The pressure builds in your gut. You can feel it working up towards your chest while the air inside you is pressed out. Many guys spray the rancid remains of their last few meals about this time. The ear-splitting sonic pressure wave rolls across us with that feeling of relief. Peering out of the rising dust, I can glimpse the target. With a flat-handed thump, my sergeant reminds me to keep my head down. Damn, I like explosions. I’ve got an inkling of a glimpse of a plume rising above the desert like the fist of god had slammed into the dirt and there isn’t much left.
I’m an experiential tourist. I’m like Walter Mitty on steroids sticking to experiences and sucking all the emotion out of them that I can. You might think that is harsh self-criticism, but I have liked to think of myself as risk adjacent. I live a life where I want to be a hero, I train and train and learn and do everything exactly right, but I’m missing some spark. I get passed over because the other guy is better looking. Maybe it’s a weakness in my personality, but the skills are there. I can prove they’re valid.
Sitting in a hole in the middle of nowhere and playing war is second nature to me. My dad taught me to shoot when I was three years old. Clutch your pearls and gasp, “Mother, protect you!” Life is what it is, and vapors be darned. I was taught woodcraft unlike anything a Boy Scout would be taught, I was taught snares, traps, and socially unacceptable engineering. I hunted and fished. I lived for many years in a 7-foot-long, 18-inch berth, and all my clothes fit in a gym bag. A shower was a bone-breaking sprinkle of water that had been nowhere near a heater. The brittle crisp pain of the water pelting off my skin was normal.
A few of us were sitting around talking about the military in high school. This is kind of like virgins sitting around talking about sex. You’ve got the words right, but you don’t have the temperament. Everybody wanted to be in the special operations force or SEALs, or considered their vast reading at the age of 17 enough to be the next Rommel. All I wanted was to get out of town and find something else. So I signed up for the US Army National Guard on a split training option. Spend my junior year in Fort Knox Kentucky, driving tanks and drinking beer. SIGN ME UP…
When I arrived, they shaved my head, gave me dozens of shots, and walked us down a line until we were falling over and punch drunk. Fort Knox is the armor center of the US Army. We could see and hear the tanks clunking and grinding through the woods. When we got to the actual boot camp induction, the Senior Drill Sergeant gave a speech, “You ain’t with your momma no more. You are in the Army now. You ain’t got no soft bed. You ain’t got no Dairy Queeeeeeen. You are in the Army get used to living like a Spartan, you f’n maggots.”
I stopped in front of my double-sized mattress. With like springs, and I am not joking with you, it was 18 inches off the ground. They gave me a wall locker I could walk into. There were dry linens. Everything was clean. There wasn’t the constant drip from every seam that was the persistent life on a leaky teaky (older Chinese sailboat). I may have giggled with glee.
What can you say about Army basic training? I learned to blow stuff up the Army way. I learned to shoot. When I broke down an M1911A1 with practiced hands and put it back together again in seconds, I got a skeptical eye from the Drill Sergeant. I got pulled aside when I did the same thing with an M16. In the clearest, most consistent, I don’t give a f’n whisper of hell what you think to the queries I said, “My dad was active-duty Army, Special Force, A team, Vietnam and drill sergeant for many years. This is the family business.”
I learned to drive a tank. There in Fort Knox they had the M60A3 a version of the venerable tank that had been upgraded with much of the targeting tools of the M1 Abrams. I drove the tank. I washed the tank. Fixed the tank. I washed the tank. Looked at the tank. I washed the tank. Shot the tank’s gun. I washed the tank. It got to the point my fingers and toes were all wrinkled up, but the water was so warm. At some point, I got qualified to drive a few other things. They asked some questions like, “Who can drive a stick shift?” and a few of us stupidly volunteered. Then, talking to us specifically, they asked each of us a strange question: “What’s the heaviest vehicle you’ve ever driven?” A more mature person would have heard alarm bells. When they got down the line to me, I said, “I’m not sure. Likely a IH D-9 dozer, or may a 40-ton road grader, but loaded down, I’d driven a truck that carried both.” I was just being honest. Kids that live in the woods one part of the year, and on boats other parts of the year get some strange experiences. A few weeks later, I had half a dozen or more vehicle certifications on my military license. The standard 5-ton to the M81 tank retriever (driver, not crew). I graduated solidly in the middle of my class. I’m average not exceptional.
When I returned to High School, I had a shaved head, cash in my pocket, and a penchant to have fun. I didn’t want to screw up, but I also, thanks to military service, was an emancipated minor. With a particular level of non-conformity and less than healthy respect for those I didn’t respect. High School took on an even more negative flare. I could now sign my own absentee and truancy documents. The school decided to make me an example. In a military town with many veterans living locally, the school administrators and teachers were the same people who threw feces on returning Vietnam vets. That, though is a story for another time.
