by Jack McLean
One Marine Corps color is gold—
Shows the world—we are bold.
Left-right-left.
Left-right-left.
Mother was less enamored with the next cadence that she heard:
Another Marine Corps color is red—
Represents the blood we shed.
Left-right-left.
Left-right-left.
She turned and silently walked off by herself as the final cadence assaulted her ears:
If I die in a combat zone,
Box me up and send me home.
Wrap my arms around my chest.
Tell the world I done my best.
Left-right-left.
Left-right-left.
The Marine Corps expected us, on this our graduation day, to have perfect group discipline, to be in top physical shape, and to have complete mastery of the M14 rifle. We were there on all counts. Several days before, Platoon 3076 had won the series S drill competition—the highest prize for a recruit platoon. Staff Sergeant Hilton had been ecstatic.
It had been his goal from our first day.
He was proud of us.
It’s hard to imagine that we could have stood taller or moved with crisper precision than we did that morning. With our parents in the stands and Staff Sergeant Hilton singing the cadence, there could be no group of individuals on the planet that could hold a candle to the one hundred eight boys of Platoon 3076.
We sang cadence in response to his lead as we marched across the island to the waiting ceremonial parade:
One, two, three, four.
United—States—Marine—Corps.
This is—what we—asked—for.
Three—thousand—seventy—six.
We’re the—best.
Of all the—rest.
Left-right-left.
Left-right-left.
The three platoons of our graduating series marched in perfect formation across the main parade deck in front of a grandstand that had been erected for the occasion. As we turned “eyes right” to the reviewing stand, the band played “The Marines’ Hymn.” A sense of accomplishment and purpose washed over me. I had learned my lessons well and, together with my comrades, had earned the title of United States Marine.
Several minutes later, we heard our final words as recruits: “Platoon … three … thousand … seventy … six … DIIIIISSSS-MISSED.”
It was official.
I was now a private in the United States Marine Corps.
The lessons of Parris Island were incalculable, and I have no doubt that they saved my life time and again while I was under enemy fire in Vietnam. Each marine, whether eventually a cook or a pilot, is first trained to be a combat infantryman. He must be a highly trained rifleman, and requalify as such every year. He must be in top physical shape and stay that way throughout his tour. He must respect his equipment. Each marine knows that, no matter his duty assignment, he must be prepared to go into combat in an infantry rifle squad anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice. He must obey orders without hesitation, and execute his assigned duties without question.
From the first night on the yellow footprints, we learned that, as marines, we were in it together. If one fell behind, we pulled him forward with the rest of us. His success was our success. We respected one another. “Gung Ho” is a Marine Corps motto. It is derived from the Chinese and means “working together.” The other more familiar Marine Corps motto is “Semper Fidelis,” which is Latin for “always faithful.” We worked together and were always faithful. These were the lessons of Parris Island.
We reveled in the observation by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt twenty-five years before,
The marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!
One year after my graduation from Parris Island, I was in Vietnam, fighting side by side with my marine brothers, when I was shot at with live ammo for the first time. During the ensuing battle and the others that followed, I was confused, disoriented, and scared to death—every time—but I was never alone. There was always another marine nearby. He also was confused, disoriented, scared to death—but he had me nearby. That was the way it worked in the Marine Corps. Together we’d figure something out. As long as there was another marine, we were a unit. It was taught from the moment that we arrived on Parris Island. It continues to exist in me and the others to this day. There is no challenge too great, no night so dark that the presence of another marine—past or present—fails to give me the courage and faith that together we are capable of anything.
Camp Geiger is part of Camp Lejeune, the sprawling Marine Corps base located on the North Carolina coast near the town of Jacksonville. All marine recruits east of the Mississippi who have completed their basic training at Parris Island go there directly by bus the morning after graduation to complete a six-week infantry training course. Those in the West attend boot camp in San Diego and infantry training at Camp Pendleton, Lejeune’s enormous counterpart on the Southern California coast.
At Parris Island we drilled, shot, and exercised by rote. The only way was the Marine Corps way. At Camp Geiger, we became creative. We were taught to think like marines by mastering the principles of infantry combat as well as squad and platoon tactics. We were trained on every individual and crew-served weapon in the Marine Corps arsenal, and were presented with situations for their use. The mission was to convert us from disciplined boot camp graduates into self-confident and thinking marines capable of immediately joining a combat-ready infantry fire team.
For many of us, that moment was now short weeks away.
The strain caused by the continuing buildup in Vietnam was apparent everywhere. New brick barracks were under construction to augment the tent cities that were popping up. There were sporadic shortages of rifles, uniforms, and general military supplies. An escalating urgency permeated our every activity. Drills that used to begin with “If this happens …” had changed to “When this happens …”
Actual combat was now a certainty for every one of us.
