I Never Had to Duck: Adventures in the Peacetime Marine Corps

By C.A. Peters

In this engaging memoir, retired Pittsburgh public servant C.A. (Chuck) Peters tells the captivating story of his ardent, lifelong love of and "undistinguished" service in the United States Marine Corps. His affair started when he was a "Junior Marine" during World War Two in a little Ohio River town, continued through his commissioning as a second lieutenant in March of 1956 and discharge as a reserve captain in 1969.

While attending Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, Peters endeavored to enlist in the Corps' Platoon Leaders Course only to be rejected for poor eyesight. A year later he tried again, and through a combination of chart memorization and lowered standards, he was accepted.

After surviving the grueling twelve-week PLC selection process, Peters, in March 1956, reported to the Corps' six-month-long Basic School at Quantico, Virginia. Once there he muddled through and in October of 1956 joined the famed First Marine Division in California where he experienced peacetime active service with the Marines.

He met his future wife and love of his life, Georgina Chamberlain, at Thiel College. They were wed in July of 1957, over the strenuous objections of both families, and remained happily married until her untimely death in December of 1999.

I NEVER HAD TO DUCK reveals Peters' love of the Marine Corps through true stories of his adventures in the storied Corps. But he also weaves tales of friends and acquaintances who served as Marines who did have to duck.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462057788

C.A. Peters

Seventy–eight year old C.A. (Chuck) Peters is the retired director of the Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) award winning, $176,000,000 Mental Health-Mental Retardation–Drug and Alcohol-Homeless Program. He lives on Pittsburgh’s South Side in a prize-winning home that he and his wife Georgi renovated in 1990. He has three adult children and five grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2011 by C.A. (Chuck) Peters.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-5777-1 (sc)

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Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 10/20/2011

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEDICATION

NOTES FOR THE READER

FORWARD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PART ONE

Why I Love a Parade

Junior Jarheads Then and Now

Marines I Knew Before I Was One

Two Teufel Hunden the Devil Dogs of World War One

Marine Raiders

High School Heroes

and Marines

PART TWO

A Different Kind of Rosary

The Night the War Ended

(And I Nearly Died)

Did You Date My Cousin?

The Telegram

Contraband

The Bucket Issue

The Rogue’s March

The First Date

Dien Bien Phu Comes to Campus

The Big Date

(Just like in the Movies)

Parade of a Lifetime

You Are What You Wear—or Not

Marching Fire

The Butter Bar Who Kept

the Wrong Dog

The Mine Field

Leaving For Quantico

PART THREE

The 2-56 Basic Class at Quantico

Hospitality Room Sea Stories

Pride Goeth Before the Fall

A Family Heirloom

In’56 We Got Our Kicks

on Route 66

The First Marines

Church Parade

Brother Elk

Equipment Issued

by an Authority Much

Higher Than Mine.

A Tragedy, a Love Story,

and a Lesson

If They Don’t Want You to Pass

You Are Fucked

The Man Who Saved My Life

A Record Run On Route 66

W-Day 6 July 1957

White Glove Inspection

Private Abraham and Me

Pandering For the Toad

The Major and Me

Gaining the Corps’ Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval

(and Marriage Counseling)

Could You Have Shot Him?

Professional Privates

Apollo and the Aztec Princess

The Border Twist

The Chief

Dos Gringos Aficionados

The Reluctant Jarhead

Friendly Fire from the 106 Recoilless Rifles

Better Them Zoomie Assholes

(A Second Adventure with the

106 Recoilless Rifle)

Demi-Gods of the Corps

Long Beach Parade 1958

Going Home We Got Our Kicks

on Route 66

PART FOUR

Pittsburgh’s Old 12TH Infantry Battalion USMCR

A Near Miss With Two 106 Recoilless Rifles

They Know Everything

The Bull Was A Devil Dog.

