In August of 1966, after my best friend had already been in the Marines for over a year, I turned 17. I was more than ready to go into the service, even though I had a great job as a worker in a tomato packing plant in Cambridge, MA. The Marines were the only choice for me; it was always that way. It was what my family did before me and that was what my peers were doing at the time. I had been watching Sunday movies and going to see movies about Americans fighting wars all my young life. If John Wayne did it then it was the right thing to do. I felt I was ready and I went.
In September I was off, and boarded a train in Boston's South Station. This train took me to South Carolina, where we boarded buses to ride through the night to the strangest smelling place on the planet: USMC Recruit Depot, on Parris Island. This is where I began my training to become a United States Marine. I was stationed at Camp Pendleton, CA. It was beautiful.I was a combat engineer and did all kinds of stuff. I was trained in demolition and mine warfare, booby traps, and other stuff like that. I couldn't have been happier. I don't know what it was about all that, but I couldn't get enough of it. The thought of removing and making safe an enemy’s device was a way of defeating the bad guys, and on a few occasions I got to actually sit on the road where we'd find a device and dig it out, make it safe and move on.
Marines (I guess all services are like this) also like to have fun sometimes, take for instance, the lunch hour. I had a friend who used to like to get a few minutes of sleep after lunch. He slept rather soundly on the top rack. When it was time to go back to work we would attempt to rouse him, which was never an easy task. So we would gently push his whole rack, bottom and top out of the barracks area, into the main passageway and up against the wall of the first sergeant’s office and slip off to work. Later we would get the word that whoever pushed the marine into the hall would be punished if it happened again. So the next time we got the chance we tied his boot laces to the bed frame and then raised hell, much the same way the first sergeant did that day from the previous week. Brian would wake up and attempt to fly out of bed, only to find himself hanging upside down off the end of the rack. His screams would soon get the attention of everybody and once again the promise of pain and punishment would come from the admin people. There was never any animosity about this; it was just life in the Marines.
At this time, we were at war. I was at Camp Pendleton for about a year before I got orders to go to Vietnam. Brian and I left together for Vietnam and we were stationed in the same company. It was September 1967 when we flew out of El Toro to points west, then Da Nang. We were on a construction convoy north to open the roads again after the TET uprising, and as we climbed through the mountains north of Da Nang, there was a section of road that had been blown out and we had to clear it and put a bridge in place there. We were digging away on the mountainside, leveling things off when my friend’s shovel hit something. Typical of Marine problem solving, he hit it harder. It was not long before I saw that he was slamming his shovel into a stick of explosives and just hadn't hit the blasting cap yet. We tip toed around the rest of the site and secured a couple more surprises then moved on. My best friend had gone in before me and half a year later my other friend followed us in. Sadly, he was killed. I learned that war is not like the movies. Still there was a thrill, perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be for an 18 year old American boy.
I learned the following in the Marines: