exit maybe 10 yards? I guess geese are supposed to be faster than ducks, or so the drill instructors would imply. I was never starved though - I put on 35 pounds in bootcamp. From 117 pounds at high school graduation to 155 pounds listed on my bootcamp I.D. card.

        Later, when I joined the Navy, I heard stories about sailors getting laid during Service Week in Orlando bootcamp. What? Getting laid in bootcamp? I didn't even see women for three months at Parris Island. No girls, no liberty, no beer. Just mosquitoes, sand fleas, and drill instructors from hell.

        In bootcamp, there were a billion things you just did not do, like fart at attention. Show up naked for watch. Or hold hands with anything, especially yourself. The list is endless, but at the top was you did not embarrass your drill instructors. Under no circumstances. And worse, you never embarrassed your senior drill instructor. Ever.
        One fine day we're on the drill field practicing for a big marching competition. If you've ever seen a crack troop of Marines led by a good drill sergeant, they tend to flow like one. Every move is perfect; every turn cut on a dime. It's a pleasure watching human beings do something so well together. (Go get 'em, 8th & I!)
        Then there was Platoon 393. For us it was, "Forward, shuffle." We had about six people out of eighty who knew that if the boot that pointed that way went on that foot, naturally the boot that pointed the other way went on the other foot. Needless to say, we managed to "embarrass" our senior drill instructor in front of a few of his fellow D.I.'s.
        It was an Academy Award winning performance. The senior D.I. threw up his hands, made an assortment of dejected, sorry faces and walked away from us slowly, his head hung low. Eighty of us stood in the middle of the parade ground, too frightened to move, knowing we were dead meat. We waited for ten uncomfortable minutes, waiting to die, until an assistant instructor finally retrieved us. To a man, we wished we were elsewhere.
        But it was great. The assistant actually ordered us to pull our shirt tails out. Tilt our hats sideways. Unstring one boot lace so it dragged behind us. Unbutton our pockets. Mess up our hair. Push one sock down and leave the other up - just look as ragged as possible.
        Then we were ordered to "diddybop" back to the barracks - marching was not allowed. Eighty disheveled recruits "diddybopped" across the parade ground - what a sight we must have made - it brings to mind Monty Python's Ministry Of Silly Walks. We got in the barracks, fixed ourselves up real quick and scurried to attention in front of our bunks waiting for the inevitable. And it came all too soon.
        I heard noises at the far end of the barracks, which quickly escalated to yelling and crashing sounds. I'd been in bootcamp long enough to perfect the "Peripheral Peek" - checking things out to my left and right without appearing to move my head, which would immediately give your movement away to an instructor. I saw it was the three cronies who witnessed our senior D.I.s embarrassment on the drill field. The three were a tidal wave of destruction, tearing everyone and everything up in their path. Lockers were dumped, people were pushed around and given a shot or two - or three. Bunks were ripped up and overturned. And all the while these guys are screaming at the top of their very powerful lungs. I never saw or heard anything quite like it in my entire life.

        Now, to this day, I don't know what possessed me to laugh.

        Seeing three grown men acting like bigger assholes then I'd ever seen in my life - well, I plead insanity, but laugh I did. I had a big ol' grin on my face as the wave approached, and it was even starting to get infectious. Across the squad bay from me, Tony Bowe was starting to crack up too. But he didn't get caught.
        What I didn't know was that one of the three had snuck up behind the bunks, out of my line of "peek" - and snagged me laughing. AH HAH!!! He immediately called his two buddies over. One got an inch from my nose, one an inch from my right ear, one an inch from my left ear - and they screamed at me for twenty minutes. They got into it so much that little pieces of heart and lung came up and hit me in the face and ears.

        And how I lied at the top of my own lungs! "NO SIR, IT WASN'T FUNNY, SIR!" "NO SIR, THE PRIVATE WASN'T LAUGHING, SIR!" "NO SIR, THE PRIVATE WILL NEVER LAUGH AGAIN, SIR!" I don't think I've ever stopped laughing...