An Old Cannon’s Last Roar

Lost One Hill

Hollywood Marines

The Valor of Ignorance

A Parade in Pittsburgh

PART FIVE

Old Corps—New Corps

Two Pacific War Marines

Korean War Marines

Four ‘Nam Marines Who Had To Duck

The Reckless Rifles in ‘Nam

A Reckless Rifle Sea Story

A Different Kind of War

My Last Parade and Salute

My Brother in the Other

Naval Service

The Great Santini—Or Not

The Most Liberal of

Leathernecks

The Making of a

Progressive-Liberal Jarhead

Uncle Homer Was Not

a Marine

Trolling For Sea Stories

A Hometown Marine

Afterword

by Anne (Penny) Peters-Hagerty

Five Poems

GLOSSARY

Another Holy Trinity—Marine Infantry Formations 1957

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As a youth during World War Two, C.A. (Chuck) Peters read about and listened to stories of the United States Marines. As a Junior Marine, he read so many books about the Corps at night by flashlight under his blankets that his father warned him, You’ll ruin your eyes and never be able to pass the physical. Over three score years on, following service in the famous First Marine Division, a tour with Pittsburgh’s Marine reserve 12

While attending Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, Chuck endeavored to enlist in the Corps and through a combination of eye-chart memorization and lowered standards was accepted.

Following active duty with the famous First Marine Division on the west coast, Peters started his career teaching the mentally retarded in gritty West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. He went on to build a distinguished record in human services in both New Hampshire and primarily in Pennsylvania. For 20 years, he served as the Director of the Allegheny County (Pittsburgh’s) well regarded $176,000,000 Mental Health-Mental Retardation-Drug and Alcohol and Homelessness Program. The budget was $18,000,000 when he assumed the position.

He met his future wife and love of his life, Georgina Chamberlain, at Thiel College. They were wed in July of 1957, over the strenuous objections of both families, and remained happily married until her untimely death in December of 1999.

Starting in 1982 Chuck and his wife Georgi became avid and adventurous Lake Erie sailors of their 25-foot sloop Bedlam.

The author currently lives on Pittsburgh’s South Side in a home that he and Georgi renovated in 1990. The Civil-war era dwelling has won design and architectural prizes and has twice in ten years been featured on local house tours. Chuck has been active in various civic organizations, political campaigns, and is a regular writer of letters to the editors concerning military and political issues. Peters is a founding member of the South Side Celtic Society, a pan Celtic organization engaged in charitable works and raucous Hooleys. He has three adult children and five grandchildren.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my three children, Chip, Stewart, and Penny, and to their late mother, Georgina, who worked so hard to make me understand I was their Dad and not their DI, and to our five grandchildren in the hope that they might read it.

And

To all Marines who have had to duck. We, who never did, bask in their reflected glory.

NOTES FOR THE READER

Frank McCourt opened his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes with the observation that A happy childhood isn’t worth a pint of piss when writing a book. This may be true but I must hope that a book about the peacetime (most often happy) Marine Corps is worth more than a pint of piss.

My father, a raconteur of some local reputation always admonished his three sons, Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. I haven’t heeded his advice herein and fudged as few facts as possible, although some names have been changed or omitted to save people embarrassment. But I must also acknowledge that history is more often what is remembered than what actually happened.

FORWARD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A fourth of the stories in this book were written prior to the spring of 2004 and were intended as a brief record for my family of my adventures in the Marine Corps. Much of the motivation for the effort came from the fact that neither my wife nor I had inherited written memories from our parents and, as an amateur historian, I saw such as being desirable for our progeny.

At a 2004 reunion of my Marine Corps Basic Officers’ Course in San Francisco, the group determined that a commemorative book should be published marking the 50th anniversary of our graduation from Quantico in September 1956. Having already put a few stories on paper, I volunteered along with classmate Marty Shames of Hollywood, Florida, to edit and assemble the publication. We both assumed that the most onerous part of the task would be selecting from the plethora of offerings that would be forthcoming from our demonstrative, verbal fellow officers. We had heard these old jarheads swapping sea stories in reunion hospitality rooms for hours and hours.

Getting our aging classmates to memorialize their adventures in the Corps proved to be as difficult a task as our Drill Instructors experienced in changing us from college boys to Marines over a half century ago. In the end, only two-dozen stories were submitted; Marty and I accounted for ten of that number. Only a disappointing two came from classmates who had served in Vietnam—the majority of us didn’t go there. The book, not even 60 pages, was ready for the 50th reunion of the class when it convened in Washington, in the spring of 2006.

