He was right of course. I wheeled toward the C-141. “Let’s get moving.”
PV punched me on the arm, hard enough to hurt. “Ayeaye, boss.” He pointed his index finger in the air and drew circles with it. “Come on, guys—load up. Let’s go get drunk.”
He was right. Screw ’em all. It was time to get drunk and go home.
Chapter 3
GOING HOME IS NOT SOMETHING I’VE EVER BEEN VERY GOOD at. I certainly didn’t do it much as a youngster. I was born on Thanksgiving Day, 1940, in my grandmother Justine Pavlik’s house in Lansford, Pennsylvania, a tiny mining town in Carbon County—appropriate, isn’t it?—just east of Coaldale and Hometown. For the uninitiated, that’s about half an hour northwest of Allentown, and a lifetime from Philadelphia. My father, George, and mother, Emilie Teresa Pavlik Marcinko, never made it as far as the hospital delivery room. Typical.
I’m Czech on both sides. My mother is short and Slavic looking. My father was big—just under six feet—dark, brooding, and had a nasty temper. All the men in the family—and virtually every male in Lansford as well—were miners. They were born, they worked the mines, they died. Life was simple and life was hard, and I guess some of them might have wanted to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but most were too poor to buy boots.
We lived on top of the hill, just around the corner from Kanuch’s, where we got our groceries and Old Man Kanuch would lick the thick pencil stub before he wrote down what we’d taken in his ledger book. He’d keep a tab and collect from us on payday. It would probably have been cheaper to shop at the A & P six blocks away, but hardly anybody did. You went where you were known.
If I’m ornery, and there are those who think I am, I probably got it from my maternal grandfather. Joe Pavlik was a cantankerous, short, barrel-chested, shot-and-a-beer, harddrinking son of a bitch with a square face, and Leonid Brezhnev eyebrows, who worked the mines all his life and never complained about it once. I don’t remember him ever complaining about anything. He was a real hell-raiser—one of those archetypal tough guys you see in working-class bars, with big, wide, labor-toughened hands that look as if they were designed to go around old-fashioned beer glasses.
I was always independent. I had my own paper route by the age of five. At seven, I was taking off for a day at a time, running through the mile-long Lehigh Railroad tunnel to swim in the Hauto reservoir. You could get there by going through the old Lansford water tunnel, too, but there were huge rats living in the water tunnel, and besides, it was farther up the mountain. So I took the shortcut—and my chances—with the trains. I got nailed a few times. The first time the steam locomotive bore down on me I thought I’d die. I held my breath and squeezed my eyes tightly, hugging the wet stone tunnel wall as car after car after car went by ka-chang-kachang about a foot from my nose. My dad, George, beat the crap out of me after I told him what I’d done. Thereafter, whenever I used the railroad tunnel, I kept my mouth shut.
Neither of my parents was big on education. My dad probably dropped out of school around eighth grade; my mother may have gotten as far as ninth or tenth. Neither of them ever put any emphasis on book learning, so school was something I never took very seriously. I was much more interested in having fun—or making money.
Fun, before I discovered women, consisted of swimming at Hauto and summer vacations in the Catskill Mountains—the Jewish Alps—where my uncle Frank and aunt Helen had a boardinghouse. Money was always a problem. The mines closed down when I was in the seventh grade, and after several months of just scraping by, my father finally found work as a welder in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We moved to New Brunswick in 1952. I went through real culture shock. Lansford was a town of maybe four thousand, mostly Czech. In New Brunswick, there were Poles, Hungarians, Irish, Jews, blacks, and Hispanics. That took some getting used to, with the result that I both gave and received more than my fair share of welts and bruises on the walk between school and the small basement apartment we could afford.
Life around the house was not pleasant. My mother’s brother moved in with us—three adults and two kids (by then I had a brother) crammed in a three-room apartment. When my parents fought, which was often, my mother’s brother would take her side. The result was that my father spent less and less time at home. My younger brother, Joey, who was nine or ten at the time, was close to my mother, so he stayed around the house with her. Me, I couldn’t stand the place. So I went off on my own, returning only to sleep or do what little homework I did.
