By another intervention of
providence, I did not outpost with my series.
For weeks prior to our graduation and installment as real Marines, every
man of the four platoons that made up the 100 Series had been living for this
day. Now, after the long anticipated
graduation week-end over which Mom and Dad and my brother Tom drove to Parris Island to witness and share in my new glory, I
learned that I was to be detained there on “the island” to await another test
date. If I passed this one, it would
qualify me for enrollment in the Navy’s “preparatory school” (NAPS), then
located aboard the Naval Training Center
at Bainbridge, Maryland.
Situated on a bluff high above the Susquehanna River about forty miles
north of Washington, D.C., this elite military school, about which at the time
I knew nothing, existed for the single purpose of academically preparing fleet
Marines and sailors for an anticipated appointment as plebe midshipman at the
United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.
Originally my orders after infantry
training were to electronics school in San Diego, California, but my scores on
the initial classification batteries in the early weeks of boot camp apparently
suspended those orders and permitted me to stay behind and to sit for the NAPS
exam. This delay temporarily shuttled me
into the “casual platoon”, which was made up of mostly boot camp graduates who
were in a hold or waiting status for a variety of reasons, administrative, medical
or otherwise. One other marine from
another platoon in our recently graduated series was there with me for the same
reason, waiting for the NAPS exam and for a time we hung around together. But at some point in the process, he was
either transferred, dropped out, or failed the exam. I never saw him again.
As a “casual” and a recently graduated
“boot”, I was
temporarily assigned to a job as a runner and an admin clerk in a
company
office. Though I was still a private E-1
and at the very bottom of the Marine Corps pecking order, I at least was no
longer a recruit, which meant that I had been returned, by the grace of God, to
some sort of status as a human being.
This meant that I worked regular hours in a job that had a quitting
time. It also meant that I could enjoy the wonderful privilege of going to the
flick (the base theater), where admission was, as I recall, $.35. And then on the weekends, miracle of
miracles, I was allowed to actually leave the island for a 48-hour liberty. At the base PX I spent precious dollars to
purchase some new inexpensive civvies, a pair of Hushpuppies (so that my feet would not give me away, as
though my virtually shaved head, the proud military stride and my new
damn-the-torpedoes attitude was not tip-off enough). I also had money for a new 35mm Minolta
camera. I had an itch to see Savannah.
So then of all the recruit Marines in my platoon
and, indeed, in my entire series, I was the single individual who found
himself
in this odd and rather rare situation. I
had not yet been to Infantry Training (ITR).
It all came about this way. One
day, while still only half way through boot camp and without any sort of
previous notice or warning, I was summoned to the hatch of my senior drill
instructor. There, intently sensitive to
the minutia of the prescribed protocol and the serious implications of any
minor deviation, I dutifully and properly “pounded his pine”. Having announced my presence, I then stood
there at rigid attention, patiently awaiting his acknowledgment. S/Sgt. Lashley sat there leaning back
casually in an office chair, eye-balling me.
His hands were behind his head and his feet were propped up jauntily on
the little wooden desk. He glared at me
from beneath the rim of his Smokey Bear cover with a mixed smirk of amusement
and self-satisfied contempt. For a
moment he was silent, as though giving some consideration to the fact and
implications of my very existence. Then
he began to administer the usual ration of nit-picking harassment and verbal
intimidation. At the end of this
regimen, the real reason for my summons at last appeared in the form of his
question.
“Morgan, what would you think about it if my Marine
Corps permitted you to go to the Naval
Academy?” The
unspoken part “. . .as a Midshipman” was
only dimly implied in his question.
Before that moment the notion of attending a
military academy had never entered my head and for a brief moment I was
confused. But then a sudden and blissful
naïveté engulfed me and it seemed to me that any place on the earth other than
the place I was then standing sounded very good, indeed, inconceivably
blissful. So my answer seemed easy.
“Sir, Yes sir, the recruit would like to go to the Naval Academy.” Could he possibly mean that I was leaving
today?
“What are you saying to me, Morgan? Are you trying to tell me you want to be a
squid?”
The confusion returned and I stood silent for a
moment, pondering my response and its possible ramifications. “Sir, no sir. The recruit does not want to be a squid, but
the recruit does want to go to the Naval
Academy.”