For the first time, several of our instructors were Vietnam veterans. To them, our education was not theory—it was real. They had been shot at. They had seen people get killed. They had been wounded.
All knew the value of training and how critical it would become when we ourselves were under fire.
9
I COMPLETED MY INFANTRY TRAINING ON NOVEMBER 10, 1966, the 191st birthday of the United States Marine Corps, and returned home to Brookline for three weeks of leave. My homecoming was disorienting. Civilian life seemed chaotic and unstructured. I felt naked without the rifle that had been with me since the second week of boot camp. I wasn’t sure what to do with my new body. I was twenty pounds heavier than when I’d left. None of my old clothes fit.
I wondered at my muscled strength. My shoulders were broad, my thighs were like granite, and my general appearance was, well, mean. My every stance was awkward. Making sentences out of words became a thoughtful struggle. As my mother noted, it was palpable the degree to which things had changed in my life during those long weeks at Parris Island, while little at home seemed to have changed at all.
After the initial euphoria, which included my first private visit to a bathroom in more than three months, I began to feel uncomfortable. Back under my parents’ roof, I settled into old routines that made me feel more like a boy than the man I was becoming. Dad went to work, Barb went to school, and Mom went about her daily life. I was bored. I actually missed the structured daily regimen of boot camp.
Several days after my arrival home, I took a bus up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to surprise my Andover friend Lou Maranzana with a visit. He was a freshman at Dartmouth College. As night fell, I trudged up three flights of stairs, found his room, and entered. I slowly looked around, and the sight was an assault on my barracks-trained sensibilities. Books and
magazines were strewn about the dormitory room floor, intermingled with empty beer and soda cans, and food wrappers. One glaring overhead bulb brought the only illumination. As I absorbed the scene, I cringed at the thought of how Staff Sergeant Hilton might have reacted to such chaos.
I was, in fact, cringing at the chaos myself.
Lou was reclined on a threadbare sofa reading a book. Our eyes caught as the door opened fully. We were speechless. Something was very different. Had I changed, or had Lou? He looked the same to me, but his expression told me that the feeling was not mutual. He rose slowly and exhaled loudly while taking me in. I was twenty pounds heavier, shaved bald, and in perfect physical shape. As many friends and family members told me during those weeks, I was a formidable sight to behold. Lou broke into a broad smile, muttered a disbelieving “holy shit” under his breath, and we hugged.
He found me a beer while I lit a cigarette and flopped onto the corner of the sofa. It was a difficult moment. It was hard to know where to begin. The books on the floor related to subjects as diverse as Einstein and romantic poetry. I was more aware of what I did not see than what I did see, however. There was no footlocker, no rifle, no spit-shined boots, and, well, no control.
Lou, like most people that I encountered during boot leave, wanted to know everything about where I had been and what I had experienced. Like Lou, however, most people had no place to put the information. To them, I was devoid of context. I was, after all, the only person among my family and friends who had become a United States Marine. There was an enormous disconnect. I asked Lou about college, his courses, girls, and the Ivy League football he played. “It’s college,” he said dismissively. “Just college, Jack, that’s all.” With the wave of a hand, he outlined the panorama of the room. There was nothing to it.
His life could be explained to me with the wave of a hand.
My life, however, had become complex. I could find few words to describe it. The previous March, word of my enlistment had made me a curiosity among my Andover classmates. Now I was a marine, and they were college freshmen. The chasm had become deep and institutionalized. We were increasingly very different. Although everyone I knew from my previous life was like them, they knew no one like me.
Not even one person.
For an entire generation of college boys, the thought of joining the military was beyond remote. The college draft deferment ensured that the ignorance would continue for another four years. My closest friends occasionally tried to appreciate my experience and to understand my rapidly changing life, but for the most part, they had no place to process the information—my experience was that remote to them. I was regarded as an oddity.
The balance of my leave sped by, and I felt increasingly disconnected. The Marine Corps, to which I’d be returning shortly, was putting me in the backwater of supply. I was about to go from the central focus of war preparation to the exiled purgatory of supply school, followed by a remote duty station. Vietnam was now where the action was for the Marine Corps. It was all that I had been trained for. Most of my former platoon mates were on their way. In both my personal life and my new professional life, I was rapidly flowing out of the mainstream.
As my leave came to a close, I joined my family on our annual trek to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with my father’s parents. It too was awkward. Cousins and other family members were locked into traditional roles of prep schools, college, and first jobs. My grandmother, with so much family to be proud of, was dazed and confused when it came to me. For the first time in her life, she was confronted with the real possibility that by next Thanksgiving a member of her family would be absent and in harm’s way half a world away.