        In addition to exercising you to death, the drill instructors could and did reach out and break your face from time to time. Legally or illegally, it didn't matter. But none of us would ever dream of testifying against a drill instructor. Once, before asking if any of us saw the senior drill instructor hit this one scumbag private, we were reminded that legal proceedings have a way of stretching out time for a recruit on Parris Island. You couldn't graduate and leave this place if court martial proceedings held you up. I didn't see nuttin'. Did you?

        Have you ever seen the movie "Private Benjamin", where Goldie Hawn comes strolling out of the gas chamber with her mask on, wondering what all the fuss is about? The instructor grabs the mask off her face and pushes her back inside the room - and for those of us who've been there, we know the horror that awaited young Judy Benjamin in that gas filled room.
        Remember back when you were three or four years old, and you breathed in something you shouldn't have, and a part of it got stuck inside your lungs for the last 30 years? No, I didn't expect you'd remember it, but I can guarantee, taking your gas mask off inside the room filled with gas would surely have cleaned out your sinuses from things stuck in there from as far back as the womb. I never saw so much snot in my entire life, ever - nor would I want to. I wanted to die once that stuff got into me.
        The scariest part was that exposure to gas was supposed to be a yearly training adventure - I should have gone through it again, but I got out of #2 some way I don't recall - probably through my connections in Regimental S-1.

        Our last day on Parris Island was a joyous one. After graduation, we piled on one of the buses taking us to the Charleston airport, laughing and joking and carrying on like you wouldn't believe. All of a sudden one of the D.I.s from platoon 394 steps up on the bus with a bad look on his face. A business look. A "you done @#%$ up" look we were oh-so familiar with.
        We all froze at attention, which was harder for some than others, being on a bus. You could hear a pin drop, and we all suddenly knew this had been some kind of psychological test - we weren't really getting to leave. This man was here to drag us all back to hell.
        He surveyed us with this cold look - then breaks into a big grin and says, "GOOD LUCK, MARINES!" We freaked, naturally. You could hear this mass escape of air from our lungs because all of us had been holding our breath, waiting for the worst.

        When we got to the Charleston airport, several of the guys bought themselves ribbons and medals to wear home. Yes, I'm quite serious. I'll never forget one guy trying on the different medals to see which one looked best with his green uniform. I think he gave himself the Congressional Medal Of Honor to wear home to war-torn Newark.

        I went home to New York and spent two solid weeks partying my ass off with my friends trying to break free of three months of Marine Corps brainwashing. When I first arrived back home, I practically @#%$ at attention - and thought I was the baddest thing that ever walked. Heck, I could easily walk into any bar in town and clear it out, should I be so inclined. A real skinny badass.

        Yeah, right.

        Fortunately, there were a lot of good friends around the hometown, and I was semi-normal by the time I got on the flight from New York to L.A., shared with actor Jack Cassidy - I remember seeing him give this little smile and wave as they pre-boarded him. My mom and dad saw me off at Kennedy Airport in New York City, probably the last thing I saw them do together as husband and wife.

        The trip from New York to L.A. cost me $68 military standby. I'd never been further west than Pennsylvania. These were the days when L.A. still had a smog problem, since solved. I guess that "California emissions" thing for cars is pretty strict. You can't argue with success though - it was clear skies when I passed through L.A. again in 1999.

        Camp Pendleton, California was a huge scary place. As usual when reporting aboard, I got there late at night. When you report to a military base after hours, you take your chances. I was there for machine gunner school because my request for sea-going Marines had been turned down - thank the Lord. It was later in the Navy when I saw what kind of awful life those guys led; the butt of a million sailor jokes and rude remarks. "Sea-going bellhops" was a favorite. And always outnumbered, even if one Marine equals five or six sailors in a fist fight.

        Mount @#%$ was the title given to the mountain we had to climb too often during advanced infantry training. You'd start dying about a quarter of the way up, but fear of being singled out as a quitter kept most of us going. Try carrying an M-60 machine gun - or worse, a hundred-fifty pounds of lead ammunition - up the side of Mount @#%$ sometime.

