by Barry Fixler
Friends can influence you, and I thought mine would say, “You’re crazy. We’re all going to college. You’re out of your mind.”
I would have gone to college if I hadn’t enlisted in the Corps. My school was focused on academic achievement, so probably 95 percent of the students went on to college. In Long Island, the suburbs, we were all expected to graduate from high school and then go to college.
I waited until the night before my reporting date to inform my parents. They were shocked. I remember each day knowing that the reporting date was getting closer and closer, and that I had to tell them, but I couldn’t. “I can’t do it tonight. I can’t do it tonight.” Finally I didn’t have a choice.
I said, “Ma, Dad, I got something to tell you.…” They were lying in their bed watching TV, and I told them. They were stunned, but there was nothing they could do or say. The next day I left for boot camp.
I wasn’t a bad kid, but I just had this gut feeling that I needed more discipline, and I wanted excitement and adventure. I was a senior in high school, so I was conscious of the war in Vietnam, but I wasn’t concerned, and I knew nothing of the politics behind it all. As a student, it never dawned on me how many troops died, how many bombs were dropped, none of that.
My thoughts weren’t all that patriotic then, like they are now. All I thought about was adventure and surviving boot camp. I almost forgot the part after that: we all go off to war. I wasn’t scared about that part, just boot camp. I had heard about the Marine training camp at Parris Island in South Carolina, that it was tougher than tough.
I worried. Maybe I wouldn’t be physically fit enough, mentally fit enough.
The recruiter had told me that I had to memorize eleven general orders. Each general order is like a paragraph long, and in those days you had to memorize them all. So that’s what I did during my senior year, concentrated on memorizing the eleven general orders. Four months after I graduated I was off to boot camp. I had to report to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn at 9:00 a.m. sharp. A relative who was in the Army drove me. He just dropped me off and said, “I’ll see you in three years.”
No big scenes. That was that.
6
Welcome to
Parris Island
The bus ride to South Carolina felt adventurous. There were thirty to forty of us on the bus, a bunch of teenagers, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen. No one knew each other, so we told each other where we were from: Somebody came from Albany, others from Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, north New Jersey, all the way up in Rochester. None of us knew what to expect.
We hit Parris Island at 2:30 in the morning, and the bus door opened and the drill instructor burst in screaming.
“What the fuck?!” he yelled. “Get the fuck off this bus! You got fucking ten seconds to get off this bus—and nine are gone!”
Pure culture shock. We stumbled all over each other.
At 2:30 in the morning, we couldn’t see how drab Parris Island was, mostly just greens and grays, but we found out soon enough.
After they chased us off the bus, they gave us boxes. We had to strip to our underwear and put our “scummy’’ civilian clothes in the boxes to send home to our parents. “Scummy” was the drill instructors’ term.
They overpower you with everything at boot camp. You are in such a whirlwind situation that it’s like being thrown into a Nazi concentration camp. That’s how overwhelming it is. Their objective is to tear you down to nothing, strip you of your civilian identity, and build a Marine.
It’s like you’re not a human anymore. They examine your body, and you’re in your shorts—they call them skivvies—and you’re standing in line and a man comes and paints numbers on everybody’s chest: 1, 2, 3…12, 13. So I wasn’t a human being. I was number 12. It said so on my chest. It’s like you’re totally stripped of anything to do with humanity.
You sit down and they grab you. “Next!” You’re in line. “Next!” A drill instructor flings you on top of a garbage can, not a chair but an overturned metal garbage can. Then they cut off all your hair with electric clippers.
Zwoom! Zwoom! Zwoom! “Next!” Zwoom! Zwoom! Zwoom! “Next!”
Afterwards, they gave us soap, toothbrushes, that stuff, and we kept them in wooden footlockers with our other personal belongings.
While we were being processed, the base doctors asked medical questions of the whole group.
“Anyone who has allergies, step forward!”
“Who is on medication?! Step forward!”