My grandfather alone stood tall that day in my mind’s eye. He understood what I was doing and was immensely proud of the decision that I had made. Our freedom was a fragile institution, and, given his life experience, he well appreciated the need to defend it at every turn. Grandpa was a bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking former six-term Republican congressman from New Jersey’s sixth district. His childhood years had been spent as a page in the United States Senate. His twelve years in Congress exactly overlaid the first three terms of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Grandpa had provided me with many of my most lasting childhood memories. He took me to my first baseball game in 1954 to see a remarkable young phenom named Willie Mays at the Polo Grounds in New York City. He later introduced me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see the newly acquired Rembrandt masterpiece Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.
My grandfather’s first association with war came one April afternoon in 1898 when, as a twelve-year-old Senate telephone operator, he answered the call from President William McKinley requesting a congressional war declaration against Spain.
Nineteen years later, while a young lawyer, he watched as the United States sent forces to Europe to execute the final push that ended World War I. On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as a fifth-term congressman, he cast a vote to declare war on Japan. In 1950, while he was serving as a judge in Union County, New Jersey, the United States entered into the war in Korea.
Grandpa knew that our freedoms were to be cherished and defended. Sometimes, as with World War II, the enemies were clear and present. Other times, as with Spain and Korea, the issues were less obvious. As a patriotic American, however, Grandpa had long understood that national service on any level was both a privilege and, on occasion, a necessity.
On this Thanksgiving Day, he quietly pulled me aside after dinner and expressed his appreciation for my decision to enlist in the United States Marine Corps, and expressed his deep pride that I would be serving the United States during a time of national need.
10
ON NOVEMBER 29, 1966, I TRAVELED BACK TO CAMP Lejeune and began a course in mechanized supply at the Marine Corps Supply School at Mountfort Point. A select group of us had been chosen out of boot camp to learn a new computerized supply system that was being implemented by the Marine Corps. It was as safe an assignment as existed in the marines at that time.
Our days were spent in classes learning how to type and do basic accounting and property requisitioning. There was little discipline or physical training during our six-week course. The war seemed a world away. Each day further separated us from the airtight discipline of Parris Island and the travails of our former platoon mates, now en route to Vietnam. With our new training, we were all destined to be stationed at one of the two huge stateside United States Marine Corps supply centers, in Albany, Georgia, and Barstow, California.
Graduation was held on February 3, 1967. Given the choice of the two available duty stations, I chose Barstow, California. It was 1967. California was sun, the Beach Boys, hot cars, fast food, and beautiful girls. It was an appealing image to a nineteen-year-old boy.
I could not deny, however, an unscratchable itch to go to Vietnam, to fulfill that to which all of my training had pointed. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to go. I wasn’t what would later become known as a hawk. I had yet to form any political thought about the right or wrong of American involvement in Vietnam. I was nineteen years old, and, despite my Barstow duty station, I knew that it was still possible that I might go to war with the United States Marine Corps.
How cool was that?
Such was the thinking of this teenage boy. To this day, it’s a continuing marvel to me that any boy, during any period in world history, has ever reached his twenty-first birthday.
The United States Marine Corps supply center in Barstow sprawled over wide stretches of the Mojave Desert. Outside, all manner of military apparatus, including tanks, artillery, and Jeeps, were lined up for miles. Inside the dozen enormous warehouses lay the clothes, web gear, and ordnance to outfit the exploding marine population in Vietnam. That was what we did in Barstow.
Military life there was civilized. A large contingent of my supply school classmates accompanied me, includ
ing Sid MacLeod, my closest friend and constant companion. We’d been inseparable since Camp Geiger. Sid hailed from McLean, Virginia, which we saw as a curious coincidence. He had attended a year of college but had yearned for something else. Like me, with little warning to his parents, he had quietly enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.
Every payday we’d head to the slop chute for a beer. Sid would put the Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows” on the jukebox. We’d order another round and wonder what might become of our lives.
I was nineteen. Sid was twenty.
We each had fifteen months left in the Marine Corps. Sid wanted to go to Vietnam. I wanted to go as well, but not enough to actually raise my hand—not that it would have mattered. Sid had been volunteering fruitlessly for ten months.
He was six feet tall with bright blond hair worn in a buzz cut. If you were looking for a marine out of central casting, it would have been Sid. Then again, if you were looking for a more unlikely candidate than me to be in the marines, it would have been Sid. He was intelligent, sensitive, funny as hell, controlled, patient, and intolerant of chickenshit.
A year later Sid was dead, killed in action in Khe Sanh. I was a few miles away, celebrating my twenty-first birthday on the DMZ, a brief week before our unit was overrun by a regiment of the North Vietnamese Army.
On a Sunday evening sixteen years later, my eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, handed me a folded piece of yellow-lined paper. She and her mother had just returned from a trip to Washington to visit friends and had taken time to visit the newly dedicated Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I unfolded the paper to find a pencil rubbing of the name Sidney M. MacLeod. It was visible evidence of the fact that Sid was dead and not just in deep hiding like all of my other Marine Corps buddies.