        I got my first tattoo. A couple of us went to Long Beach, where we drove by the Queen Mary docked in the distance. Went in a tattoo parlor where everyone was getting "Death Before Dishonor", "Mom", skulls and crossbones, old stuff like that - but I wanted something different. That meant something designed in the past fifty years. The two newest designs were Bugs Bunny dressed as a hospital corpsman - he had a big carrot as his needle - and a Zig Zag man, the guy from the cigarette rolling papers.
        Well, it was a balls thing, so I had to get a tattoo. And it had to be something I could live with, so I got the Zig Zag Man. I've never regretted it, but I also don't share it with anyone who might get worked up about a pro-drug advertisement etched into my upper right arm.
        One buddy I'd been through bootcamp with started Lyle Tuttling himself that night. He's probably covered head to toe with tattoos by now. When we got back to the barracks, someone asked about the "Indian Jesus Christ" tattooed on my arm.

        I finished first in my class at machine gun school, which meant I was supposed to get my first choice of duty station. I picked the Marine Barracks at the Groton, Connecticut submarine base. It was the closest duty to home, and I was still foolishly homesick. I don't know how it came about, and I wasn't too thrilled at the time, but when my orders arrived at the end of 1972 they said "Okinawa."

        Okinawa. A little dot out in the Pacific Ocean where some serious @#%$ from World War II happened. I knew nothing about the place when I arrived, and thirteen months later when I left, I knew about as much. I made no attempt to experience the culture or the cuisine. I'd occasionally walk down to the beach, a white sand/blue water heaven if I ever saw one, but I wasn't too happy to be stuck on Okinawa. I rarely went anywhere off the base because I didn't drink, and oriental women did not appeal to me.
        I can't say I was a shut-in for a whole year because I remember hearing a few bar bands, on base and off. Little brown guys who could knock out "Smoke On The Water" flawlessly but couldn't speak a word of English. One white Marine used to go up and play "The Thrill Is Gone" with the band every time I was there, but he wasn't as good as the Filipino bands.

        I reported to "H" Company, Second Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment. Commonly called "Hotel" Company, we were also known as Hog Company the same way "F" Company was known as Fox Company. Part of the initiation into Hog Company was to be unceremoniously dumped in the Okinawan mud. Tom and I were both admin clerks who rarely saw mud, but we sure did that day.

        In 1973 there was a serious racial problem on Okinawa, with black and white Marines at each other's throats all the time. Stories of guys getting jumped at night were common. The general feeling was one of mistrust and hate.
        Well, it ain't hard to get caught up in that @#%$. Peer pressure is a bitch, and a few minor incidents can snowball into real bad feelings. We were all required to attend human relations classes, not affectionately dubbed "Watermelon U."
        Some of the prototype classes were difficult times at best. Fights broke out and harsh words were exchanged. There was even a place on Okinawa near Kadena called "The Bush" where white people just did not go - not even surrounded by their black friends. I was curious, but I wasn't stupid so I never went anywhere near the place.
        Most of the black Marines were into Al Green's music. All day and all damned night, Al Green would blare out in the squadbays over portable tape players, driving the rest of us to distraction. Raised on Elvis and the Beatles, I'd never heard of Al Green, and didn't want to. He'd come to prominence with white audiences later as the writer of a Talking Heads hit "Take Me To The River", as well as Tina Turner's hit "Let's Stay Together." At the time I hated him, his music, and especially those idiots who were playing it.
        Unfortunately, a lot of my memories of Okinawa recall the fear of being jumped at night. The mistrust; the clearly defined lines. It got so bad that it wasn't until years later I heard Al Green again. Recalling he wrote "Take Me To The River", I borrowed an album to see what the original song sounded like. Sometimes that's fun, to see how the original writer meant for his song to sound. A classic example of this is Bruce Springstein's "Blinded By the Light", redone by Mannfred Mann from a raw Jersey shore sound to synthesized polished pop.
        The Al Green album contained all those songs I could almost sing from memory, along with "Take Me To The River." I don't really understand exactly what happened, but since the fear and hate weren't there anymore, I probably heard the music for the first time - and loved it. I ended up buying a double album of his greatest hits - songs I hated all that time - and even made a copy of it for the car.