I escaped by working as a pin-setter in a bowling alley, doing whatever odd jobs I could find—even by serving seven A.M. Sunday mass as an altar boy. On the days I decided to show up, I went to St. Ladislaus Hungarian Catholic School, where like generations of students before me, I had my knuckles rapped by nuns hefting wicked rulers. But I never liked classes very much. I cruised through school on autodrive, much more concerned with earning pocket money than A’s or B’s.
During my sophomore year, for example, I worked sixty hours a week at a luncheonette called Gussy’s, just off the Rutgers campus. During the summer vacation I worked there a hundred and twenty hours a week—from five A.M. until ten at night, seven days a week. The hours were long but the money was great: a dollar an hour, off the books. That was a real windfall for a 15-year-old in 1955.
Besides, Gussy—his full name was Salvatore Puleio Augustino, but I can’t remember anyone ever using it—treated me like his own family. He took me upstairs, where his father, Old Man Sal, lived, and filled me with pasta and sauce, and sausages and chicken and huge platters of vegetables sautèed in olive oil and garlic, instead of my having to eat meat loaf or Salisbury steak off the luncheonette steam table. Old Man Sal let me watch as he made wine in the basement, and I developed a real taste for Chianti. I even picked up enough Italian to get by at the dinner table, which Sal’s old man just loved. Gussy made a real Czech guinea out of me.
Because I had a lot of money in my jeans for a teenager, I even bought a car. a chrome-yellow 1954 Mercury convertible, as soon as I was old enough to get my driver’s license—the day after my seventeenth birthday.
Things were made even more interesting because Gussy’s was a hangout for many of the Rutgers fraternity guys, some of whom adopted me as a kind of mascot. I spent a fair amount of time in the Rutgers Greek houses, which ultimately turned out to be a great and enlightening experience. The exposure helped smooth a few of my roughest edges. When most of the kids from backgrounds similar to mine were sporting pegged trousers and motorcycle jackets, and styled their hair like Elvis or Dion, I dressed in button-down shirts, chinos, and Harris tweed sports coats. I learned how to drink beer at an early age, and—more important—how to handle it, too. My fraternity friends also instructed me in some of the finer points involved in the constant search for meaningful female companionship.
The inculcation worked. The summer between my sophomore and junior years—I was fifteen—I met a beautiful and sophisticated young student teacher named Lucette at one of the fraternity parties. We hit it off right away. She was a French major, and I spoke my pidgin Italian, and we clicked. I was big for my age and always had cash in my wallet, and I talked and dressed like I went to Rutgers and acted like I owned the goddamn fraternity house, so she never realized I was a high-school kid.
She found out the hard way. With what the inscrutable Orientals might call a dose of Real Bad Karma, she was assigned to teach a third-year high-school French class in September and saw my beaming face in the third row. Zut alors!
By the time I was seventeen I’d gone through a bunch of changes. My parents split up. My mother took a job at Sears, and we—she, my younger brother, and I—moved into public housing. My father rented a furnished room over a Slovak bar called Yusko’s, just a few doors down from the luncheonette where I worked. He’d spend a lot of time there and I’d drop by Yusko’s to visit. The place could have been transplanted from Lansford, with its pickled pig’s feet in big jars, and hard-boiled eggs sitting in bowls, and t
hree or four guys who looked like Joe Pavlik sitting on the barstools from ten in the morning until closing time, drinking steadily and chainsmoking Camels. My old man was happy there because it reminded him of home. George Marcinko never got used to New Brunswick.
Meanwhile, I was spending less and less time in school—cutting classes regularly—and more and more of my time with a young Italian woman who was married to a guy twentyseven years her senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping, which I was all too willing to provide. I quit Gussy’s and went to work as a counterman at a Greek place in the heart of New Brunswick. The money was good—about $200 a week including tips, for about half the time I’d been spending at Gussy’s. Moreover, the chefs were willing to teach me some rudimentary cooking and baking skills, so I saw the job as a way to learn a trade. That was a first for me. I’d never really considered what I’d do with my life.
