Taking on the Burden of History: Presuming to Be a United States Marine

By George M. Van Sant

This book is a memoir of the authors active service in the United States Marine Corps. It recounts his decision to enlist, boot camp, service in North China, recall in 1950, commissioning, adventures in Hollywood, combat service in Korea, and his homecoming. The author reveals he was not your typical hard-charging Marine. The book tells stories of many heroes, and a few cowards. It recounts some terrifying experiences, some hilarious episodes, and graphically illustrates how the superlative history of the Corps imposes a burden on every individual Marine to measure up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9781450045629

George M. Van Sant

George Van Sant, born November 20, 1927, State College, Pennsylvania. Attended St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md. during and after the war, A.B. in 1948. When he finished his Marine Korean service in 1953, attended graduate school at University of Virginia, M.A., 1955, Ph.D., 1958 in philosophy. Appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 1958, Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He pursued parallel careers: active Marine Corps Reserve service 1953-1977, retiring as Colonel, USMCR; and teaching at the University of Mary Washington, retiring as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, 1990. Also many community activities in Fredericksburg, including three four year terms as a City Councilman.

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Copyright © 2008 by George M. Van Sant, Colonel, USMCR-Ret.

Library of Congress Control Number:              2008902499

ISBN:                    Hardcover                              978-1-4363-2926-2

                             Softcover                                978-1-4363-2925-5

                            Ebook                                      978-1-4500-4562-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1: Enlistment And Parris Island (1945)

Chapter 2: Boot Leave, Camp Lejeune, And A Slow Boat (1945)

Chapter 3: China Adventures I (1945-1946)

Chapter 4: China Adventures II (1946)

Chapter 5: Home, Discharge, Between Wars (1946-1950)

Chapter 6: Back To Camp Lejeune (1950-1951)

Chapter 7: Quantico, Becoming An Officer (1951-1952)

Chapter 8: To West Coast And Korea (1952)

Chapter 9: Introduction To Combat

Chapter 10: Two Engagements, Things Heat Up (1952)

Chapter 11: In Division Reserve (1952)

Chapter 12: Stromboli

Chapter 13: Bunker Hill I

Chapter 14: Bunker Hill II

Chapter 15: Final Days With Fox Company, Into Reserve

Chapter 16: Winter And Back Online

Chapter 17: Back To Reserve And Back To The Lines

Chapter 18: Going Home (1953)

Postscript

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Edward Dunbar Van Sant

January 18, 1955-December 14, 2007

He never got to read it.

Acknowledgements

The motivators for writing this book are numerous and go back for many years. Both my son, Edward D. Van Sant, and my daughter, Mary Van Sant Duncan, have been suggesting such an effort since they were children. Twelve years ago, after losing my late wife to cancer two years earlier, I was blessed with my wife, Milena, whose contributions to this book far surpass those of any other person. She also contributed four wonderful stepchildren, with whom I have been able to forge a very close bond. Each one of them, Andrea Micklem, Steve Votta, Nicole Tomiczek and Brandon Votta, as well as their spouses, have also pressed me to get this thing done.

Milena was absolutely instrumental in producing the book. It was first dictated into a tape recorder and Milena then typed a complete draft of the work. Only she understands how challenging and tedious that job was. Since then she has edited each new version and contributed every step of the way..

One other person has been enormously instrumental in helping me. That is Robert Krick, the Civil War historian. I came to know Bob when he was the Historian with the National Park Service Battlefield Parks in Fredericksburg. Bob has taken up an interest in Marine Corps history and he is now a consultant with the U. S. Marine Corps Heritage Museum in Quantico, Virginia. He has made a great contribution to the installation of the first exhibits in that impressive and fast-growing institution. When the original draft of this work was finished, Bob had just retired and had some free time. He subjected that draft to a meticulous and thorough reading and made many, many positive suggestions and corrections.

Several of the fine people with whom I have served have made significant contributions. Dick Payne, my platoon corpsman in July and August, has contributed pictures and important information. Chuck Lundeen, our 81 Mortar Forward Observer, contributed all the maps. And Major (now Colonel-Ret.) Bob Dominick read and contributed to the account of our serving together. He also contributed several pictures.

Finally, I must thank the staff of Xlibris whose skills and devotion to their work has far exceeded what I had expected.

George M. Van Sant

Colonel USMCR-Ret.

July, 2008

Preface

The news anchor Tom Brokaw has written a book entitled The Greatest Generation. This book recounts a number of inspiring stories about the men and women who grew up during the Depression and fought World War II. I was born in 1927 and lived through the Depression, of which I have some painful and vivid memories. I then impatiently endured high school, began college during World War II, and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in July of 1945. I had almost finished boot camp at Parris Island when the atomic bombs brought an unexpected and abrupt early end to that war. As the reader will see, I was sent overseas anyway, had a number of adventures, returned to college, and was called back for the Korean War.