        Okinawa is also where all things American were greatly missed by us Americans. Unlike the luxury military services - Goldie Hawn's condos in "Private Benjamin" had nothing on the Air Force pukes at Kadena - Marines could not bring wives to Okinawa. Not even the major general who signed my third meritorious promotion, this one to corporal (E-4).
        We missed home so bad, that if a round-eyed woman showed up for any reason on our base, the news would literally sweep the place. We were the furthest from "civilization" (so to speak) at Camp Butler, and Marines would pour out of barracks and mess halls to see the rare woman who didn't have an Epicanthic fold.
        Guys would drive thirty-eight miles to the southern end of the island just to see roundeye Army and Air Force wives. Hey, when you rely on cabs, shoe leather, and winding two lane highways as your mode of transportation, thirty-eight miles might as well be the moon. As it was, the Amazon jungle ain't got nothin' on Okinawa.

        We didn't do too much except play Marine a lot. We'd camp out in tents, regardless of monsoons. Practice shooting our weapons, whether it be rifles, pistols, mortars, or the 106mm recoilless rifle. We ran three miles every day, and went to an endless stream of boring lectures on everything from weapons to hygiene to race relations.

        One day in early 1973, without warning, we were suddenly issued weapons, live ammunition, and c-rats. We were told to pack our gear, then we were trucked south to Kadena Air Force Base, where we sat for a few hours fidgeting and looking around at each other on stationary C-130 airplanes. There were no explanations, and we weren't into questioning orders at the time, so there we were. I thank God nothing ever came of it, like an all-expense paid trip to Vietnam, and we ended up driving back to Camp Schwab after a few hours, again without explanation. I've always wondered what happened and why, and how close to war I actually came at the time. (Or perhaps just a drill?)

        "Watching the coming of the divine light (Goraiko) which takes place as the sun rises over the mountain in freezing temperatures - is a sacred act".

        "You are a fool if you don't climb Mt. Fuji in your lifetime. But you are a bigger fool if you climb it twice".

        There is a U.S. Marine camp near Mt. Fuji in Japan, a tent city no more than a mile from the eastern base of the mountain. Being a huge fan of mountains, I spent a part of every clear day in quiet awe of that marvelous view, and soon decided I had to climb it.
        Everyone thought I was crazy, and for the first time I understood the answer to every question about climbing mountains - "because it's there." Only one other guy, Marvin Staggs from western Oregon, offered to make the climb with me.
        We got three day passes and took a bus a good ways up the side of the mountain - I think we started walking at 8,000 feet. My partner took a picture of a Japanese woman and her child standing in front of the sign for the Fuji-Yoshita trail, which we followed up the mountain. (Since lost in transit.)
        The climbing was awful. We were in fantastic shape from having to run three miles a day over hilly terrain, but Mt. Fuji was all soft volcanic ash. It was like trying to climb the biggest, steepest sand dune in the world - your feet would sink way down into it, forcing you to take twice as many steps to get anywhere.
        On the way up were stations for resting, obtaining refreshment, and having your wooden walking stick burned with a hot iron for a small payment - I think the exchange rate was 300 yen to the dollar at the time, and a burn cost about 50 yen. Marvin and I had every stamp put on we could fit, all the way up one side of the mountain and back down the Fuji-Gotemba trail on the other side - and I still have that stick. It is my oldest possession.
        We spent the night at the ninth of ten stations, exhausted like you wouldn't believe. We slept in something that looked like an opium den, only with no opium and two feet thick layers of blankets. We had to get to the top before the sun rose - that was what it was supposed to be all about, sunrise on Mt. Fuji - but we weren't making it that night.
        In the morning, the last hundred feet up was murder. As we're dying and climbing, a Marine major we recognized from our camp goes running by us in a track outfit - uphill, mind you - and says, with great enthusiasm, "Let's go, Marines!" He ran briskly by till he was out of sight above us in the clouds. I wanted to puke, never mind the Corps right now - but we finally made it to the top a few minutes before the sun came up. All activity ceased, and everyone looked to the east as the sun made its first appearance of the day.
        I noticed quite a few people were up there. It was intense. Swirling winds, thick clouds, and a murky looking hole that led down into the still active volcano. We heard a variety of dialects, including an Australian who wore khakis and was the loudest thing up there - just short of the howling wind.
        We didn't stay long. There's not much to see even on a clear day at the top - the mountain itself, that is. We could see down the coast toward Numazu, where we'd originally disembarked from the LST we rode from Okinawa. (The LST is the Navy ship where they ride right up to the shore, the front opens, and equipment and people pour out.) That was to the south east; most everything else was blocked by clouds.
        The trip down the other side was a lot more fun, like playing on a never ending sandy dune. You could jump in the air and come down twenty feet away, immediately sinking into the soft ash. We probably ran down half of the mountain, laughing our asses off the whole way.
        A few weeks later I got lost with two other guys on the north slope of Mt. Fuji while exploring. We thought we were goners after twelve hours of wandering around and seeing no signs of humanity, but finally we stumbled across a logging camp and a free ride back to the base.

