MY MARINE CORPS
Part One
Memorial Day, 2019
When I die, bury me in my Marine
Corps uniform in case I need to fight my way out of hell.
I’m a peaceable guy, but it never leaves
your system.
Three score years ago my platoon waited
below decks of a troopship for the signal to deploy topside where we’d climb
down rope landing nets in full battle gear into landing craft circling below,
waiting to spread out into a wave which would take us to shore. We’d been
warned not to fall because getting smashed between the two iron hulls smacking
back and forth in the rolling sea meant you’d have to be identified by your
teeth. It wasn’t Iwo Jima, but a piece of each of us wished it were so. To have
fought in a legendary battle! The Few. The Proud. It was amphibious assault
training way back when there was still amphibious warfare, in other words, hit
the beaches, the way John Wayne pretended to do. Jets screamed in to pound the
area. They always amazed me because by the time you hear them, they’re not
there anymore. The entire landing zone was seeded with explosives strong enough
to knock us off our feet or worse if we got too close. Our mission was to hit
that beach and move forward. Every Marine, regardless of occupational specialty
– grunts, engineers, cooks, armorers, motor pool, supply, Remington Raiders,
i.e., the clerks – it didn’t matter – everyone was trained as an assault troop.
You get the order. You grab your rifle. You go. Forward.
We had formed up at dawn to wait our turn.
Everybody seemed relaxed, loose, no grab-ass,
just scuttlebutt and bullshit until a hideous buzzer shrieked like a strangling
coyote - our signal to saddle up. Every man snapped to. Move! Do it! Helmets
on. M1, locked and loaded, secured by the sling to the pack of the guy in front
of you, while the guy behind you secures his to yours. Hands free. Facing
forward. Poised to go. Suddenly, so quiet, so hushed, so still. Waiting to move
out.
And that’s when I got it. That’s when it
hit me.
With our helmets on we looked no different
than the guys in newsreels doing what we were now about to do. We were those
guys, or we would be. That was the instant it all became very real. We weren’t
kids playing cowboys and Indians in the neighborhood. We weren’t dressed for
Halloween. Regardless of what we had been, none of us were us anymore. We were
Marines, descendants of the third division at Chosin reservoir, the troops Mao
feared over all the others, the ones he labelled “Yellow Legs” because of the
puttees they wore. General Chesty Puller, a revered, reviled, and singular
son-of-a-bitch, when informed that the Chinese had them surrounded, exclaimed,
“Good. Now we know where they are.”
The Corps was the stuff of legends, every
one of them geared to send you to your death and render you proud to go there.
I don’t know that many of us or any of us
really considered what we were doing, certainly not then and maybe not now, but
I am not the same person I was then. I told a friend of mine the other day, “At
this stage of my life, I want to be Mr. Rogers.” Hold on. Course correction.
Mr. Rogers Plus. The Marines haven’t gone anywhere, but Mr. Rogers has moved
into their neighbor.
************
My Marine Corps
Part Two
I was no hero. When people thank me for my
service I’m prompted to reply, and often do, thank you for yours. However, I
was determined to be the best Marine I could be, but I was never a hero and
would no way claim to be one. I never threw myself on a grenade or charged a
machine gun nest with my bare hands. I did not wake up each and every morning
wondering if it was my last day alive or in one piece, and no other man’s blood
splashed over me.
It wasn’t patriotism, either, as I’d not
given much or any thought to being a patriot one way or the other, that is,
until fairly recently when the braying of right-wing blowhards brought with it
the realization that I might actually be one without having known it. But I
became a Marine, a Jewish kid who survived Parris Island (“dayenu”),
trained as a combat engineer with a unit that also trained as recon. It was
difficult, and it was dangerous, but I never faced the worst of it. I would
have, but I didn’t, and I would never dishonor the men who did by saying I did,
too. There’s reason behind all this. Patience. I’m working on it.