In the following account, I have tried to recount in plain terms what it was like for an ordinary young man to enter and experience the Marine Corps; its training; and, eventually, combat. In presenting this story, I have endeavored to accomplish several things.

First, I have tried to recapture the responses, the anxieties, the disasters, and the triumphs of this ordinary young man who was probably not particularly well prepared for or conditioned for the military life, especially the military life as practiced in the elite U.S. Marine Corps. Because from the very beginning, I always wondered if I really had the stuff to be a U.S. marine, and because being a U.S. marine has turned out to be a crowning achievement of my life, I have entitled this book Taking on the Burden of History: Presuming to Be a U.S. Marine.

Second, I have tried to recall and present, as vividly as I could, some of the extraordinary men and women whom I came to know during that service. Most were persons of exemplary character, and some were funny as hell. But a few were craven cowards or morally degenerate misfits.

And third, I have tried to present both the outrageously hilarious and the poignantly horrifying aspects of my experiences. It is often said that combat veterans really do not like to retell their worst experiences. That is true. When one’s memories are of total terror and of witnessing unspeakable sights, sounds, and smells, a recounting of even a portion of these experiences is supremely distasteful. Recalling these memories has been gut- and soul-wrenching for me, and many times, while writing this, I have dissolved into uncontrollable sobbing.

My primary purpose in writing down these stories is to leave a record for younger members of my family, before I forget all these stories or pass on. Maybe other young people can learn something from these stories. They describe the kind of experiences I think few Americans, with the obvious exception of our forces fighting wars and combating terrorism, have ever had. There is perhaps something to be learned from such experiences: the importance of humanity and the glories of being alive, and the depths to which humanity can sink.

A few caveats and cautions must be added at the outset. This is a personal memoir. It is written from a first person point of view. Some readers who were in Korea at the same time may remember certain events differently. In writing this, I have tried to check facts as well as I could from sources available. But as von Clausewitz said, War is accompanied by a ‘fog.’ This makes every individual’s recollections of a war different from that of every other individual’s. Inevitably, there are a very few persons the reader will encounter in these stories who, from my point of view, behaved very badly in a rich variety of ways. In some cases, I have gone to some lengths to conceal their identities. I do not want to gratuitously offend anyone. Also, there are a very few individuals whose identities cannot be concealed but who, I believe, have all passed on to street-guarding duty in heaven.

One last personal perspective must be shared. An enduring memory of life during World War II, and the half dozen or so years following it, was how often one heard variations on the word service. One went into the service. One was in the service. The term serviceman produced instant respect. We were millions of young people who were called to serve, and every American, civilian or military, respected that.

At Parris Island, I was merging my tiny, maggoty little self into a mass of literally millions of other people who were serving the rest of our nation. I was nothing—a mere number—but what I was doing was serving my fellow countrymen, and humanity in general. This feeling of service was palpable for the Greatest Generation. One can still see and feel it at any gathering of old vets from WWII. The loss of this omnipresent attitude toward service is perhaps the greatest loss of our modern era.

Chapter 1

ENLISTMENT AND

PARRIS ISLAND (1945)

I can remember the exact moment when I decided to become a United States marine as if I were living it now. The day was a Sunday afternoon in late March of 1944, and these were the circumstances.

When I had been admitted to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, in July of 1943, I was not quite sixteen years old. Although I lacked a credit for senior high school English, St. John’s had admitted me as they did many other fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-old males during the war. I had been able to finish my freshman year of college by the middle of March 1944 because the war was on and I could attend classes on a year-round basis. But now I was enjoying a two-week break until classes resumed for my sophomore year at St. John’s in April.

My family had moved to the Maryland/DC area at the beginning of the Second World War, in 1941, but on that March day two years later, I returned to the place of my birth—State College, Pennsylvania. I still had many friends there from my childhood, reaching clear back to my beginnings.

It was my destiny to return to State College. I stayed in the big old house of a close friend of my parents, Mrs. Boucke, the widow of one of the great figures in the history of Penn State—so great, in fact, that today there is a very large academic building at Penn State called the Boucke Building.

It was the middle of the war, and Penn State was on a full wartime status. There were practically no male civilian students present. Most of the students were enrolled in various kinds of military programs, and they wore the uniforms of all the services. There were military students from the army, navy, and the Marine Corps, and these students marched to class and marched back to their billets, which were often the old fraternity houses turned into military housing. The small town had very much a wartime atmosphere about it.