        Saw some weird things in Japan, the least of all being the holes in the floor they call toilets. Just a hole in the floor, no stall, no paper, no nothing - they squat over these holes in front of god and everyone. Needless to say, I always had constipation until I got back to the barracks.

        One night we were called out as backup riot police because - I guess - the local citizens didn't appreciate our presence. I remember seeing the first line of Japanese riot police wade into the crowds, and hoped they held, because I didn't want that wave coming after us. They held though - brutally, as I recall. Betcha never heard Walter Cronkite report that - or the story of one of our company tanks running over and killing an Okinawan woman who was collecting spent brass in a training area.

        Back on Okinawa, the company office fell short a man, and since I scored "10" on my typing test in bootcamp, they figured I was a typist. I don't know whether that was ten words per minute or "10 out of 10", but soon I found myself sitting in the office typing company correspondence while my friends slept in muddy holes in the wet jungles of Okinawa. Not bad, so I stuck with it, and eventually had my job code changed to a Remington Raider. Got pretty good at it, too - so good the regimental commander eventually stole me to work in 9th Marine regimental headquarters (S-1).
        I worked for a Colonel Stephen Olmstead, who I heard later made general. His exec was a lieutenant colonel from Rhode Island who once heard me say "@#%$ rolls downhill" and proceeded to lecture me for a half hour about how the words of a Marine officer were not "@#%$" to be rolling downhill.
        He also came up on me one day while I was typing a letter with headphones on, Led Zeppelin blasting my eardrums out. "Does that help you type?" he asks, and I said "Oh, yes sir!" and was permitted to carry on rocking out. It was almost as much fun as the time in bootcamp when I was allowed to lead the platoon on the morning run with the words of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog". What I said, they repeated back to me as loud as they could:

        Hey hey mama said the way you move
        Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove

        Somewhere on Parris Island that day, a Led Zeppelin fan smiled quietly to himself when he heard us go running by. Well, I was tired of the same old:

        I don't know but I've been told
        Eskimo @#%$ is a mighty cold

        Got a second tattoo on Okinawa. I'd made an abortive attempt to reestablish a relationship with an old girl friend by taking leave to go back home - another forty hour round trip from New York To Okinawa - but it didn't work out. When I got back, I was sure if I got her name tattooed on my chest, it would change her mind in my favor.

        Yeah, right.

        We drove south, almost to Naha, to a small place that had a skunk on a sign over the door. I knew it would hurt, so I brought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red with me, and had been sipping on it since the beginning of the trip. I was pretty buzzed, and certainly feeling no pain when I walked through the door.
        That ended the moment the first needle touched me. I won't bore you with gruesome details, but as you can see in the illustration, the tattoo was never really finished. I couldn't stand the pain, even through a fog of whiskey. Some have a high tolerance for pain and some very low - mine's pretty much non-existent. Ix-nay on the ain-pay, I always say.