“Anyone had a venereal disease?! Step forward!”
I stepped forward.
I caught gonorrhea from one of the maids in my neighborhood; when I was barely fifteen I had sex with several of them. But it caught up with me because I was in school one afternoon and went to piss, and it burned as if someone was shoving a knife in me. I managed to finish the day and make it home on the school bus, and in the middle of the afternoon, I went straight to bed.
My mother knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell her what. Not my mother. No way.
“Ma, please call Dad. Just call Dad.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Just please call Dad.”
She called my father at his store in Flushing, Queens, and he drove home. I told him that my penis hurt. But he didn’t know anything about venereal diseases, and I never said anything like, “Dad, I got laid by the maid a few days ago, and now my penis hurts.” He was clueless.
My father called the family doctor, Dr. Edelstein, and we met him at the brand new Syosset Hospital, which was only five minutes from my house. The doctor examined me and told my father, “Your son has to tell us who gave him gonorrhea. Some little girl in his school must also have gonorrhea, and we have to inform her parents.”
I wasn’t about to say that I caught it from one of the maids, and neither the doctor nor my father was that insistent, so I kept my lips zipped.
The doctor told my dad that his son was the very first venereal disease patient to be treated at Syosset Hospital. That didn’t sit well with my dad.
But I had to tell the doctors at boot camp, so when they asked us as a group, I stepped forward. I was the only recruit who did. I wasn’t embarrassed. I stood out there proud and thought to myself, “They’re all virgins! It looks like I’m the only one who got laid.” The drill instructors and doctors weren’t as impressed as I was.
“Back in formation, maggot.”
I felt cool, for all of five seconds.
We received our war gear and were fitted for uniforms and boots and issued belts and helmets, and it was probably 4:00 in the morning by the end of processing. I hit the bed thinking that I was going to sleep for the next five hours. Half an hour later— BOOM! —time to get up.
They threw the lights on and everybody had to jump out of their racks—that’s what they called our bunk beds—and at exactly the same time, hit the deck and stand at attention in our underwear. If somebody was slow getting out, they yelled at us and everyone had to do it again until we all jumped out in sync.
It was so intense: up at 4:30 a.m., and probably when we hit the racks at 9:30 at night, it took all of three minutes to fall asleep. We were so exhausted from the physical strain of constantly running, jumping and climbing.
None of the training I did during my senior year of high school prepared me. I used to put on my nice sneakers and nice gym shorts, and then jog around nice and easy. Now I was jogging in combat boots with a cartridge belt, a pack on my back and an M14; instead of my nice shorts, little T-shirt and my sneakers, I was running and carrying forty pounds of war gear on me. Totally different.
7
The First Guy
to Die
The drill instructors yelled constantly. After two or three days, we were sleep deprived and our worlds were spinning.
They had us good then. They told us they were about to kill us for being dumbasses, and we believed them. We were so bewildered and isolated from the civilian
world that it was easy to imagine them killing us and getting away with it.
“What did I get myself into?” I thought. “I can’t believe I’m going to be suffering like this for the next three years.”
A drill instructor was yelling at us, as usual. The rifle range was about two miles away, and we could hear these little pop-pop sounds: pop-pop, pop-pop, pop, pop, pop-pop.
“You hear that, you maggots?!” the drill instructor screamed.
That was what Marine Corps drill instructors usually called recruits. To them, we were “maggots,” “fucksticks,” “asswipes,” and “ladies,” never Marines. We were lucky when they called us recruits.
“Hear that, maggots?!”
“Yes sir!”
“Well, those are the recruits that can’t make it,” he bellowed. “You think we’re sending you home to mommy and daddy? We are not sending you home to them. We are killing you! Actually killing you!!”
Now instead of pop-pop, what I heard sounded like BOOM-BOOM! BOOM-BOOM! We maggots looked at each other thinking, “Holy shit! This is bad. This is really bad! They’re killing us if we don’t make it!”