I finally quit school altogether. As I would refer to it some years later in official-sounding language, I “voluntarily disenrolled” in February 1958. Continuing just didn’t seem to make any sense. The classes all seemed to be b.s. anyway. And who needed a high-school diploma? There was money to be made, and women to be hustled, and you could drive down to the shore and lie on the beach for a couple of days at a time—I didn’t need an education for any of that. So I split.
I also tried to join the military. When President Eisenhower sent Marines to Lebanon, I volunteered. I liked their dress blues and their swords. So I went down to the Marine recruiter, walked in, and probably said something asinine like, “Well, friend, I’d kind of like to go shoot a few bad guys. Where’s my rifle, where’s the ammo, and when can I leave?”
And the recruiting sergeant most likely restrained himself from reducing me to a pile of rubble and said, “Look, sonny, you gotta go to boot camp before we let you kick any ass, and besides, you’re underage and you haven’t finished high school. So why not get your diploma, and then we’ll talk.”
Well, I knew for damn sure that by the time I did all that, the Marines would have the Lebanese problem solved without my help. So I walked away and had a lovely summer on the beach, and I worked on a serious. class-A, surfer-grade tan and got laid a lot. I also spent some time trying to toss a good-looking neighborhood girl named Kathryn Ann Black off the three-meter board of the Livingston Avenue swimming pool (off the board and into the sack). We dated most of the summer, when I wasn’t catting around with other women, and discovered that we liked each other. We must have: despite my proclivity toward outside activities, I kept coming back. There was something out of the ordinary there.
Then in September, after I’d had my fun, and Kathy went back to school, I walked into a Navy recruiting office, volunteered for service, and after taking a battery of tests, was accepted for duty. Oh, if they’d only known.
On October 15, 1958, I reported to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. For some inexplicable reason, I felt better about walking through the gates of that camp than I’d ever felt going anywhere in my life before.
I was the perfect MARK-ONE, MOD-ZERO sailor—that’s military jargon for the most basic model. Talk about gung ho—I even spit shined the soles of my boots. I was the one asshole in a hundred who actually believed the chiefs when they told us, “He who shines only half a shoe is only half a man.”
There’d been a cabdriver I’d gotten to know in New Brunswick—Joe something or other. He’d been a sailor, and he gave me his old Blue Jacket’s Manual, which I’d read by the time I was sixteen or so. He’d taught me how to roll and tie a Navy neckerchief, as well as a bunch of other Navy procedures, so by the time I got to boot camp, I was already ahead of the curve. I volunteered for everything—from the football squad to the drill team—and was even made the acting athletic petty officer for a couple of weeks. There was an incredible amount of b.s. involved in the training, but overall, it seemed like a good deal: I gave the Navy a full day’s work, and it gave me a full day’s pay—and I even had some fun in the process. I really liked the swimming and the shooting and the marching. The book stuff they could keep.
After Christmas I qualified for radioman training. But there were no openings at the school. Instead, I took a temporary assignment to Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where I helped teach swimming to naval aviators during their survival training.
Then, one night in Rhode Island, I went to the movies and saw a terrific flick called The Frogmen, with Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews. It was the story of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams in action in the Pacific during World War II. Lots of action. Lots of heroism. Lots of songs. Like the “Marine Hymn” with new words:
From the halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli, We will fight our country’s battles—Right behind the UDT!
I walked outside afterward and thought, hey—I could do that. I mean, I was a reasonably aggressive sort of person; I’d wanted to join the Marines. So the prospect of “Demolition Dick, Tough-Guy Shark Man of the Navy” was a lot more satisfying than “Fingers Marcinko, Pencil-Pushing Teletype Operator.”
The Demo Dick/Fingers Marcinko identity crisis climaxed a few weeks later when I was finally transferred to radio school in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk, it turned out, is just a stone’s throw from the Underwater Demolition Teams, which were based out of the amphibious base at Little Creek, across the harbor. I saw radiomen close up. I saw Frogmen close up. No contest.