I was getting dumped on daily by teachers who made significantly less than I did, while I was working multiple jobs and doing my reserve weekends. A value assessment that I see is in error now. People can make a living wage and not be a dung-filled sack of viciousness covering themselves in platitudes of service. To be the latter, you’d have to be one of half a dozen teachers I had in high school.
I found myself fed up with the world at one point. I was talking to a Marine Recruiter. He’d pulled myself and one of my fellow Guardsman aside to talk after graduation options. My and my fellow guardsmen’s plans were to go active-duty Army, get ourselves to Germany as fast as possible, and seek the many blonde Heidis and Helgas we’d heard so much about. I don’t do stupid stuff for the fun of it. I do it because it’s a living. Ride motorcycles? Why yes, I will. Ride motorcycles without a helmet? Sure, why not? Ride motorcycles naked. This sounds like fun. Ride motorcycles naked with a brunette in my lap. No, thank you I prefer blondes. Germany sounded like just my cup of tea.
The Marine recruiter sounded so comforting. After having done Army Basic Training, Marine Corps Boot Camp was going to be easy. Umm. Do you mean I have to do it again? Oh, hell no I told him. Yes, he said, “You can do that, and because of that you can get another bonus!” You know a Marine Corps Recruiter is lying because his lips are moving or he is writing something in the actual English language. I opted for active duty, the Marines picked up my paper and that is how I ended up in Marine Corps Recruit Depot a year after having done Army Basic Training. I stood on the yellow footprints, got my head shaved (again), and listened to the grumpy yelling Drill Sargent explain how things would suck. I almost giggled.
Marine Corps boot camp made sense. The pain and struggle weren’t angry or done from a sense of meanness. You knew you were being shaped into a tool of war. Some people with pencil necks and fewer respectable virtues see crafting a Marine as some kind of indoctrination into a cult. Those people viewing the world from the outside have no concept of the rigor, structure, logic, concern, and desire to craft a person into an instrument of war. To craft a civilian into a Marine is an act of dedication and art.
For me, with my minimal life experiences to that time, boot camp was hard. Learning to be a Marine was easy. I’m not fast, I’m not skinny, I’m built sturdy, and I’m built to walk, not run. So I had to push myself daily, but I understood at a fundamental level that there was a reason. My home life melted down. I think I am Jody’s original victim. Home life was a complete mind ream as letters delivered from home slowly destroyed me. The hate, pain, and fury of what happened at home permeated my life for decades. That, though, is another story for another time.
Exiting boot camp, I went to the fleet. I did some more schooling, but I was there. I was ready. I was a finely crafted tool with decades of preparation. My entire sire line is veterans of foreign wars. I have a lineage going back at least six sires who have been combat-tested. Live-or-die generations had prepared me for military service and combat operations. I exited the Marines, having never seen combat. Never left the United States. The most notable event in my line of duty was reading reports from others. Why and how I exited were honorable but also a story for another time.
I exited the Marines. I found myself a former Marine. I’ve never been to the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, I’ve never owned dress blues, and I never will. I wasn’t a great Marine. I was average at best and likely approaching, not past that measure. I wasn’t the handsome Marine you’d go “That’s a Marine!” Those didn’t mean much to me in my career aspirations. I always wanted to be an effective Marine. The one who got the job done. I couldn’t even accomplish that.
So, for me, the Marine Corps Birthday and Veterans Day is bittersweet. I loved what I did. Yet I could do it no longer. Those are cards we’re dealt even if we’re playing solitaire. The Marine Corps Birthday is the most important day of the year. It is a special day for the things the Corps gave me, and I could never give back. It is a special day for the dedication, duty, and respect a small group of men and women give to be Marines.
The sound of explosions always reminds me of looking at the blue sky. Wherever you are, there is peace in the moments between. The silence is expectant. Excitement moves through the soul like liquor and wine. You have a duty. I have a sense of expectation. Fear is raw in your mind and gut. Training overcomes recalcitrance. Outside that moment, in the haze and fog of emotion. People will talk about fighting for god, country, and family. The grit of dust grinding between your teeth is acrid. The truth is obvious. Soldiers, Sailors, Marine, and Airmen, and even those puddle pirate Coasties fight for each other. Marines fight for the Marines next to them.
Even though I sucked as a soldier and Marine will never forget the duty I have to others. No misstatement. No stolen valor here. I sucked, and I own it. We have one of the most experienced military veteran communities in recent decades, made up of young people who get derped on for being lazy. Knowing more than a few with multiple tours of duty in combat zones, I won’t hesitate to call bull shit on that. That’s one of the reasons I went back to work as a civilian and learned to be a spy at a relatively advanced age. But that is a story for another time.
Happy Birthday, Marines, and have a Safe Veterans Day the rest of you rabble-rousers.