Based on the limited offerings of classmates, I resolved to expand the story of the peacetime Corps (or at least my small undistinguished service in it) into a memoir. Classmate Rick Spooner, Major USMC (Retired) was most helpful. Rick, a mustang, served in WW Two, in Korea, and in Vietnam and has published a well-received novel based on his experiences: The Spirit of Semper Fidelis and in 2011 a second book, A Marine Corp Anthology. He started his advice with, Chuck, I should have warned you before it was too late, be careful about writing a book! It will take on a life of its own and will become a part of you. In your case it’s probably too late. You sound determined to go through with it. The old mustang was correct on both counts.

However, he went beyond that advice and corrected my details on the locker box drill story as told in The Night the War Ended which is in PART TWO, 1953 to 1955, Becoming A Marine. Rick also put me in touch with the Corps’ archivists who rendered able assistance. Marty, from time to time, encouraged me and generously allowed me to take data from his story Who We Were, a Profile of the 2-56 Class as published in our 50

Finally, I am deeply indebted to my daughter and primary editor, Penny Hagerty, of Winchester, Virginia. Penny is a teacher and a literacy specialist in the Loudoun County, Virginia, school system and adjunct professor at Shenandoah University. She spent several years working tirelessly with me. If you read and enjoy this book, you can thank her because she made me a better writer than I was when I embarked on the project.

But a memoir! Obviously that suggests memories and 75 percent of these stories, long forgotten, jumped into my brain housing group only after my limited submissions to and work on the 2-56, 50

In the PART FIVE, Things Adrift section I included an essay about the painful migration from the right wing of the Republican Party to the political far left that my wife and I made. That story is included to demonstrate that it is possible to be both a gung-ho Marine and a political liberal. That story, by exposing a most personal metamorphosis by their parents and grandparents, brings the book full circle to something I hope my children and their children will read and remember.

I have loved the Corps for nearly all of my 78 years but I must acknowledge that I gained more from my service as a Marine than I have ever returned because—I never had to duck!

South Side Pittsburgh 2011

PART ONE

Before Boot Camp

Why I Love a Parade

On a dazzling autumn day, September 1, 1939, a hometown parade in Wellsville, Ohio stepped off to mark the start of World War Two, for on that very day Nazi Germany invaded Poland. I was six years old. In those long gone days, my Ohio River hometown counted 8,000 these days there is only half that number. Before that particular parade, I had watched many parades and had skipped down the sidewalk to keep pace with various marching units. Every second Friday evening, from September into mid November, our high school musicians, clad in our school’s orange and black, paraded down Main Street. Their march was a prelude to the local high school’s Bengal Tigers football game. Wellsville like all Ohio River towns was (and is) football mad.

Were that not enough marching music for a little kid, the volunteer firemen’s drum and bugle corps paraded on every possible occasion. The band was decked out in their red silk shirts and white uniform trousers with a flashy red stripe down the leg. The musicians always had an old fire truck to pick up stragglers if the line of march proved too arduous or, as I now suspect, a member’s load of beer became too heavy. That colorful corps as individuals, only a few years later, marched off to World War Two. When most members returned four years later it never reformed. I imagine they had had enough of bugles and marching.

None of us on that September day, in that little troop, had any idea who was fighting and certainly less understanding of why. We couldn’t have cared less about the Germans—that rabid dislike came later. Yet when our leader, Willie, a bit older and perhaps too intellectually slow to play with his peers called us to attention, we fell in with enthusiasm. He was our acknowledged chief and usually settled on who would be the Indians and who the Cowboy and who drew what toy weapons from our armory. With toy drums and pots to beat on, we marched up the alley to the next corner (that was as far as we were allowed to go) and lifting our knobby, bare knees high, counter marched back to the next corner. As our squad of a half dozen young patriots marched along in short pants (some with bare feet), we sang, or more accurately chanted, in our high pitched pre-school voices: We are the Yankees… we fight for our bread! We are the Yankees… We fight for our bread! We are the Yankees we fight for our bread! And again and again to the thump, thump, thump and tap, tap, tap of our percussion instruments. We fight for our cookies would have made it more accurate, but Willie said bread" and bread it was.

