by Barry Fixler
We always got into jams, and it didn’t help that Mitch was made for mischief, and he was an authority on fireworks. He got hold of some cherry bombs in high school and lit one during class while the teacher’s back was turned. The thing exploded against the chalkboard and the teacher almost jumped out of his skin. He composed himself, turned around, and went straight to Mitch’s desk, because Mitch was always the first suspect when anything like that happened.
His reputation was well earned, and it only elevated him in the eyes of the kids in school. Mitch was A+ cool. He challenged authority every chance that he could, and once even provoked a teacher so much that the teacher lost his composure and they got in a wrestling match in the hall while I stood to the side and laughed.
Cool mattered to me. I always tried to be the coolest kid in class, or one of them. If I wasn’t the coolest kid, I wanted to hang out with the coolest. Not doing your homework, maybe cutting up in class, making people laugh, those things were considered cool.
By seventh grade, I decided that my best path to cool was to get in fights.
I was at my hall locker one day between classes and decided that the time was right, so I picked a fight with the kid next to me.
“Barry, you gotta do something cool,” I remember thinking. “You have to get in a fight.”
I was a shrimp, maybe five feet tall and lucky if I weighed one hundred pounds, and the other kid was quite a bit bigger. There was no grandstanding. I pushed him. He pushed me. Then I threw a punch that missed, and the fight was on.
We swung a few times and he connected with me and tagged me right in the jaw. My head banged against the open locker door. They were the standard metal hall lockers that everyone remembers from school, and my head hit a corner.
I still have the scar. Crack! I went down and my head smacked hard on the marble floor. I was out cold for a few seconds, and the next thing I remembered was looking up at a crowd of kids standing over me saying, “Oooh! Oooh! The blood!”
I tried to get up and get my bearings, but I couldn’t stand up, and I was bleeding all over the place. The wound was a gusher. Head injuries do that. I learned that too well later in Vietnam.
A woman teacher rushed over to help me and pushed a gauze pad against the wound. She took me to the school nurse, and they kept trying to stop the blood from flowing. It was all over me.
“Do I need stitches?” I kept asking them.
“Whoa! You need a lot of stitches!”
“Ah, damn!”
Word spread fast through the halls: “Barry got beat up!”
This was a nerdy Long Island public school, not a city school, so it was big news. When I went back the next day, it turned out that I was a hero for getting my ass kicked. I walked in and it was as if I had become famous overnight.
During my senior year, a junior made fun of me in the cafeteria one Friday when he saw me chewing on a napkin. I couldn’t let that ride, so I confronted him in the hall even though, like most guys in my school, he was way bigger than me.
“What was so funny?” I asked. “Why were you laughing at me?”
I threw the first punch and landed it, but not enough to knock him down, and then he clocked me and I fell, semi-conscious, and the fight was over. I had a classic black eye by the final school bell.
I had to attend a cousin’s wedding the next day, and my mother flipped out when I came home.
“How can I take you with a black eye to a wedding?!”
Because it was a very Jewish wedding, and these very Jewish people didn’t get into fights.
I was telling myself, “Damn, this is cool.”
I made the rounds at the wedding, my black eye telling all of my uncles and my cousins, “I got balls enough to get in a fight.” It was a macho thing. I was loving life, and my mother was mortified.
I never came off as being a tough guy, and my career school fighting record was 0-2 or 2-0, depending on how you looked at it. I was more of a funny guy out to have a good time, but I did have guts—courage—and that counted in the cool department.
Mitch didn’t have to try hard to be cool. He was cool by nature. He hatched this plan in eleventh grade to blow up one of the toilets with a block of M-80 firecrackers, and he dragged into the scheme this nerdy new kid who was tagging along with us, hoping that some of Mitch’s cool would rub off on him.
I was the lookout, and of course Mitch talked the nerd kid into being the one who lit the fuse while everyone else ran. But he made the mistake of loaning the kid the unmistakable Zippo lighter that he always carried and flicked a certain way to look cool.
The toilet exploded about the same time that a teacher walked in, and the nerd was stuck standing there holding what obviously was Mitch’s Zippo. We all got busted, but Mitch had to repeat eleventh grade because of that. It only elevated his coolness in the eyes of the rest of the kids.
But for all of his bravado, Mitch was never a tough guy. He never went looking for fights, and he had no business ending up in Vietnam.
3
Something About
the Tracers
The enemy started shooting at me on my second night in Vietnam. My squad was designated as backup for another squad out on patrol. We waited in a semi-secure area; if they got involved in a firefight, it was our job to go out and help them.
It was sometime after midnight, and we weren’t very far from the other squad, maybe a quarter-mile or less, but dense jungle and overgrown trails separated us in the pitch dark. We couldn’t see, and we didn’t want to fall into any booby traps or walk into an ambush.
The other Marine squad stumbled into an enemy trap and called for backup. Air support wasn’t possible, and they needed us.