The next day happened to be a Sunday. I had no idea. Every day is the same at boot camp. A Monday is a Tuesday is a Saturday or Sunday. Every day, up at 4:30, the same routine. Two or three days in, everything is upside down.
Our drill instructor stormed into the barracks screaming and ninety guys snapped to attention.
“I just know, I just fucking know, that I ain’t got no Jews in my platoon!” he yelled. “I just fucking know that I ain’t got no Jews in my platoon! If I do have a fucking Jew—and I know that I don’t have a fucking Jew—take a step forward!”
I hoped that I wasn’t the only Jew, and that at least one or two other guys would step forward.
Sure enough, I stepped forward and no one else moved. Not a soul. I stood there in front of ninety recruits.
“Oh fuck, here it comes,” I thought. “Didn’t even last three days.”
Then the drill instructor asked all Jews to face left and march. Alone and obvious, I marched past him and down the length of the barracks, past all the other recruits. The door was open, and I could see three men in dark suits, guys in their forties and fifties. Undertakers, I figured.
My thoughts churned as I marched. I wasn’t even a very good Jew.
For my Bar Mitzvah, I had to go to Hebrew school from age six to age thirteen. So when I was twelve, I kept failing and failing in Hebrew school. I was dumb in Hebrew. I couldn’t learn it. I had a hard enough time with English, and then I had to learn to this stupid Hebrew stuff three days a week.
It was during the year before my Bar Mitzvah that my mother started panicking.
“You can’t speak Hebrew! What are you going to do on Bar Mitzvah day?”
“No problem,” my father said. “Get him a tutor.”
So once or twice a week, a rabbi came to tutor me. I would go to my regular Hebrew classes, and then at night this jerky, old, big-bellied, bearded rabbi would come to tutor me. He’d show up right after dinner. I’d get home, do my homework, have dinner, and then this guy would arrive to try to teach me Hebrew. He was probably in his fifties, but he looked like he was in his nineties.
We lived in a typical Long Island house, three bedrooms upstairs, kitchen and living rooms downstairs. He would sit in a chair in my room, and I’d sit at my desk. He had no patience to really try to teach me Hebrew, so he would play a record of Hebrew words and phrases. It was always the same record, one he probably had made himself.
His neighbor must have had a dog when he made the recording because about two minutes into it, I could hear the dog howl. I learned zero Hebrew. What I did learn was to wait the two minutes until the dog howled, and by then he would be sound asleep.
He would come in, and my mother would be cleaning in the kitchen or something. He’d go to my room and shut the door, and she would be happy. My tutor was there to teach me Hebrew.
He and I didn’t even talk. He put on the record; two minutes, the dog howled and he was out cold. I had it all down. I’d go, “One, two…,” and that stupid dog would howl, and he was sound asleep. He would undo his belt after he sat down, and his big belly would hang out while he slept. It was so ridiculous. He was charging my parents for his nap time.
I finally told my mom. I told her to wait a few minutes and then come in. The guy was out cold. I howled like the dog when she came in, and this guy jumped ten feet in the air, scrambling all around.
He was gone after that and I had to say my Bar Mitzvah in English.
So marching from the boot camp barracks toward the men in dark suits—the undertakers—I thought that being Jewish was going to be a pretty stupid reason to die.
“I can’t believe it. Here I didn’t even tell my parents I was enlisting until a couple of nights ago, and now I’m gonna be the first guy in my boot camp platoon to die. I can’t believe I’m the first guy. The Marines are gonna kill me. I’m the first guy they’re going to kill.”
The guys in suits could tell I was uneasy.
“Calm down. Calm down,” they said. “We’re civilians. We’re from the B’nai B’rith. We know that you’re Jewish. We’re here to take you to Jewish services.”
My first week in boot camp was such a blur that I didn’t realize it was Sunday, and I still didn’t believe them. “They’re going to cart me to the firing range and they’re going to kill me.”