During World War Two it seemed we had a parade every other week. Some were to see the boys off by bus or train and were pre-scheduled while others occurred spontaneously to welcome home a hero or someone who had been seriously wounded and discharged. These parades were almost always preceded by our American Legion color guard of World War One veterans with gleaming, silver-chromed, washbasin-like helmets. I believed they were the most impressive military men in the world. My dad was mayor of our little town, but that unfortunately didn’t earn me a seat with a view of the marchers. I had to take my chances with all the other overly excited grade school boys who marched or ran down the street beside the parade. With such an early indoctrination, how could I not learn to love a parade?"

Junior Jarheads Then and Now

In the fall of 2008 old jarhead buddies tasked me to be the speaker for a unit of Junior Marines in Pittsburgh’s South Hills. This was a dinner dance marking both the graduation of two fire teams (eight young jarheads) from their boot camp of 14 meetings. Those feather merchants couldn’t have been much prouder if they had made it through Parris Island. In addition to marking graduation, the event was also the birthday ball for the young jarheads. Between the young folk and their parents, approximately 100 mustered for the occasion with the kids accounting for about a third of that number.

As most readers know, the SOP for any speech (except a eulogy) is to open with a joke. But what, I thought, kind of joke will appeal to prepubescent boys? Two of my adult children, both school teachers, assured me that the dirty words such as poop always played well with preteen boys. I didn’t realize that senior members of the JM’s might be 17 and 18 years old and that this was actually a unisex organization! So I told my poop joke and if you read Some Days You Are the SOS in the Things Adrift section of this book you will know it too. I can only hope you find it more amusing than did those junior jarheads sitting at attention without ever cracking a smile. Had they been ordered to, I am confident (well drilled as they were) they would have laughed by the numbers.

Speaking to that unit of lizard-suit-clad youngsters made for a pleasant evening, and it carried me back to World War Two when I had been a preteen Junior Marine. During the war it was possible for kids to be a junior anything. There were even teenage Junior Air Raid Wardens. These daring young men, during our town’s black out drills, sped through the streets on bicycles carrying messages between command centers, based on the assumption that when the Germans or Japanese targeted Wellsville (population 8,000), the bombers would wipe out our pottery industry and telephone lines! Decades and decades later I realized that our little pottery producing center was far, far beyond the range of any enemy bombers.

My brother Billy and I really believed that if you showed a light during blackout drills, Army Air Corps planes flying over would drop a flour sack on your roof to mark your transgression. Your parents could be arrested. Maybe even as spies! We never doubted that our planes were capable of that level of accuracy. During one Saturday night drill, while sharing our weekly bath, we thought we heard planes overhead! We rushed to the window and pulled back the blind. A passing warden blew his whistle, shouted at us, and banged on the door to the embarrassment of our parents.

A Pittsburgh daily paper sponsored the Junior Commandos, who had as their primary mission encouraging kids to clean their plates to aid the war effort. This organization was popular with parents. If you enlisted, you received a blue and white shoulder patch for your mother to sew onto your jacket. After John Wayne made The Fighting Sea Bees, some imaginative lads at the other end of town equipped their wagons with snow shovels and pretended to drive bulldozers. Little girls actually organized a USO troupe to entertain the troops. If you’ve seen Darla in The Little Rascals short on the Turner Classic Movie channel, you have the idea.

I would like to record that on December 7, 1941, our gang of little kids immediately rushed out to join the Junior Marines as many older kids did to join the real Corps. But that would be untrue. I remember that December day well. We went to the Sullivans, my mother’s folks, for Sunday dinner, but instead of the usual beer and rye-induced levity, everyone was talking in funerary tones about them and some place called Pearl Harbor. I didn’t know where or what it was or what had happened and my impression was and is that the whispering adults didn’t know either. But all the little kids in attendance