With the usual contempt mixed with a strange smirk
of amusement on his face, Lashley continued staring at me in heavy
silence for
another moment, then yelled, “Get out of my sight, you dumb
piece of
shit.”
“Aye aye, sir”.
I instantly wheeled in place and returned at the prescribed double-time
to the squad bay.
Shortly thereafter however, I was summoned twice
again, first to the office of the series Gunnery Sgt. and then to the
series
commander, a Captain whose name I cannot recall. Though brief, this last interview was much
more civil as I was asked a few questions about my life before I came into the
Marine Corps and about my academic background.
Then the C.O. asked me to confirm my previous affirmative responses
given to S/Sgt. Lashley and the Gunny.
And it was here that the real implication of my sudden out-of–the-blue
decision began to dawn upon me and it seems now in retrospect, that it was in
this pivotal moment that my fortune and my direction took another important
turn.
So on one bright June Friday afternoon in 1963,
outfitted with my new 35mm camera and my shaving kit in a small bag, I
produced
my ID and a weekend pass for the sentry at the gate. Then with high expectations and the thrill of
freedom in my heart I strode back across the causeway for the first time in
fifteen weeks, hitch-hiking my way to Savannah,
Georgia.
Two things stand out now to me about my memories of
that weekend jaunt. The first was my
strong impression of the romance, the old world beauty and history in which the
whole of that old-south seaport city seemed to be steeped just like a
low-country vintage rum cake. Along with
that impression was the conscious intention that one day I would come back to
this place with the love of my life, if and when I ever found her. And the second somewhat connected to the
first as a continuing sense of exhilaration and joyous freedom mixed with a
rising tinge of loneliness. As a proud
young Marine in the middle of a euphoric first liberty, it surreptitiously came
upon me as a visceral knowing while walking those old shady streets and ambling
the 17th century docks and slave blocks that I was inside still
somehow fundamentally incomplete and still looking for something I had not
found at the level of my soul. My list
of failures and potential and/or apparent dead ends in this continuing search
for purpose and identity seemed to be getting longer and longer. And in the process I was chalking up quite a
list of brave, costly, and painful but, so far fruitless attempts.
But I did not entirely or for long despair. With the energy and passion of zealous youth still burning in my bowels, the
Quixotic search would go on.
After the date of my NAPS exam had passed, I went on
with another series of boot camp graduates to Camp
Geiger at Camp LeJeune
for Combat Infantry Training. This
phase constituted another month of all day and sometimes late night field
exercises designed to train us in real life survival in primitive and combat
situations. By the end of this time I
had been advised that I had passed the prep school exam and so, once again, was
delayed from going on to a duty station (electronics school in San Diego).
Instead I was sent home on leave for most of August while waiting for
the start date for NAPS.
I was somewhat glad for the chance
to go home, almost as much for the opportunity to date a few old girlfriends as
to see my parents and my brother. The
Marine Corps had put into me a new dose of self-confidence and I called up a
long time elementary sweetheart -- and by sweetheart, I mean that I had a
crush on her since the fifth grade that so far as I knew was a one-way
thing -- a “sweetheart” who was a year
older than I was and who I had never before asked out for a real date. This time I did ask and she accepted. But the intimidation emerging from our mutual
history and close community and school ties and from the fact that our parents
knew each other, all threatened and impeded any progress of my dark and
lecherous motives, no doubt saving me from the natural repercussions of my own
supercharged and misplaced desire for a quick fix. By the end of my leave, I was ready to go.
The next part of my service education was to be a
big one for relationships and memories that would be recurrent and even
haunting through the next three to four decades of my life. I had flown out of Memphis
to Friendship International Airport
(now BWI) between D.C. and Baltimore.