I’ve never been keen with authority
figures, so how did this all come about? My mother designated our home a free
fire zone. That woman taught us to duck. Life was fraught. Unexpected explosions
from outer space. One day my Drill Instructor bellowed into my face, “What’re
you doin’ in my Marine Corps, clown?” “Sir,” I shot back, without thinking,
“It’s safer than being at home, Sir!” He sneered like I was a turd under his
nose and hissed, “Get outta my sight, maggot.” Yet, he was the same DI who
stopped another from an adjoining platoon who took to harassing me for being
Jewish. “Hey, boy, you know what the fastest thing was in World War II?” I did.
A Jew on a bicycle in Germany, but I didn’t want to say it. My DI, Staff Sgt.
Smith, reached out and touched the menacing DI on the arm, a very subtle touch,
a signal: don’t. Would I have broken? Would I have answered? What I do know is
that my DI put an end to what promised to be a serious clusterfuck.
Parris Island. PI. I wanted to survive. I
was terrified, as were we all, of getting “set back”, meaning you failed some
element of training and were kicked back to one platoon behind – an extra month
on the island – and every man in that platoon including the DI’s would hate you
for being a fuck up. A setback was death, worse. Whatever it was I wasn’t going
to go there. Imagine what the Fat Man’s platoon was like! Yes, there was one.
Think the enemy’s scary? Spend time with a squad of hardcore grunts. These guys
were dangerous, like if they found out that underneath my own hardcore grunt
disguise, they’d find a scared shitless, chubby little Jewish kid, and kill me.
Anyway, that other true fact: As badly as
I wanted to be a good Marine, I needed to keep a small piece of me operating on
the sly. So, I took to lacing my combat boots one set of eyelets from the top thereby
assuring myself that I was the only Marine in the entire Corps to dress this
way. I was different. Nobody knew it but me.
So, why? As a kid I read a war comic story
about a guy who grabbed a flaming cannister in both hands to save his crew. I
wondered if I could do such a thing? Who knows what anyone will do in a
split-second crisis, but I suppose I hoped I would? Once, in the midst of a
grinding wargame, my squad reached a stretch of barbed wire. The word on this
was that one of us would throw himself on top of the wire and everyone else
would use his back to run up and over. I threw myself on that wire with no
thought at all, not one, while eight guys ran up my back. I had no notion of
heroism or any notion other than just do it because that’s what we did. It felt
a lot better than rigging a booby-trap to shred another man’s face. The
“beauty” of planting an anti-personnel mine was that “all it did” was take off
a man’s foot thereby necessitating two more to carry him thereby taking three
men out of action for the price of one. I did buy into all that for a while. I
began to understand the logic of war. In the killing fields it made some kind
of sense. Years later it occurred to me that if I’d become a corpsman, I
could’ve been in the thick of it without killing anyone. Still, why? For
excitement. Survival. Defense. It didn’t hurt that I’d been tossed from college
and had nothing else to do except bag groceries at the local A & P. I
wanted the best. The toughest. Death Before Dishonor. Raising the flag on Iwo. Just
look at those billboards: “A Few Good Men”. Navy SEALS did not exist nor did
the army’s Green Berets. Frog Men did, but I didn’t take well to cold water. There
were only “the Few, the Proud, the Marines.” Those billboards still give me
goosebumps. I may well be “woke”, but, like the man said, once it gets into
your system it stays there. Like malaria, it crops up from time to time. But
that really isn’t it. It’s more like resolve, more like wearing a back brace
that reminds me daily to stand up straight.
My discharge from active duty coincided
with a program to train enlisted men as chopper pilots. Upon completion, you’d
be awarded the rank of Warrant Officer and an all-expense paid tour to
Viet-Nam. It was 1961, I think. It wasn’t like I was driven towards anything
much in civilian life, except maybe freedom, never having to run in sand again,
longer hair, also the unadulterated pleasure of moving one’s bowels in private
rather than in a twenty-pot row with twenty more grunts growling for you to
hurry up. Marines were already in Viet-Nam. A few. Chopper inserts were underway.