Perhaps what led to the first mustering of our Junior Marines was Randolph Scott as the stereotypical leatherneck gunny in To the Shores of Tripoli which was released early in 1942. In the final scene he marched his sun-helmeted Marines through the cheering civilian packed streets of San Diego to board troop transports and sail off to the war. If not that movie then Wake Island, which memorialized the gallant and futile defense of that island by those undaunted jarheads, did it for us. Certainly a year later, when Wallace Beery (always popular with kids) made Salute to the Marines, we were convinced. In the final scene of that World War Two classic, Beery as a doomed, retired gunny, fired a machine gun as he pulled on his dress blues jacket So they will know who they are dealing with. Whichever movie motivated us, sometime early in World War Two the Wellsville, Ohio, contingent of the Junior Marines was organized. Throughout that conflict we never missed a movie about the Marines or any war movie for that matter.

Somehow we gained the idea that real Marines always had a stripe down their pants legs so we midnight requisitioned chalk from our elementary school and colored a white stripe down the seam of our blue overalls. This practice continued for some months until our respective supply officers (i.e. mothers) put an end to it. I thought of our make-believe uniforms the night I addressed the local Junior Marines. Those boys and girls buy their first camouflage uniforms, but as they outgrow them (how could they not) between ages eight and eighteen years, the unit provides a new issue.

Like real lash-ups in the Corps, ours too was a most heterogeneous bunch that changed when members were transferred. In our case, parents moved. The Maple brothers were lost when they moved to the other end of town. Norman Ryder, known to his little chums as No No for some long forgotten reason, was lost when his dad, a school teacher, moved to Columbus to work in a defense plant. He was the brightest (skipped second grade) in the group. In 1957 I partied with him in Laguna Beach, California. He was a zoomie flying jets out of El Toro as Red Ryder and I was a ground pounder in the First Marines. Little Ronny Russell (he never did grow much) went on to become a Colonel in the Army Engineers. We spent Christmas Eve 1956 at my Aunt Ruth’s in Pasadena. Ronny was a energetic, intense, feather merchant who later did a couple of tours in ‘Nam. Bobby Logan, a neighbor, became an enlisted Marine and my kid brother, Billy, became a lieutenant in the Corps. You can read about him in The Reluctant Jarhead. Of course there were many, many others, but the muster rolls in my head have faded with time.

So what did these Junior Marines do for God, Country and Corps during World War Two? We killed hundreds if not thousands of Japs and Nazis! In our imaginations. We were fully armed with rifles, .45 automatics and Thompson sub machineguns. Our Tommy guns were of the correct size and had either drum or banana clip magazines. These were the weapon of choice because you could go Rat-a-tat—tat-a-tat-tat when firing them versus the simple, bang! bang! bang! of our wooden pistols and rifles. None of the other junior anythings were as well equipped as we jarhead wannabees.

Our arms superiority came about because we had a member with access to a jigsaw and to an older brother who was delighted to display his prowess on that dangerous machine. As our pre war Indian-fighting six shooters, carbines, and wooden swords wore out or became obsolete, we had great need of his skill on that machine. Even toys were rationed in World War Two. Our biggest problem was finding and purchasing the raw material, black paint, and white pine for our armory. The Junior Marines solved the supply problem by accumulating a war chest from our niggardly allowances, odd jobs, returning empty pop bottles for two cents each, and collecting scrap metal and paper to sell.

What did these well equipped Junior Marines do? They went on self organized maneuvers and field exercises, which often involved going into the boondocks (we didn’t know the word) to hunt for imaginary foes. Thickets of sumac trees were preferred because we imagined they looked more like jungle growth than the hard woods and stunted orchards in the hills behind our town. After seeing a movie in which the Marines detected a Jap sniper from the flash of the sun on his rifle, we put one of our own ahead of us on a jungle trail, up a tree with a mirror (perhaps lifted from a mother’s purse) to see if we were sharp enough to detect the flash. Unlike real Marines we didn’t go to the field with C Rations. Our ration of choice was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and occasionally, if we could lift them from our parent’s pantry, Vienna sausages or a can of baked beans. The last was problematic because we weren’t allowed to play with matches to start a fire to heat the legumes. However, matches were also occasionally covertly obtained from a mother’s pocket book or from above the kitchen stove.