From there I took a bus through Glen Burnie
and on to the U.S. Naval Training Center at Bainbridge. In the mist of memories, I somehow
habitually associate arrival at a new duty station of those days with the
feeling of disorientation and aloneness set in the limited perspectives of the
mid-watch. So here, one more time I
arrived at my new duty station in the wee hours of the night, when shadows and
darkness give false dreamlike impressions that seem to morph back to something
altogether different with the coming of the light. After the final few hours of that short night
spent in a rack at the transient barracks, I was the next morning, after
presenting my orders, walked up the hill into the Tome Area by “a runner”
sent down to pick me up. As we walked up
through the brilliant red, gold, and orange fall foliage on the trees along
this winding and park-like footpath, it seemed that I was walking into a place
apart, not at all like any military reservation that I had so far seen. As it turned out, it was an old boys’ prep
school on a scenic bluff above the tiny little Maryland
town of Havre de Grace and above the quiet
serpentine multi-colored banks of the Susquehanna River. Scene after scene took my breath and kept my
camera snapping.
Specifically as a site for the prep school and for
the base Officers’ Club, the Navy had bought this pristine
classic property and
annexed it to the training center down the hill. The Tome area, taking its name from the
former Tome Prep School, was off-limits for all
other enlisted personnel on the base below.
In that sense we were ourselves VIP’s of a sort, which was appropriately
reflected in the slightly ribald and always lustily sung “alma mater” for our
three companies of NAPSters:
High above
the Susquehanna lives a bunch of chaps.
They are
called the admiral strikers, ‘cause they go to NAPS.
You can take
your admiral strikers, and your Navy brass;
You can take
the whole damn program - shove it up your ass.
And so one can glean an insight into the spirit and the
demeanor of this special group of 180 above-average and irreverent squids and
jarheads who had been selected out of the fleet by their Uncle Sam to better
themselves while simultaneously making a patriotic contribution to their
country’s welfare as “admiral strikers”.
In Navy jargon, a “striker” was a student or candidate for a particular
job or position. The sole purpose then
of our being there was the expectation that the graduates among us the
following May would be headed for midshipman rank in the U.S. Navy and then,
four more years later, on to
commissioning as ensigns and second lieutenants in the Navy and the Marine
Corps.
The beautifully tree’d Tome area was indeed a place
apart. It was the archetype of a classic
little American
college campus, impregnated with fall color and reeking of nostalgia. There was a mall, a central grassy parade
ground of sorts which was rectangular in shape and surrounded on four sides by
the principal buildings, most named for early presidents. On one side was the Monroe House, a two story
1920’s and 30’s style boys dormitory which, in its renovated state, served as
the officers’ club for the entire base.
Across the corner of the mall on one side from the Monroe House was the Harrison House, another two story early century style
dormitory for the second company of elite enlisted sailor/students of NAPS. Down the way along this same side of the mall
was the Tome Inn, apparently in the early days a lodging facility for parents
and visitors in it’s pre-military prep school days. During our era, it was the dormitory for the
third company of NAPSters, another sixty sailors from the fleet. At the far end of the mall, opposite the
officers’ club was a pristine park area of breathtakingly colorful trees that
merged into the top of the cliff that was fenced and beyond looked down upon
the meanderings of the Susquehanna.
Directly across from the Tome Inn was the majestic Greek architecture of
the school and administrative building, where all our classes were held,
presided over by a faculty of the best and sharpest Navy ensigns, jg’s and
lieutenants, as well as a few hand-picked civilian instructors. The OIC was LtCdr. Peter Stark, himself a
NAPSter and a Naval
Academy graduate, class
of ’52. Down from the school building on
the same side of the mall was the Madison House, the domicile of the
rambunctious Marine first company. Here
at Madison House I would find my home for the next nine months, in the company
and comraderie of the best and the bawdiest group of jarhead scholars in the
fleet.
For a few days we were mostly idle as new classmates from
all over the world straggled in to take their places among our ranks. My early roommate John Riley had come from
WestPac and a duty station in Japan. He was a Lance Corporal who had three years
in the Marine Corps and was a relative “salt” among us. Now almost four years distant from his most
recent academic exposure, John would have been a virtual poster child for the
purpose of NAPS, which was to prepare the talented and intelligent but
academically very rusty personnel from the fleet who would eventually stand
shoulder to shoulder as classmates at the academy with the congressional
appointees from colleges across the country.
During those first idle days we served on work details and marched in
formation down the hill to eat at the base’s enlisted mess. We were the only ones who marched to
chow, reminiscent of boot camp days, and thereby attracted the attention of
sailors who were at the various other schools at the training center and
straggled in of their own volition. Yet
marching as we did, we did march down from that restricted and mysterious Tome
Area and so carried with us the special badge of a breed apart: admiral
strikers.