I was the new guy, and everybody knew that I was a new guy, so they didn’t expect much from me. Out of about ten guys in my squad, I hovered right in the middle of the pack.
We were single file, spread out about eight feet apart in case somebody stepped on a Bouncing Betty, the land mines that shoot into the air about waist level before they explode. Spread like we were, it wouldn’t take out two or three guys, just one.
I was extremely anxious. Scared is not the right word. My adrenalin was pumping. This was the real deal, and I didn’t know what to expect. I found out pretty quick.
The Viet Cong were smart. Only one trail led to where they’d ambushed the other squad, so they figured, “We’ll fuck up the backup, too.”
We humped toward the area, and my mind raced a million miles an hour. The term “humping” is what we used for hiking or marching on combat patrol. I didn’t hear any shooting, and all I could see was the very faint silhouette of a Marine about eight feet in front of me. I concentrated on him instead of my flanks. I was green and I didn’t want to get lost. I didn’t even care about the Marine behind me. It was my first night patrol, and all I could imagine was my squad leader screaming, “Where the fuck is Fixler?!”
I didn’t want to hear any of that.
We walked smack into the Viet Cong ambush. They picked a perfect spot to light us up, a trail as straight as a bowling lane. I heard machine gun fire, and tracers started flying. Every third or fourth bullet on a machine gun is a tracer meant to show where the rounds are going.
Something was strange about these tracers, different than what I’d seen in training back in the States. Everyone else hit the ground, but I just stood there with my M16 staring, not comprehending, not reacting.
Tracers flew right past my head. That was it! They were coming at me! It was the first time I had seen rounds being fired at me, and I just didn’t react. It was almost as if I was studying the situation, thinking, “The tracers should be going that way, that way. Why are they coming this way?”
I guess I’d thought maybe the tracers were from us shooting at the bad guys. Finally my brain snapped into gear. “Whoa! You’re being shot at!”
Then I dove to the ground, as flat as could be, and when I did, I stabbed my M16 barrel-first into the earth like a ba
yonet. It stood straight up in the mud, and bullets whizzed all around it. I tried to keep my head down and dislodge my M16, but I couldn’t get any leverage on it because I was lying as flat as humanly possible.
It was almost a miracle that the stock of the M16 didn’t get blown apart. The Viet Cong bullets were coming at us furiously, and my M16 was exposed.
I could imagine standing in front of my squad holding just the muzzle because the plastic stock would’ve been chewed to bits.
“Fixler’s M16 got killed!”
I never would have lived that down.
I didn’t feel lucky that night; I felt very inexperienced, bright green.
The barrel of my M16 was jammed with mud for the rest of the patrol, and I knew from training that if I fired it, the rounds could blow up in my face and kill me.
“Oh fuck!” I thought. “I can’t even return fire now. There’s no way that I can pretend that I am a combat Marine.”
You think when you come out of boot camp and combat training that you can rip apart the world. But you find out real quick that you’re not about to rip apart anything.
You eventually get used to being shot at, but I wasn’t there yet. It was very dramatic to me, but I also was embarrassed.
I would have lowered myself in the eyes of the guys if I had said anything. They’d have just called me a fuck-up.
MAKING A MARINE
4
Planting the Seed
I had life very easy growing up in my mostly Jewish neighborhood in Long Island. The houses were big and the lawns were bigger, and everything was neat and trim.
If I was slow in math, I had a math tutor. If I was slow in English, I had an English tutor. Anything I wanted in life—a set of drums, a guitar, singing lessons, whatever—I got it: my own room, my own TV, my own air conditioner, just everything. I had two cars, a motorcycle and a horse by the time I was sixteen.
My mother Ronnie would scream and holler, but you know, your mom is your mom. I wasn’t intimidated by my mother. She could throw something at me and I’d just laugh.
Your father’s something different, but my father worked all the time and was not a disciplinarian. With him, punishment was: “No TV for two days, alright son?” Half an hour later, he’d say, “OK, you can watch TV.”
My father served in the Army during World War II, but he was in awe of the Marines. He told dozens of stories about them when I was growing up. That planted the seed for me to become a Marine, and the seed grew into a passion.
“What are these Marines?” I would ask myself. “Why do they have such a mystique?”
My father was proud that he served in the Army for the United States of America, and he was proud of us as a family, but he was proudest of me being a Marine, a combat Marine.
If somebody brought up something about the military during a conversation, he would say, “My son’s a Marine” ten times before he’d tell people that he served in the Army.
Louis Fixler grew up in the 1920s and ’30s as a Jew in Romania and Hungary, very poor, running from town to town. He had eight siblings: four brothers and four sisters. Those were the days of large families. This was before Hitler, but even then in those parts of Europe, Jews were not welcome, and so my father’s family fled across the Atlantic when he was fourteen years old. They settled in the Bronx.
By 1940, my father was in his twenties but still had no direction, so he joined the Army on his own, the only one of four brothers who served. He knew he needed to get his bearings in order to navigate his way through the world.