I had managed to have some nice reunions with a few of my old friends, whom I had not seen since the time of Pearl Harbor, and on this particular Sunday afternoon, somebody said, Hey, let’s go out to Autoport.

Now Autoport, built in 1936 and flourishing to this day, was the first modern motel established in Pennsylvania, and eight years later, we still thought it represented the height of elegance. Even before I had left State College, it had become a kind of hangout for upper-grade high school and college students. It boasted a restaurant and a beer bar.

Let’s go out to Autoport, one of my friends said; I think it may have been Douglas Mead. A lot of guys hang out there on Sundays. Somehow, and I don’t remember how, the two of us managed to get ourselves to our destination. We must have caught a ride with somebody because transportation was hard to come by during the war, and we certainly could not have walked there because in those days, it was outside of the town of State College.

We arrived at Autoport, and lo and behold, in walked my old friend Dan Stearns, resplendent in the uniform of a United States marine. During the thirties, my parents and I had lived on a small farm outside State College, and I had attended one of the last one-room, one-teacher-for-eight-grades schools in Pennsylvania. Dan had been a year ahead of me and was two years older, but living in the country, you take your friends where you can find them, and we had been pretty good buddies as children.

Dan had graduated from high school the previous June and had worked through that summer and fall on his father’s farm. His family prevailed upon him to stay with them almost until Christmastime, but in December of 1943, he had enlisted in the marines.

By now, he had been in the Corps about twelve weeks and was on boot leave. Since Dan’s father had been a marine in World War I, and something of a hero, Dan’s choice was not surprising.

For several of the half dozen or so guys gathered together that Sunday afternoon at Autoport, this was going to be their last fling before going into service. As soon as Dan entered, everybody flocked around him, and with not too much prompting from us, Dan began telling us about Parris Island.

Dan was a good storyteller. He told the most horrendous, horrible, hair-raising stories about how harshly he had been treated at Parris Island and how hard the program was and how awful it was and how rough it was at boot camp. He made it all come alive, and you could just tell he was pleased as Punch that he had made it all the way through.

While he talked, I could feel the Marine Corps seeds slowly dropping into me and rapidly germinating. The challenge the Marine Corps posed, and still poses, for young men, and nowadays for young women as well, is this: If others can endure and make it through the program, then why can’t I?

The more horrible he made the program sound, the more attractive it became to me. He looked dazzling in his uniform, and I might add that Dan Stearns is someone with whom I have had some contact since that fateful afternoon. He was sent overseas and fought all the way through the Battle of Okinawa, and we both ended up in China at the same time, although our paths never crossed there. Dan left the Corps after World War II and, just as I did when I got out, joined the reserves. We both were called up in 1950, and as luck would have it, Dan and I ended up in the same battalion at Camp Lejeune in 1950. Our careers up to that point had been somewhat parallel, although mine had started much later than his.

Once the Marine Corps seed was planted in me, and fertilized by Dan, it became firmly rooted although in March of 1944, I was not yet seventeen and could not even legally enlist in the Marine Corps. In order to get in at the age of seventeen, a parent’s signature was required, as my parents, very forcefully, reminded me. Later that year, my father would be going overseas, and his impending departure loomed over us all. I remember my mother plaintively asking me, If Daddy goes overseas, you are surely not going to leave me here all alone? But in my mind and in my heart, I firmly knew that when the time came and the opportunity presented itself, I would become a marine.

Months passed. My father went abroad, and my mother was left alone with my young sister. She rented out a room in our house to a woman physical education teacher from my old high school so that she would have someone staying with her. My sister at that time was only five years old and had not even started school yet. I came home fairly frequently from Annapolis to visit.

We got through 1944 and the last Christmas of the war, and although I think that it was very clear to everybody that the United States and our allies were going to prevail in the end, even then it still looked like a long, long haul to reach that goal. Christmas of 1944 was still a somber time. The largest battle U.S. forces engaged in in the entire European theatre was being fought around Bastogne. The two largest battles of the Pacific war were yet to be fought in February and March of 1945 at Iwo Jima, and in April, May, and June of 1945 at Okinawa. It had become abundantly clear that the Japanese were not going to give up easily.

It was an interesting home front in those months, and I remember it well. First of all, there were practically no young men without a uniform to be seen anywhere. Everybody was in the service. Because I was tall and looked older than my years, I was periodically accosted by middle-aged ladies who sternly asked me why I was not serving. The buildup to get into the service was getting bigger and bigger. At St. John’s College, the student body dropped below one hundred during the winter and spring terms of 1945, and a great many of my classmates and friends were already in the service. There were people leaving almost every day.