        The battalion conducted a huge training exercise in South Korea, where I fell in love a little with a half-American, half-Korean bar girl in Pusan as tall as me who spoke perfect English. We were there as part of a huge landing exercise conducted with the Navy.
        When we first flew into Korea, we stayed at Pohang, a lot farther north of Pusan - like, right on the border of North Korea. It was snowing like a bastard and several of our guys, mostly from the south, had never seen real snow. They're running around in it like kids, having a blast, not realizing they were also freezing their asses off. Yeah, cold enough to snow, but we're Marines, so we get to sleep in tents.
        Fortunately, they provided each of us with those down filled mummy-looking sleeping bags. It could drop down below zero and we'd be toasty in those mummy bags. But woe be the first poor bastard who had to get out of that cozy, warm cocoon every morning and light the stove that always went out three hours before dawn. Rank has its privileges, and I'd made E-4 by then, so it wasn't me.

        In Pohang we saw how discipline worked in the ROK Marines - that's "Republic Of Korea" Marines. We're sitting around minding our own business, and along comes this ROK sergeant who walks up to a ROK corporal and starts screaming in his face, smacking him about the head and shoulders, not pleased with something this man did - or had responsibility for. The moment this tirade ended, the corporal turned around and took off toward this ROK private, and did the exact same thing in the exact same sequence to him. I guess @#%$ does roll downhill in South Korea.
        We ended up trading everything you could imagine with the ROK Marines. Lighters, belt buckles, flags, clothing, personal effects - all up for trade. I had a ROK Marine belt buckle for years, since lost.

        The second time we came into Korea was on LSD - the ship, not the drug. We stormed ashore in grand style, but nothing was shooting at us, so it really wasn't much training in my opinion. The LSD is the Navy ship where the ass end sinks in the water, allowing small boats and landing craft to launch and tie up.

        We're sitting around one night swapping stories with our captain and one of the majors from Battalion HQ, and he told a story I will never forget. It must have been bullshit, though. Had to be.
        There's about a dozen of us sitting around the campfire, and the major tells us of a fraternity brother in college who had the chance to take this gorgeous woman out on a date. He got a little too drunk, and when he leaned over to kiss her in his car, he vomited in her lap. Poor girl?
        He must have also passed out because he remembered nothing past the point of throwing up in his date's lap. The next morning, he woke up laying on his back out in the grass next to his car, with a pile of @#%$ sitting in the middle of his chest, presumably hers.
        I've been chuckling about that story since, true or not. Can you imagine some poor bystander coming across this gorgeous woman in a puke-stained dress squatting over a man's chest? If said bystander was close enough, he'd know what she was doing - and probably wonder about it for the rest of his life.

        When the ship pulled into Pusan, I was elected to be Shore Patrol on the first day. I was told to report to this Army Staff Sergeant who ran the local military police. Well, this was McHale's Army if I ever saw it. This guy was set up like a king. He took us on a tour of Pusan that few white boys ever got to see.
        I'll never forget Green Street - a long, crowded city street with three stories on either side - where the sergeant told us that anything you could think of could be bought somewhere on this street. Guns, bombs, women, drugs, stolen art, Cuban cigars, political influence, murder - you name it - could be had for a price.
        The sergeant then brought us to a brothel that was not open to white people - "they drive the prices up", said the sergeant. Intercourse was two dollars a pop, and oral sex was three dollars.

        And now for the part that no one ever believes.