At NAPS, we were enmeshed in a strange hybrid world
of military and college life. We had a
football team, a lacrosse team, a soccer team, a wrestling team, a baseball
team and a full range of intramural sports.
Competitors on our athletic calendar were the junior colleges in the
area and our arch rival was the MAPS at Fort
Belvoir in Virginia.
This was the army’s equivalent of our institution, the enlisted prep
school for the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point, New York.
The one place down the hill to which we did not
march was to the Fiddler’s Green, the enlisted club that in my memory, somehow
and miraculously always had Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” playing on the
jukebox every time I entered the door.
Even now that old sixties song is indelibly engraved and linked in my mind with that (now probably
non-existent) club and the two are
inseparable. When I think of or hear Blue
Velvet, I see the Fiddler’s Green and when I think of the Fiddler’s Green,
in my mind as real as ever, I still can hear Blue Velvet. This was our place, the equivalent of Maury’s
in the Whiffenpoof Song. Here was where
we commiserated during the week and planned our weekend strategies and made
contact with the Waves who offered us female consolation if we were lucky and
appropriately and adequately suave.
Beyond that, the Fiddler’s Green offered cheap beer and steak dinners to
all and a place to mitigate our loneliness in the company of other military
pilgrims, most of whom are to me now lost forever.
In fact, of all the guys whose lives intersected
there with my own, there are now, thirty-eight years later, maybe a
dozen who
stand out in my memory. Of course I can
see more faces in my head but these few were special, closer. And of those dozen or so, only one now am I
in touch with still today. That one is
Richard Red of Lafayette, LA.
He still lives in Louisiana.
Richard, before coming into the Marine Corps, was a tall 6’3” young roughneck
on a Louisiana
oil rig. He enlisted in the Marine Corps
about the same time I did in early 1963.
After NAPS, he stayed on at the academy by the skin of his teeth for
five years and was at last commissioned into the Marine Corps with the class of
’69, after being turned-back as a result of academic trouble with a
navigation class.
One morning in early June of 1969, when I was out of
the service, a civilian again, newly married and going to school at
Memphis
State, I picked up the local Memphis paper from the front porch of our
apartment and was startled to see a UPI feature photo right there on
the front
page reporting that year’s recent graduation ceremonies at
the Naval Academy at
Annapolis. The photograph with its
caption was a shot of the graduating class’s traditional “anchor man” , hoisted
up on the shoulders of his classmates with both fists full of dollars, his
historic due for holding the dubious honor of graduating at the absolute
academic bottom of his class. As I
looked at the photograph with increasing amazement, I slowly absorbed the
astounding fact that the anchor man for that class of ’69 was none other than
Richard Red, my “roomie” at NAPS.
I cut out and saved that newspaper photograph for
thirty-three years and when Richard came through Memphis with his daughter last year in 2002,
I dug out that old yellowed photograph and showed it to him. As it turned out, he had seen it many times
before since it had been a wire service photo that had run in a number of
papers across the country shortly after the graduation event occurred.
Richard crossed my path only one other time. It was during a trip through Memphis right after his graduation. He was enroute to what I believed at the time
and for years to be aviation training at Pensacola
in Florida. It was not until he came by last year that I
learned that he had gone, after a time at Pensacola,
to an army helicopter school at Fort Benning, Ga, training to approach hot LZ’s in Viet Nam. I did not see Richard again for that entire
33-year period until last year when he and his daughter Summer spent that one
night with us at the house.
Over the fall, winter and spring of ’63-64, Richard
and I spent nine months in the same room on the second floor (deck) of
the
Madison House where I became an expert at Rummy. Richard did love to party. He loved to party, he loved girls, and he
loved an occasional – no, a frequent -
“winkie poo”. We would at times
go on liberty together with Bill Wishard and Altmeyer into the Pennsylvania
night to dances in Lancaster, Pa. and on at least one other occasion to New
York City were Red was then dating a nurse.