Putting on that uniform was the first time, he said later, that he felt like he belonged to a country. “Thank God I finally belong somewhere! I finally have a country!” He said it was the greatest feeling.
He was stationed in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was proud to be a Pearl Harbor survivor.
Louis spent most of 1941 through 1945 hopping from island to island in the Pacific theater, and that was where the Marines that he encountered were etched into his memory.
The Army was much better supplied than the Marines in World War II, my father said. Army guys even received pallets of beer on some of the islands, and that beer was such a valued commodity that the Army stationed volunteers to guard it. But the Marines would get wind of the beer and decide, “To hell with the Army guys.”
The Marines would sneak over and take out the sentries—just knock them over their heads or rough them up—and commandeer the beer. They’d just take it. After that happened several times, nobody in the Army would volunteer to guard the beer.
“Are you kidding me?” my father recounted. “We’re going to mess with the Marines? Forget about it! Just let them take it! We know we’re going to get beat up. Just give the beer to the Marines. They’re crazy!”
* * *
Stories like that stuck, and by the age of fifteen, I had my own story about stealing booze.
A buddy of mine and I had paper routes. We rode bicycles with big baskets on the front and threw newspapers onto the doorsteps and big lawns of the houses in my Long Island neighborhood.
A restaurant along my friend’s route caught fire, and after the blaze was out, he rode his bicycle past the blackened building and noticed the charred liquor bottles at the bar inside. They were black, but unbroken, and all of that liquor was just there for the taking.
He pedaled straight to my house a few blocks away.
“Oh my God! All that booze! Let’s go! Let’s grab it!”
The windows were broken and the place was wide open, with only yellow fire department ribbon to warn people away, but that meant nothing to us. We filled our bicycle baskets with so many liquor bottles that we wobbled on the bikes like drunks as we pedaled back to my house.
“What do we do with all these bottles?”
My mother took great pride in all of the shrubbery around my house, and we thought the bushes would be a great place to hide the booze. We thought that we’d have enough liquor to last us through the rest of high school.
We raided the burnt-out restaurant on a Tuesday and decided it would be cool to wait until the weekend and throw a huge party for all of our friends.
It was late spring, and the next day the neighborhood gardening crew came. A truck would drop off a crew of about ten black day laborers from the Bronx, and they tended to the yards of all of the houses in my subdivision. The truck driver would return in a few hours to gather all of them and move on to another neighborhood.
That morning, while I was at school telling all of my friends about my huge liquor stash and making plans for a blowout weekend party, the gardening crew picked my house to begin the workday. It didn’t take the guys long to find one of the hidden liquor bottles, and then another and another. Every man on that crew dropped his tool and converged on my mother’s bushes and started drinking. She must have looked out the window and thought that our shrubs were getting special attention.
Mine was a lily-white, mostly Jewish neighborhood, and within a few hours, every man on that all-black gardening crew was rolling drunk and passed out on people’s lawns. I can only imagine what went through the neighbors’ heads.
The truck driver returned and found his crew shit-faced on untended lawns, and he thought, “What the hell?!” He had to physically lift each man onto the truck. All of the evidence was scattered across my yard, and I got caught.
When the truck returned the next week, the men all swarmed to my bushes, and the boss driver had to get out and inspect them to make sure that no more liquor bottles were there, or he would have returned to the same nightmare.
* * *
Most of my father’s service was in Army communications or transportation units, which were assigned to secure an island after the Marines had taken it from the Japanese. Saipan, Okinawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima… Marines would go in there fighting hand-to-hand with the Japanese like savages, and when things started to settle down, the Army would move in and establish communicati
ons bases, landing strips, hospitals and roads.
Only a few Marines would be left on the island by then, and even on the heels of bloody battles, they would still be marching, training, preparing for the next fight.
“How tough these Marines are,” my father remembered telling himself. “There’s no let up in these guys. Please, give these Marines a break. They’re not giving these guys breaks. Army guys have breaks, but Marines don’t. What are these guys made of?”
He was in awe, really in awe, and the stories that he told me when I was a teenager impressed me. He told a story about arriving after dark on an island that the Marines had just seized. He couldn’t see and didn’t know that dead Marines were all around him, piled one atop another…hundreds of them.
“Holy shit!” he said. “What’s that smell? What’s that rotten smell?”
A Marine grabbed him.
“What the fuck do you mean that rotten smell?” the Marine yelled. “These are dead Marines!”
My father said that he couldn’t apologize quickly or profusely enough.
5
Decision of
a Lifetime
I actually joined the Marines during my senior year in high school, but I had made the decision to join the year before, when I was seventeen years old. The stories that my father told me had made such a strong impression that joining the Marines was really the only plan I had. You could say that I was obsessed.
I was slight, only about 130 pounds, but athletic; in my senior year I ran every day after school to get ready. I knew I was going to join the Marine Corps, but I didn’t tell a soul. I never told my parents, never told my friends. I figured I could get talked out of it if I did.