Alas, we never did troop and stomp (i.e. close order drill) or fire real rifles because unlike the Junior Marines of today, no adults were available to teach us. And certainly few adults would voluntarily sleep out on the ground with a platoon of kids while teaching them how to use a compass. In fact, the only adult supervision was to prescribe the zone of permitted operation with the railroad tracks and the Ohio River being absolutely no go boundaries. Back then, Junior Marine veterans if they returned home from the wars late for dinner or exceptionally dirty were chastised by their COs and occasionally confined to quarters. Today’s Junior Marines have a high order of positive adult involvement that teaches and leads by example, including overnight time in the boondocks, and today’s kids do know that word! And much more Corps jargon.

Unlike the real Marines in the Pacific, we Junior Marines, in the early 1940s, had a good war. We got cured of poison ivy while they got jungle rot. Unless we opted to sleep rough, usually in our backyards, we went to bed between clean sheets and never slept in the rain or in a hole in the ground. The only enemies we had were in the movies or in our imaginations because the real jarheads were between us and the really bad guys. My time as a Junior Marine did much to confirm my desire to be a real leatherneck just as it does for some of today’s boots.

Marines I Knew Before I Was One

The Corps justifiably prides itself on spanning the generations, with each nurturing and passing on the tradition and lore it has acquired to incoming boots. My knowledge of Marine traditions and lore started in World War Two, long before I was old enough to enlist. I acquired it as I read with a flashlight following lights out, night after night, under the covers. I did this so often that my father would admonish me that You are going to ruin your eyes with all that reading and not even be able to pass the eye test! Boy was he correct! In 1952 when I first tried to enlist in the Corps’ Platoon Leaders Course, I was rejected for poor eyesight but he never said I told you so. By 1953, vision requirements were relaxed. Scuttlebutt had it that because so many lieutenants had been casualties in Korea, replacements were needed. Beyond my copious reading I actually met Marines of other generations when I was a kid. As a youngster I knew two from the Great War. I actually knew…

Two Teufel Hunden the Devil Dogs of World War One

The first was a family friend, a neighbor and a veteran of the infamous wheat field the Marines crossed in ill-advised dressed ranks in their first major engagement of the Great War. A veteran French officer watching as half their number fell is reported to have to have mused, It is magnificent but it is not war! Uncle Brad never tried to dissuade me from enlisting even though he walked with a pronounced limp acquired that day in 1918. As he told the story, he and the other Teufel Hunden, (the nickname, Devil Dogs given to the Marines of World War One by their German foes) were pinned down by grazing fire from entrenched machine guns. Suddenly, I felt a tug at my right heel and craned my neck to look back toward my feet but without raising my head. I only dimly realized that my heel was gone and I was really bleeding! I must have been in shock because I jumped up and using my rifle as a cane limped to the rear past a lot of dead and wounded buddies. How did I make that walk? The Kraut fire was so thick we couldn’t crawl to advance a yard and yet I walked right through it going the other way. The war was over for me almost before it got started.

As a pre-teen kid, I thought it was cool to be walking with a limp and being able to tell a story like that to impressionable youngsters while suavely standing with a highball in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Uncle Brad always added, usually after a poignant pause, I still remember, for each and every one of us that limped or got carried off that day, one went into the ground. That sad fact didn’t resonate with me as much as walking with a limp and being around to tell such a tale while smoking a Lucky Strike and nursing a Seven and Seven.

The other veteran I knew from the Great War was also from my hometown. The taciturn Mister Ford Ball taught high school shop. He was a gruff, hulking man who was known never to smile; I don’t know if he intimidated others, but he certainly did me when I eventually took mechanical drawing. I have several images of Mister Ball (always Mister), the first occurring in the fall of 1942. Someone had assigned this old jarhead to become the drill instructor for the high school seniors who were at risk of being drafted. Higher ups believed, correctly, that if they had the rudiments of close order drill, it would be an asset once they entered the military. I remember looking out the window of our very old, three-story elementary school with envious eyes as they drilled. The high school was just a half block away, and watching the high school boys do their maneuvers earned me a teacher’s admonishment for daydreaming on more than one occasion.