With great frequency there in Madison House, we
would go down the hall in our skivvies --
at any given moment, except during official inspections, half the
company currently present in that irreverent dormitory were attired only in
their skivvies and “flip-flops”, our name for the thong-style shower
shoes that everyone of us wore -- and so
we’d go down the hall to sit around the walls of John McKay’s room at the end
of the passageway. There we’d listen to
the extraordinarily professional harmonica playing of Ed Cody from near Chicago, who was right up
there with the best of the Harmonicats.
Having played the instrument since a small boy, Ed would take almost
anybody’s request and play harmony and melody simultaneously from both sides of
his mouth. This extraordinary talent so
inspired me that shortly thereafter, when I was in Baltimore, I spent nearly my last dollar to
buy a Hohner four-octave Chromonica identical to Ed’s. It has lain in its box in the back of a
dresser drawer for 38 years now and to this day I can play only parts of Sentimental
Journey on it.
The Marine Corps Birthday celebration at Tome Inn
that year marked the infamous “Wine Glass and Fire Hose
Fiasco”. Near the inebriated end of that gala event
and about the time the nursing students from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore were re-boarding their buses, our
notoriously rowdy crew shattered a large portion of the wine glasses borrowed
especially for the event from the nearby Officer’s Club over at the Monroe
House.
Then when most of our infamous company had straggled
back across the mall to Madison
late that evening, something else very memorable occurred. It was Richard and John McKay . . . John, recently by his own admission . . . who
each assumed the roles of adversarial assault leaders in a very wet and
inebriated game of “Repel Boarders” up and down the length of the second
deck. At first it was only the fire
extinguishers at each end of the hall that were emptied, but then, in the true
spirit of escalation and never-say-die, the fire hoses themselves
somehow became unlimbered and employed in the contest. Even amidst my own alcohol induced haze, I
realized that serious repercussions must soon follow.
The next morning we did learn at a special called
formation that that unauthorized and overzealous wine glass heaving
plus the
even more egregious fire hose episode that effectively flooded the
second floor
of Madison House and had water running down the stair wells like Niagra
Falls,
had also served well to put the entire Marine First Company on report. Liberty
was promptly and unceremoniously canceled for an extended period . . .four
weeks or so as I now recall . . . for every one of us and there was also a
mandatory garnishment of our next paychecks to cover the replacement of the
glasses.
The sins of the evening were egregious, yet somehow
by some miracle they did not kick us out.
Six months later and a few days following the graduation ceremonies in
the late spring, which my parents again - and I now imagine very hopefully
- attended, I celebrated my 21st
birthday by my arrival in the yard at the U. S. Naval Academy with an entire
bus load of fellow NAPSters to begin our Plebe Summer. The keynote speaker for that NAPS class
graduation was R/Adm. James Minter, the Superintendent of the Naval Academy. I still have a photo of Mom and Dad standing
there with me on the mall, proudly smiling in what I imagine was for them a
glimmer of hope that I was really going to do them proud at last. I know Dad was impressed that I had somehow
stumbled into this appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy. I had at last performed and made him proud
and he was pleased.
Military Grace
So now at last integrated into the new plebe class
(the class of ’68) of the Brigade of
Midshipmen, our NAPSter class still for the most part saw ourselves as by all
rights above and not at all deserving of this vexatious encore of “chicken
shit” abuse. After all, at least for the
Marines among us, we reasoned that we had already endured the infamous ordeals
of Parris Island or San Diego,
long nights of infantry training and those ten-mile marches in the dark. Many among us had already been in the fleet
or at far-flung duty stations around the world. Why could not these people recognize that
accomplishment for what it was? While
the physical part of Plebe Summer was for most of us an easy cake walk, the
incessant hazing from our impudent upper-class wardens who in most cases were
themselves younger than many of us, was galling and intolerably offensive. Yet from that portion of the Second Class,
the class of ’66, who stayed back from cruise to run Plebe Summer, we got no
consideration at all. Even before the
academic year began, the former enlisted NAPSters of ’68 began their four year
process of bailing out.
When Red came through Memphis with his daughter and visited with me
last year, we had a grand time reminiscing, looking through the pages of the
Lucky Bag, the academy’s yearbook. With
rollicking laughter, we re-read my old journal entries and perused through
pictures I had made while we were there together at Bainbridge. But I learned one thing from Richard during
that visit that shocked me thirty-eight years after the fact. He told me that of the eighty-plus appointees
from the fleet that had gone down to the yard that June day in ’64 from that
year’s NAPS program, only six or eight ultimately graduated either in ’68 or
later as “turnbacks” in some following class. So it turned out that the vast bulk of that
ribald crew dropped away at some point during their four-year term at Mother
B. They apparently did so for all sorts
of reasons.