The answer was simple: let’s bag this radio crap and go straight to Frogman. So I visited the UDT command and told them what I wanted to do. The news they gave me was like the Marines all over again. I couldn’t become a Frogman until I had a permanent assignment. They didn’t take applicants from temporary commands—and radio school was a temp. Goodbye, Demo Dick; hello, Fingers Marcinko.
It would take me almost two years to get back to Little Creek. My odyssey meandered through Dahlgren, Virginia, where the Navy ran a space surveillance center to track Sputniks, and Naples, Italy, where I worked as a Teletype clerk at the Naval Support Activity Station.
After five months at Dahlgren I applied for UDT training. I made it through the first step, which in those days consisted of being sent to the Navy Yard in Washington, where they put me in one of those old-fashioned canvas diving suits with the hard-hat helmet and thick air hoses, and dropped me into the Anacostia River to see whether or not I had claustrophobia.
I passed the claustrophobia test and was just about to leave for UDT training when I broke my hand slamming it against something hard—the side of a very stupid sailor’s head. It wasn’t my fault. He should have ducked. Goodbye, UDT. Hello, Naples.
Naples turned out to be more fun than I’d expected, even though the job sucked. I realized that I was not cut out to be a Teletype operator. The job was a dead end: it required no imagination or ingenuity. Worse, my watch-mate drove me crazy. He was a real sniveler, a pug-nosed, acne-faced momma’s boy named Harold who picked his ears all day and complained about everything. I called him The Whiner. Harold’s sea daddy was the chief petty officer who ran the Com. Center, a self-important s.o.b. black guy in his mid-forties named White, who acted as if he were royalty. Between the two of them, I plotted murder. No jury in the world would have convicted me.
On the other hand. Naples was terrific. I worked and lived in the same apartment house in the middle of the city, not on the naval base. So unlike a lot of sailors in Italy, I actually got to see the natives. The Italian I’d learned from Old Man Gussy got me by. And while my hand healed, I jogged through the Neapolitan hills, lifted weights, did calisthenics and swam.
But I was still a shore-duty, pencil-pushing Teletype operator. And there was still this little voice inside me that kept saying, “UDT, UDT,” louder and louder. The question was, how to get there.
I had one immense problem to overcome: my commanding officer. How immense? Two hundred pounds. And the ugliest female I’d ever set eyes on in my life. I called her the Big Female Ugly Commander, or Big FUC for short. Big FUC was also a
rule-book creature, and she was shorthanded, a combination that made it impossible for me to leave (I’d made the mistake of signing on for a one-year extension of my assignment in Naples—hoping to transfer to UDT as soon as possible). To Big FUC, a year meant 365 days. Transfer was not a word in her lexicon.
Ultimately, I forced her hand. The next time The Whiner pissed me off, I tossed his typewriter out the window. I would have stopped there, but the little son of a bitch just wouldn’t let up—“I’m going to put you on report and tell Chief White what a bad person you are.”
Something in me snapped, and I busted his face wide open. He was in sick bay for a month. That set the chief off. He was an extra large—six two or so, two hundred pounds—about the same size as my father. He grabbed my ass and hauled me off to the bathroom by the belt and the scruff of my neck and shoved me up against the tile.
“I ought to beat the shit out of you.”
I was in the mood for anything at that point. “Hey, Chief, if you’re feeling frisky, let’s have at it.”
He grabbed me with his big ham hands. I stepped between ‘em and gave him a knee in the balls. He went down like a bag of cement. He struggled to his feet, came at me again, and I slammed him in the gut—I’d learned my lesson about hitting sailors in the head the hard way—clinched him up close so he couldn’t do much, and kneed his groin as if I were stretching wall-to-wall carpet onto a tackless batten, lifting him five, six inches in the air with each pop. When his eyes rolled back, I dropped him on the deck.
He lay there sucking air for a while. Then he rolled onto his knees, crawled on all fours to the toilet, and was sick. “I’ll get you,” he wheezed at me. “You’re gonna be outta here.”
Oh, please, oh, please, Br’er Bear, toss dis rabbit into de briar patch.
ROGUE WARRIOR® Page 5