        We're led into this fine room with a large glass case in the middle of the room. We sit down in comfortable chairs, the mama-san brings us whatever we want to drink - and there before us, inside the glass case, is about 15 mostly beautiful Asian women laying around on pillows and couches in revealing lingerie. The sergeant says, "Have that one stand up", pointing at a girl who quickly stood up and revealed her charms for the six or seven of us sitting there with our mouths on the floor.
        I'm not sure what excuse I used at the time but I didn't participate - though several of my fellow Shore Patrol did. I was in love with Sandy Rose at the time - as well as all things American - and Asian women simply did not appeal to me in a sexual way. They looked like little kids, to me.
        In 1999 I met a tall black former Marine sergeant who saw the glass room in Thailand. He also had never met anyone outside of the military who'd ever seen or heard about such a thing, and we had a marvelous conversation on a Greyhound bus in California. I'm still amazed his 6'5" frame fit in a Greyhound bus seat. It was good to hear that I wasn't crazy as I'd been accused of - that someone else had seen the same thing over there.

        Near the end of my tour on Okinawa I managed to swing a set of orders to the Marine Corps Development and Education Command (MCDEC) in Quantico, Virginia. I was the only Marine in the Ninth Regiment to get orders to Quantico. Everyone else up for transfer - all my friends - went to Fort LeJeune, North Carolina. All of 'em.
        MCDEC is the place where baby Marine officers fresh out of Annapolis learn how to be real Marine officers - The Basic School - or at least as real as you can get without going to war. They also taught enlisted men and women to be officer candidates, and taught the rest of us how to salute everything that moved - when we weren't standing at attention, forced to attend two or three showy retirements a month. Way too close to the D.C. Dog 'n Pony Show, for my tastes.

        One thing made it a little easier to bear, and it was the statement, "Anyone who can't tapdance is queer." I don't care where we were or who we were talking to or what we were doing, if someone whispered "Anyone who can't tapdance is queer" in your ear, you had to tapdance. I once tapdanced in the middle of about 2,000 Marines standing at attention in dress uniforms for a retirement. We tapdanced in malls and stores and movie theaters - it was totally a balls thing. Someone would test your balls, sometimes real publicly, and you'd better not be found wanting. Other times you'd get tested when you were flat on your ass drunk - and woe be to the poor bastard who was too drunk to actually get up and display some semblance of tapdancing before passing out.

        The FBI had an academy at Quantico, where they'd play "storm the terrorist-held aircraft" among other nifty things. But the plane they were using in 1974 looked like something donated by Indiana Jones in 1937. No big jumbo jet swarming with Kat Stevens Kommandoes, just an old prop job.

        I was a Remington Raider in the base reception office, fresh from a year of total isolation from all things American on Okinawa. When I say "Remington Raider", I mean, I wasn't your basic infantry cannon fodder, front line, "dig holes in the ground and actually sleep in them" kind of Marine. "REMF" was my unofficial title, an acronym for "rear echelon mother @#%$" - the guys who manned the rear guard. We who had hot meals, dry beds, running water, and porcelain toilet bowls. All the luxuries of life denied the "grunts" in the field.

I remember walking across the parade ground in Quantico and seeing this Marine approaching in dress greens. A quick eyecheck told me he wasn't an officer who required a salute, but then my eyes strayed down to his medals - and the top row, left (I believe) was that beautiful blue field with white stars - the Medal Of Honor. I almost tripped, I was overwhelmed with admiration and amazement and "oh my God" and whatever else at the time. He seemed to be in another world, hardly noticing I was there, if at all. Knowing what people go through to even be recommended for awards like this, I just gave the man his space - and continue to be amazed to this day that I actually saw a Medal Of Honor winner in person.
All that valor - and a shitload of luck as well, to be still around to not talk about it - funny how guys who have really, really "been there" never brag. Their families can't even get them to talk about it, let alone brag about their medals.