For me, I lasted until early November of my plebe
year, just a few weeks before the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, which was to be our first
opportunity as plebes to leave the yard.
It was sometime in early October that calculus began to give me serious
trouble. Good as my high school math
preparation was under the spinster Miss Lee, I never had any extended
experience with calculus and I found myself to be as lost as the proverbial
goose. A few weeks later I was sure I
was hopelessly behind and could not “get it”.
I had no inkling then of the lengths and extent to which resources were
available to bring the government’s expensive investment in those “pampered
pets” back up to par.
In a very short time after the onset of my
mathematical maelstrom, the focus of my despair and attendant discomfort
shifted on its own from calculus-per-say to the larger issue of my very
presence there as an “unanticipated plebe”.
Only twenty months before I had initially said “Yes” to this
entirely new proposition simply as a naïve but failed route towards escaping
that other unpleasant military circumstance called boot camp. Of course it didn’t work to get me out of Parris Island but the glamor and prestige associated
with this new role held me on course.
Now here, without the confidence I so desperately needed, my mind began
to turn to the thought of bailing out again.
As it was then prescribed for us, I could anticipate four years at this
institution of what I was alternately coming to see as a factory of personal
diminishment and increasingly galling homogenization. This would be followed by a mandatory four
more years in the active service before I could resume my now suddenly
reappearing dream of independent travel and writing and freedom. This newly reborn urge to escape again –
IHTFP - seemed to make such intuitive sense to me at the time that I ignored my
grandfather’s letters of counsel to rethink my stated decision to resign my
appointment. How could I know that such a decision to quit again would only
prolong my misery; would only prolong my coming to the truth about who I really
was? One of the things I had heard
over and over from my father were the echoes of Churchill’s own counsel: “Don’t Quit”.
Yet, once again, in my desire to escape pain, unpleasantness, and
hardship, I virtually guaranteed my own extended enrollment in the school of
hard knocks from which, by Divine decree and a severe mercy, I could not
then or ever resign or quit.
Yet still there is another part to it as well. Even now and for long years I have quietly
but almost compulsively mulled a curious imponderable regarding this long ago
decision to leave the Naval
Academy. Every coin has two sides, they say. Here the other side of this argument places
its tentative toe along the oft-times murky edges of that vast sea that is the
immutable and inscrutable will and grace of God. It goes like this: Simultaneous with this shameful tendency
toward caving in and stopping short, that old echo of my father’s accusation, I
have later seen as well in my decision to leave a potential and simultaneous
hint of God’s protection and the irrefutable DNA of destiny. All of it seems to me to be inextricably
woven through the whole fabric of this apparently dubious and
less-than-courageous decision. The
passage of time would reveal one huge truth that was then invisible, unseen and
unconsidered by almost everyone in the fall of 1964.
The graduating classes of 1965 through 1970 at the
U. S. Military Academy at West Point would go
on record as sustaining extraordinarily high casualties and horrific
experiences by virtue of their high percentages of personal involvements in the
Viet Nam War. This tale has been
graphically brought home with vivid and poignant power in Rick Atkinson’s
chronicle of USMA’s class of ’66 in his book “The Long Gray Line”. The same would prove to be true for Navy’s
graduates of those same years. Recent
graduates from those classes newly commissioned as Navy ensign and Marine
second lieutenant aviators or ground combat unit commanders were also being
added daily and at an alarmingly rapid
rate to the growing roll call of honor around the cool marble walls of the
Rotunda. Month after month as those
painful academic years crawled by there in the yard, it was always a sobering
and haunting experience for those young midshipmen in classes immediately
behind to read that infamously expanding list of names on that cold stone wall
and remember them well as good friends and former classmates, undoubtedly
silently wondering all the while about their own destiny to shortly come. When the first names would begin to appear
in 1965, I would be gone almost a full semester.