At St. John’s, the tradition was that anyone leaving for the service was given a suitable farewell party, and since people were leaving so constantly, the parties went on almost continuously. Not surprisingly, my academic performance during those two terms, the winter and spring of 1945, slid right down the tubes. As you will see later on in this story, when I returned to St. John’s after the war, my record for that period of time would be mercifully obliterated.

The outside pressure on me to enlist was building all that winter and spring of 1944-45, but of course, my mother remained the biggest obstacle to my enlistment in the marines. As spring turned into summer, in June of 1945, I took myself down to the Marine Corps recruiting station in Washington DC. It was explained to me what I would have to do in order to enlist at my age, and I picked up the necessary papers. That enlistment station, by the way, was a temporary building on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets. It is now a small park.

I took the papers home to my mother, and she prevaricated and delayed and piddled along until I finally got her to set a deadline sometime in July for her signature authorizing me to enlist. In early July, she relented.

In July of 1945, the war in Europe was over, and the full weight and strength of the French, the English, and, of course, the Americans was turning on Japan. Although Japan was embattled, there were ample signs that the Japanese were going to make us pay for every inch of their homeland.

The Sunday before my long-awaited enlistment, my girlfriend, Margaret Bolgiano, whom I had been dating since the previous Christmas, and I decided to take a long bike ride up through northern Prince George’s County and into Howard County, Maryland. We packed a light picnic lunch and took a couple of soft drinks along. It was a warm July day, and our liquids were soon depleted. Way out in what was then a very remote and rural part of the Maryland countryside, we decided to stop at a lonely little farmhouse and ask for a drink of water. We cycled along a long lane, walked up to the front porch, and knocked on the door. A wizened old lady came out and, in response to our thirsty request, came back out of her house with two tall glasses of ice water. We stood in her front yard sipping the cool water while she talked with us.

She asked me the universal question: Are you in the service?

I proudly told her, I am going to enlist in the marines tomorrow. And Margaret added that we were on our last bike ride together.

And then the lady said something that some weeks later I was to recall with considerable amazement. She told us in her shaky, querulous voice, I don’t think you really have to worry about the war, young man. I feel that we have developed some kind of a special weapon or bomb that’s going to end the war soon. You will never even have to get involved in it.

Margaret and I finished sipping our water, returned the empty glasses to her with profuse thanks, and began the long cycle home. As we rode down the road out of the old lady’s sight, Margaret rolled her eyes and rotated her finger at the side of her head, looking back toward the old lady’s house.

The next day, I returned to the recruiting station to take my physical. First of all, as soon as I arrived, my height was measured. As I did not attain my full six-foot-five height until I was nineteen years old, I drew myself up and was measured to be six feet and three and one-half inches. My slender weight was 178 pounds. The recruiting sergeant told me, Son, you know, you are just too tall for the Marine Corps. Can’t you slouch a little bit?

What? I said, and he explained that because I was enlisting as a seventeen-year-old, I had to conform to all the physical standards of the regular Marine Corps. Although I was enlisting in the Marine Corps Reserve, I was still subject to regular standards. At that time, the height limitations in the regular Marine Corps were between five feet six and six feet two, so I was one and one-half inches too tall. Crestfallen, I watched my dream evaporating and asked the sergeant, My god! What are you saying? You are not going to take me?

He replied, No, we can get you a waiver, but you will have to go before a medical board for evaluation to make sure that you are capable of meeting the standards.

Had I waited until I turned eighteen years old that fall, and had I been drafted and then volunteered for the Marine Corps, there would not have been any problem with my height, which would have been acceptable up to six feet six or even six feet seven. But of course, I was too young to be patient. The fall seemed too far away. I was eager to become a marine now. I wanted to get in right then, and not anytime later.

Next, my blood pressure was taken, blood for testing was drawn, and a corpsman took my pulse. And tung, tung, tung, my pulse raced. By this time, having been told about the height waiver, I guess my pulse rate had shot up to ninety-two, and the corpsman said, My god, you have a fast pulse. You can’t get into the Marine Corps with that kind of a pulse rate! And that was certainly another less-than-calming statement for me to hear.

The corpsman looked at me intently and said, You really want to get into the Marine Corps, don’t you?

I answered him, truthfully, Yes, I do.

I’ll tell you what, you go off into that little room over there and just lie down for a few minutes and try to calm yourself, and I’ll take your pulse rate again later, he told me. I lay down on a gurney for a few minutes, making an enormous effort to relax. I must have been successful because when the corpsman retook my pulse, it had dropped to an acceptable seventy.