        I had a pretty sweet deal in Quantico, but unfortunately blew it because I couldn't talk to the jerk I worked for. When I left Okinawa, I mailed my seabag full of military clothes ahead to Quantico because I was going home to New York on leave and didn't want to deal with them. The postal service promptly lost the bag, and refused to pay off the insurance until 90 days passed (they never paid me either.)
        A seabag inspection was announced shortly after I arrived, and when I tried to explain what happened to my uniforms, this @#%$ just says, "Be there." Gee, thanks for the understanding. Needless to say, I didn't bother to show up empty handed - I didn't show up at all.
        So I was written up immediately, my first real trouble since joining the Marine Corps. I was confident the commanding officer would listen to my circumstances and give me a break. After all, this was my first offense. And I thought I had a pretty good reason for missing the inspection.         Well, what was I supposed to do, buy a whole new seabag with less than six months left to get out? I was making about three hundred bucks a month at the time, and a whole Marine seabag cost a little more than that, not to mention tailoring, dry cleaning, and rank insignia.
        Well, the captain threw the book at me. As much as he could, anyway. Took money and restricted me - plus extra duty. I was completely shocked and completely pissed. I walked out of his office - and kept going. Spent 47 days gone - even listed as a deserter after 30 days. I lived the high life and traveled to New Jersey, Michigan, and New York until finally turning myself back in at Quantico. Well, the summer was over.
        It was during this period of desertion that I hitchhiked from Muskegon, Michigan to Fishkill, New York wearing a pair of shorts, a guitar, and nothing else. As always when I travel, good people turn me on to food, rides, and wonderful conversation. These two guys in a van in Pennsylvania brought me almost forty miles out of their way. We talked endlessly.

        I was in New Jersey when my uncle Joe, a freelance photographer who sold pictures to the Associated Press and the Newark Star Ledger, brought me to Eddie Adams' home, who he knew well. Adams is the Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who snapped the shot of the South Vietnamese general in the process of blowing out the brains of a suspected V.C. sniper during the Vietnam Conflict.
        Of course, I had to ask the guy how he could just stand there snapping pictures while a man was being murdered, and Mr. Adams said the sniper was just captured after killing several of the general's closest friends. War is hell, I guess.

        I'd been transferred in my 47 day absence, and the new gunnery sergeant I worked for was a fair 'n square guy who went to bat for me because I busted ass for him while awaiting my second Article 15. They could have easily thrown the whole book at me - court martial, whatever - but I walked out of the room with the exact same punishment I walked out with before. Added to the last one, it made for a month restricted to the barracks working my ass off every day scrubbing showers and floors. Got pretty good with a big floor buffer too, after initially making a complete ass of myself with it.
        The amazing part was, even with desertion and two Article 15's, had I stayed in the Corps until December 1974 I'd have picked up sergeant's stripes. After my restriction, I went to work for the good gunny full time, and ended up straightening out all the hosed records of the battalion training office. They were very happy with me about that.

        I was discharged in October 1974. The day I got out, I had Ron Easter's black Gran Prix parked at the end of downtown Quantico real early in the morning. I just stared at the sky for a long time thinking about what had gone on, and what could go on now that I was finally free to make my own choices.

        I went back to New York, where it seemed everyone was doing the exact same boring thing they'd been doing when I left two years before. I'd been around a little in two years as a Marine - South Carolina, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Okinawa, Japan, and Virginia. I'd been to South Korea and made stops on Guam and Wake Island. Honorably discharged, I was a twenty year old ex-Marine and semi-world traveler who bored altogether too easily.
        Went home and tried working at a cement pipe factory with my brother Bill for a while, where my primary duty was breaking up defective sewer pipes with a big sledgehammer. This was November in New York, not a good time to be outside with a sledge hammer.
        Visited Marine friends in Virginia, and five months after I was discharged as a Marine I ended up joining the Navy. Saw an advertisement in Penthouse Magazine of a nuclear submarine plowing through the waves on the surface of the sea - I think it was the USS Flying Fish. Marines to submarines - and man, did I take some @#%$ from the submariners. Years of it.
        I signed up as a torpedoman because it was one of the few Navy jobs that didn't require a six year enlistment. Signing my life away for four years was bad enough, but I later signed up an additional year to get a petty officer's stripe and a twelve hundred dollar bonus check that I quickly blew on partying with my friends - and a 1975 Guild F50-R Navarre guitar that I traded for a carbon graphite Rainsong after 26 years.