I swear, that’s what I thought. My eyes were still bugging out.
“Calm down. Calm down,” they said. “Every Sunday we come and look for new Jews, and you’re a new Jewish recruit.” I didn’t know what day of week it was, and I had no idea the Corps made allowances for religious services for everyone, Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, every Sunday.
I still didn’t really believe them until they walked me to a little chapel and we went inside, and four other recruits were there. We weren’t Marines, just recruits, and it was the first and last time that I had the opportunity to talk with other recruits.
There was no talking during boot camp. If we wanted to talk to another recruit about something, we had to ask the drill instructor for permission: “Sir, the private, Private Barry Fixler, would like to request permission to speak to…”
Then we would hear: “What the fuck do you want?! What the fuck does so-and-so have to say to you?! What the fuck?! Are you gay?! Are you both faggots?! Are you fags?!”
That’s what we’d get. We might say, “No, sir! We want to talk about our M14s!”
It didn’t matter. What we heard in response was something like, “Bullshit! You want to put the M14 up your ass, right?! You want to put it up so-and-so’s ass! Isn’t that right, private?!”
I never requested permission to speak. I spoke to nobody. I couldn’t.
“What?! Are you both fags?!”
The B’nai B’rith people took a picture at the chapel that first Sunday of recruit training and sent it to my parents. My mother didn’t show it to me until after I was home from Vietnam. The back of the picture said: “Best wishes B’nai B’rith Savannah, Georgia.” So they came from Savannah to Parris Island just for the recruits.
It was nice of them, but I can never forget that day because all I had been thinking was that I was going to be the first guy to die.
8
Learning the
Hard Way
As recruits, we learned that everything in the Marine Corps has to be exactly so. The sheets on our racks had to be tight—tighter than tight—until we could bounce a quarter off of them. The drill instructors really would do that, bounce quarters.
In the beginning of recruit training, I would open my blanket and tuck myself in. I had it folded a certain way, tucked in nice and tight, but sleeping in it messed it all up.
It just didn’t pay to slip underneath the blanket and ruin all the creases, so I slept on my back, on top of the blanket, so I could jump out and quickly pull it tight.
We
had a few minutes before bed each night to take care of personal business. It wasn’t free time that we could use to chat and hang out. We were ordered to write letters home, polish our brass and boots, or clean weapons. It was work, but it felt like rest.
Then a drill instructor would storm in.
“Ladies! Get your shit squared away and prepare to mount!”
We didn’t get into bed; we mounted our racks. When we heard that order, we would quickly stow our gear in our wooden footlockers and then line up in front of our racks, always at attention.
“Ready, hoo-agghh!”
That was the order to mount, and we’d jump into our racks as quickly as possible. We were still at attention, but on our backs.
The drill instructor would pace through the barracks for a few minutes reminding us how we had screwed up during the day.
“Alright ladies, at ease!”
In unison, we’d chant our Marine Corps bedtime prayer: “Good night Chesty Puller, wherever you are.”
Lights out. We’d fall asleep within minutes. There are no insomniacs in boot camp.
At night in boot camp when everybody was sleeping, one guy put on a cartridge belt and helmet and carried an empty rifle and walked guard duty for two hours, just in case of an emergency. It was called fire watch.
The drill instructors never left the platoon. They had a private room in the barracks and babysat the recruits, monitoring their every move. Fire watch was boring, up and down, up and down the aisles while everyone else slept.
We all had to do fire watch on a rotating basis, probably once a week. It really cut in to our rest, and we dreaded it.
The drill instructors had beautiful ice-cold water fountains right in the hallway near their quarters that we weren’t allowed to touch.
The only water we were allowed to drink in our barracks came from the sink in the head. That’s what they called the bathroom, the head. We had to cup the water in our hands to drink it. It was a crappy way to drink water and we could never really get enough. We were always a little thirsty.