By the time I actually left the academy in November
of 1964 to complete the 26 remaining months of my four year enlisted
obligation
in the Marine Corps, I would have become secretly infected with the
latent germ
of another idol that would in years ahead emerge to play an important
role in
my struggle toward life and purpose and God.
It would lie dormant for more than a decade after my initial
inoculation, then upon its anomalous resurrection years later, reappear upon
the stage of my heart in the role of a beautiful enchanting metaphoric Siren, a
consort that would for more years to come represent for me the essence of
spirituality itself. It was
sailing.
On moorings in the yacht basin there in the mouth of
the Severn or tied along the seawall at
McDonnough (?) Point were the eighteen or so Luder yawls of the academy’s
training fleet. During Plebe summer
there were a number of opportunities for new plebes to sign on as crew on one
of these boats that were always skippered by our “midshipman DIs” from the
second (junior) class. In a manner
surely like generations of midshipmen before us, we would cast off mooring or
docking lines and sail out of the Severn into the Chesapeake to beat up into a brisk wind. Tacking back and forth we might claw to
windward along the Chesapeake’s
shore, then fall off to drop anchor at a selected spot in some other inlet for
a few hours or on several occasions, overnight.
During those spectacular overnights, we would sleep on deck, looking up
into a brilliant canopy of stars above us that crowned those perfect summer Maryland nights. As a boy from landlocked Memphis, this was a totally new but
completely exhilarating experience for me.
I loved every bit and part of it, every moment of it and for a short
while I could forget my rather grim overall status as a lowly plebe. Then for decades after my departure from the
academy, that level and order of exhilaration was lost to me until finally once
again, thirty years later, I would find it at the helm of a 35’ Beneteau off
the southern coast of Tortola in the Saint
Francis Drake Passage. At that reunion,
the magnitude and significance of my very visible and uncontainable joy was
totally lost on my family. I can expect
that my wife interpreted it as some kind of unhealthy derangement. It certainly was an idolatrous affair with
an old lover.
I recall that I hitch-hiked home from Annapolis to
Memphis either to await orders or to await a school start date at my
next duty
station after my resignation was finalized.
However it was, I can still now viscerally remember the excitement of
being out on the road again with my suitcase in hand. I had purchased a brown hard side at the
Midshipman’s Store which suited my peripatetic fantasies very well. I bought some more civilian clothes and
reveled in the feel of the pavement under my feet.
I was shortly assigned to radio operator school at
the Naval Training
Center at Norfolk, Virginia. My original orders to Aviation
Electronics School
in San Diego
had more than a year before been preempted by the assignment to NAPS. Since electronics school was almost a year in
duration, by the time I resigned my appointment to the academy with only
twenty-six months left on my enlistment, it no longer made sense for the Marine
Corps to reinstate that original order.
So I would become a radio operator instead.
Shortly after arrival in Norfolk, I learned that my recently
terminated status as a midshipman appeared to follow me with some lingering
good effect. Very quickly I was
designated as the assistant class leader for the newly forming CW (continuous wave)
radio class about to begin. I was made
assistant class leader because the class leader slot had already been given to
PFC Jim Langen, a Floridian from Jacksonville
Beach who possessed a service file probably even more
unique than my own.
Jim automatically impressed almost everyone not only
because of his obvious intelligence and handsome demeanor but as well
because
he was the only living human being in anyone’s memory that
had gone through Parris Island twice and both times voluntarily. As I recall Jim’s story, it happened like
this: At boot camp Jim was also a high
scorer on his initial aptitude and placement batteries so that while still
there he was designated to continue on a track that would take him to OCS at Quantico and eventual
commissioning in the Marine Corps. But
circumstances would not turn out to be quite that easy or simple for him. Before he completed boot camp he sustained
some sort of illness or injury that resulted in his medical discharge from the
service. But by then the desire to earn
a commission in the Marine Corps was indelibly fixed in his psyche and had
become a thing that he found he wanted more than anything else. So however it happened, his medical problem
was, after months of trouble and political maneuvering, finally satisfactorily resolved and he inquired
again about Quantico. He was informed that since he did not
complete boot camp and was discharged in the manner that he was, there was some
sort of procedural impediment to his appointment. His best and maybe only route to
commissioning would be to re-enlist and return to Parris
Island to complete boot camp.