We had another of the ubiquitous World War Two scrap drives to obtain metal for the war effort. On this occasion the drive was associated with the public schools and as a result, the scrap pile grew on the street between the high and elementary schools. Students of all ages and townspeople were, once again, enthusiastically culling basements, garages, vacant lots, attics, and derelict houses looking for scrap to contribute. Adults were making rousing speeches about how badly needed this scrap was and what a grand thing we were doing. When they paused for breath, the high school band would strike up a stirring march.

Finally, as the day was about to end with what I thought we had the highest junk pile in the world, the old Marine (I thought Mr. Ball was ancient, but he was probably about 45) stepped forward. I thought he was going to make another rousing speech. Instead he simply said, I don’t need this anymore, and sailed his World War One Brit style washbasin helmet to the top of the scrap heap. I see it now with the black four-pointed shield, large white star, and Indian head rampant resting on top of that heap. I knew enough history of the Corps to realize that this was the insignia of the Second Army Division and that two Marine regiments had made up half of its infantry complement in 1918. He had brought that prized souvenir back from his service in the war to end all wars and was now sacrificing it to help fight this new conflict. Later I wondered if he had ever regretted his donation. Every time I see that division patch on the evening news from Iraq, I remember the sacrificial helmet.

By the time the Korean War started, I was in high school and learning mechanical drawing from Mister Ball. His domain was the shop where boys, never girls, were introduced to a variety of power tools and the drawing room where he held forth on the basics of drafting in his no nonsense style. The Red Scare was just heating up, and one day he brought a German Luger (perhaps the most recognizable handgun in the world) to class. He held that iconic weapon up for all to see—we were impressed—and he emphatically announced, I took this off a dead German in 1918 and will shoot any damn Reds that show their faces in Wellsville. None of us doubted that the old Devil Dog could and would do it.

Marine Raiders

Perhaps the first Pacific War Marine I met was a boyfriend of my Aunt Ruth Sullivan. Aunt Ruth was a great looking, big bosomed, stylish Irish lady whom any jarhead home from the wars would have been proud to be seen with. Of all my aunts and uncles she was my absolute favorite. Auntie was very popular and had more than one amour, so I don’t recall this particular leatherneck’s name but he was the real thing. The guy had been a Raider and had participated in the Makin Island Raid in 1942 with Colonel Evans Carlson’s Second Raider Battalion. The president’s son, Jimmy Roosevelt, was a major serving as the unit’s executive officer. In order to be with that lash up, Jimmy had to fight to get a waiver (not a deferment) because he had flat feet. How many politicians’ sons now fight to get into the Corps? How many did during Vietnam?

The movie that portrayed and dramatized the Makin Island Raid had recently been released; it was 1944 and I had just turned ten. I sat through the movie two or three times with other war-obsessed elementary school boys. Now I was meeting a real Marine Raider with the distinctive skull patch on his shoulder and just had to question our visitor. My first one was, as depicted in the flick, did the Marines actually paint an American flag on the roof of the island’s main building so the Japanese navy or air force would destroy it? Looking back, that was a stupid question even from a ten-year-old Junior Marine. If the Raiders wanted it destroyed all they had to do was set fire to it because in the film it was only bamboo with a tin roof!

But this Raider was kind to me, thanks to Aunt Ruth, and quietly said, We didn’t have enough time to do all that we wanted to do. They did send some planes over and we shot down some big sea planes and burned some stuff of theirs.

Years later I read the raid had been much less than a qualified success with outboard motors that wouldn’t start on rubber boats and nine Marines left on the beach when the battalion sailed away in two submarines. The Japanese later beheaded all nine. Before and after my service in the Corps, I was to meet and admire many jarheads from the Pacific War but for decades this was the only honest-to-God, legendary Marine Raider I ever met.

At a birthday luncheon 30 or so years ago, I met a second raider. The luncheon was at the Sheraton on Pittsburgh’s South Side and we had packed a large ballroom, a standing room only event. Leathernecks from Pittsburgh’s three rivers area can no longer muster in those numbers for that occasion. Time has done what the Japanese, North Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese could not do.

The proceedings had already started when a stranger entered, hesitantly