I knew a crew chief, a hard-core leatherneck, who had just returned from
Viet-Nam. Can’t remember his name but can still see him clearly. I told him
about the Warrant Officer commission which would take me to Viet-Nam. “You
don’t want to go there,” he said, level, stern. “You went,” I said. “Yeah,” he
answered. Here’s what he told me. “We landed our chopper right outside a
friendly village to pick up a squad under fire. The enemy was right behind
them. Our guys made it, on-loaded, and I gave the signal to take off. Shit. We
couldn’t. We could not get off the ground, God damnit! We were taking fire now,
but the problem was that the villagers were hanging onto our runners, begging
us to take them, too, because the Viet Cong would slaughter them as traitors.
Make a decision, corporal. You got the enemy closing. Eleven men to keep safe.
Make a decision, corporal.” I knew what he was getting at, abruptly glad I
didn’t have to get at it myself. “We turned the guns on them,” he said. “Shot
‘em off. Men. Women. Some kid. What would you do?” The same damn thing. “I
didn’t become a Marine to kill civilians,” he said. I knew of another crew
chief who shot an old lady in the head with his .45 as she tried to board.
“How’d I know she didn’t have a bomb on her?” Sometimes they did.
I liked to fight. I liked the excitement
of dangerous situations, but I learned I did not really want to hurt anyone,
not seriously, anyway, maybe punch out a politician or two, but that’s it. Like
those crew chiefs, I didn’t become a Marine to kill civilians, either;
actually, I realized I didn’t want to kill anybody. What I wanted was to keep them
from killing me, and I did get pretty good at that.
I’m proud of my service, and carry the
best of it with me each day, ideals I try to meet but don’t always: demeanor I
admire; behavior, considered, collected; the trust to “just do it”; a call (usually
uncomfortable) to stand witness to my beliefs; courage if I need it, but I will
never again support military adventurism ever because the people who start
these things send others to fight them. And because it is a terrible thing to
take a man apart. And because I’m not angry and afraid anymore.
Recently, it dawned on me that I have a
specific form of survivor’s guilt, a particular kind of PTSD, applied to vets
who never had anyone trying to kill them on a daily basis while others they
trained with did. A piece of my bedrock laments that I was not there with them.
Another piece whispers softly, “Thank you.” I had seen deadly wounds before the
Corps, including gut wounds and a head blown off by a shotgun, so it wasn’t
queasiness, and I have had to deal with physical situations both in and out of
the service, so I really don’t believe it was fear. It was the evolution of
principle that had earlier, without my knowledge, taken root.
I can’t remember where I was stationed at
the time, but the base had a library, and, one day, a squad member, a very
smart guy whose father was a physicist at Oak Ridge, came back from the library
and handed me a book: “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo. “Read it,” he
said. I did. So, should you. I can only surmise that the base librarian
miscalculated on this one thinking it was something pure and patriotic. It
sneaked by, the first anti-war novel I had ever read, and, to this very moment,
the most visceral and painful of them all. World War 1. A soldier is speaking
to us from his hospital bed. The shock comes when we finally realize that this
voice comes from something with no limbs and no face, something that once was a
young man.
Photographs of the severely wounded come
across my desk from time to time: men and women without arms and legs, without
arms and without legs; blind and deaf; men with their faces burned off; men who
have stepped on mines and triggered IED’s. All of them are awful. Most of them
unbearable. That I trained to do this to men just like these except for their
language or their skin! I live with enough not to have been burdened with that
one. The kneejerk is to look away from these photos, but, no, uh, uh. I have no
right to look away. If these men and women need to live like this, I’d better
damn well honor them by looking at them as they have become. These are the vets
to whom we owe our thanks, not just our thanks but the nation’s treasure and worldly
goods, whatever it takes to ensure that they may live out their days in whatever
comfort they can find. I know what they fought for. They fought for each other,
not for the reasons they were sent, certainly not for the politicians who
contrived those reasons. Look at those pictures yourselves. Look hard. Go
beyond repulsion to gratitude and grace, then tell me you want to send another
innocent to war.
END
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"Personality-wise he's a dynamo, witty, and compassionate. Writer-wise he's insightful, lyrical, evocative, and strong" Ellen Stern, journalist, NY Magazine, writer, Gracie Mansion and more