Then he might again be considered.
So he did just that!
As I recall Jim’s telling of it, because he had
mostly completed the boot camp program on his first time through before
he
left, his DI’s this second time through were made keenly
aware of the presence
among them of this highly extraordinary special case recruit. As a consequence, they largely extended him a
pass in the harassment and grief department and generally left him alone through
the entire thirteen week period. Of
course he still had to do everything required of every other recruit, but he
just didn’t catch Hell for every breath he took and he was undoubtedly already
somewhat inured to the calculated shock effect of the total experience. What the other recruits in his platoon
thought of this and how they handled it, I do not recall him saying. If any special, instructions or comments passed from drill
instructors to Pvt. Langen or to his platoon comrades regarding his presence
and status, Jim did not speak of it.
Also I am not entirely clear on how he happened to
be a student in the radio school class at the time that I arrived in Norfolk. None-the-less, because of the special status
that our unusual histories afforded us, he and I never had to stand watch or
duty sections and every weekend was available to us for liberty. Jim had a ’64 Volkswagen beetle aboard the
station and every weekend we were gone together to some place or other. One or two times at least we drove up to D.C.
to tour during the day and eat and bar hop at night. One weekend we drove to the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill to scout for girls and sample
local beer in quaint near-campus Bavarian rathskellers. Jim had a connection, a friend there that got
us a place to sleep in a fraternity house on campus for both nights that we
were there. After the word got around
that those new guys were actually visiting Marines, we somehow even got an
invite to a fraternity party.
Another time we made a long drive down to Jacksonville Beach and I
met Jim’s parents and Vonna, his “potential fiancé”.
When I graduated from radio school, I was assigned
to the Communications Section, Headquarters and Headquarters Squadron,
Marine
Corps Air Station, at Cherry Point,
N.C. To begin I was assigned to Radio
Central. Corporal James, a slow-talking
friendly guy from South Carolina
and I stood our watches together in the air station’s control tower, one floor below Ground Control
Approach (GCA). From there we kept up a
stack of green radio transmission logbooks and regularly talked to other naval
air facilities all over the world from Spain
to Japan,
usually about flights transiting between this place and that. In the few months I was there in Radio Central
I do not recall ever saying or doing anything that I would describe as
dramatically significant or important, either on duty or off. The most prominent memory I have of that time
was riding on my bicycle on Friday afternoons to the E-Club, where I would
order a huge 20 oz. Sirloin and a potato for $4.00 and as much beer as I could
drink for $.35 a pilsner. Sometimes I
would be with a group of guys, loud and rambunctious and sometimes I’d be alone
with a book or my journal. It may
possibly be true that the single most exciting and dangerous experience for
those first months there was my undulating two-wheeled return trip, trying
to ride back to the barracks on that bicycle late at night, all the way
counseling myself out loud to be extra careful and focus, focus, focus. It was here at Cherry Point that I learned
how to “PM my head” (military jargon for
preventative maintenance) with
four Extra Strength Excedrin before I turned into my rack for the night.
Then after a time and for reasons I do not now
recall, I was reassigned to another unit there at Cherry Point and
things began
to “pick up” a bit. I remember walking
over on my first day with new orders in hand to an odd and scruffy-looking low
tin house/shed hybrid sort of construction that was canopied under a
group of very large shade trees across the road from a C-130 hanger near one
end of the flight apron. Soon thereafter
I learned that that strange tin oddity was referred to by its occupants as “the
radio shack”, as were other such military shacks in other places around the
world that would finally years later lend that universal appellation to a
national consumer electronics corporation.
It was here at that particular radio shack that I was introduced to
possibly one of the loosest enlisted stateside groups in the Marine Corps at
the time, all “Air Wing” to the core and even a bit of Beetle Bailey style at
that. It’s NCOIC, (if in charge
can be construed as legitimately descriptive in any way of the function in that
place), its NCOIC was S/Sgt. Jake
Janerio, a “lifer” from California
who often as not answered the phone – at least when he was reasonably sure of
the caller’s identity - with his trademarked salutation: “Janerio’s meat
market. Can’t beat my meat.”
© 2006, Glenn B. Knight
http://4merMarine.com/NAPS/arboreal.html