Next came the medical board for the height waiver, consisting of one single doctor, and it turned out to be a very curious experience. The doctor sat behind a desk in a barren office, a sparsely furnished room with blank walls. He had all my papers spread out in front of him and told me to take off all my clothes.

I stood there, stark naked, and he said, What we are going to do is give you some coordination tests because you are pretty tall and gangly. But I think you know that already.

I remember the tests precisely. In the first test, I had to stand with my back, the back of my legs, and my heels flush against a bare wall, and my arms extended clear out to the sides against the wall. I was instructed to do a deep knee-bend, all the way down to the floor, keeping my back against the wall, simultaneously bringing my arms forward and touching my two forefingers together. Naked, I had to bob up and down in deep knee-bends three or four times, but I managed to get my fingers together every time and never fell away from the wall and was told, Okay, that’s all right.

Next, he came over with a triangular ruler, the kind used by engineers. He held it in front of me, parallel to the floor, between the palms of his hands. He had me spread my hands side by side with palms down over top of the ruler. Without giving me a clue as to when he was going to do it, he would spread his hands apart at indeterminate intervals so that the ruler would begin to drop. My task was to catch it before it hit the floor, which meant that I had to make a sudden sweeping motion down. It was a test of reflexes.

I just chortled to myself as we were doing this because some of my friends and I had, in our spare time, been working on this exact maneuver for years. I had become an expert in catching triangular rulers, and the doctor seemed quite impressed that I was able to easily catch it every time.

Next, he tested all my other reflexes. He tested the reflexes in my feet, in my knees, in my hands, and in my arms. Naked as I was, he swarmed over me like a pack of ants and finally said, Son, you seem to be very well coordinated, and you have good reflexes. You pass.

There were three other guys being examined and tested on the day I enlisted. We ended up in boot camp together. And so we progressed through processing. After all of us had passed the physical, signed our papers, and everything was deemed to be in order, we were ushered into a captain’s office. At this point, I was utterly naive about ranks in the Corps. Although I had heard about corporals and sergeants and knew that there were officers and enlisted men, I did not have a grasp on the technicalities and the finer points of ranks. We were, I now understand, actually ushered into the relatively exalted presence of a captain.

The sergeant took us in and introduced us and asked us to line up in front of the captain’s desk, and we were asked to raise our right hand and to swear allegiance to the Constitution and to obey the orders of our officers, and I can’t remember the exact words of the oath, but they were formidable ones.

The most interesting thing about this procedure was that up to the point when we were taken into the captain’s office, the sergeants, the navy corpsmen who were giving us our physicals, and the clerks who dealt with us were extremely polite, pleasant, even respectful to us. One could almost be reminded of a bank, where the customer opening a new account is always right. Mr. Van Sant, please step over here, the sergeant had asked me politely just a short time ago.

Our oath, though, seemed to have caused a complete personality transformation in our sergeant. From being simply the most obliging guy in the world when we entered the captain’s office, he was suddenly converted into a terse, bellowing creature, yelling, All right, you guys, line up, these are your orders. You will report to Union Station at 1800 hours for boarding train number so-and-so, and don’t you even think of giving me any shit. Holy Moses, once they had you after that oath, they had you by the throat, and the contrast was simply amazing. Three gentle but eager civilians had walked into that office. Three utterly shaken would-be-marines emerged.

I was sworn in, I would guess, at about one o’clock in the afternoon. I dashed back out to Hyattsville to say good-bye to my mother and my sister. I called up my girlfriend, Margaret, and she was excited and said she would come to see me off at Union Station. Our instructions called for bringing only the clothes we were wearing on our bodies, which eliminated the necessity of packing a suitcase. But we had to bring our orders, and I clutched them in a big brown envelope, together with other official papers and documents and my train ticket.

Margaret and I went to Union Station together, found the train, and enjoyed a lingering, bittersweet farewell kiss. She waved me off as the train started moving. The train, as it turned out, was completely filled with military personnel. I would say that two-thirds of the people on the train were marines who were returning from their boot leave to go on to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

The Marine Corps has a great tradition. When you have finished boot camp and have officially become a marine, you are sent home for ten days to brag about it. And in that process, of course, the marine seed gets further disseminated and planted, as it had been planted in me by Dan Stearns.

These guys were now traveling back to Camp Lejeune, where they were going to begin advanced infantry training at what in those days was called Tent Camp. And they were in abundance. The other people on the train were young men like myself who were still in civilian clothes and completely green and were destined to arrive at Parris Island sometime the next afternoon.

The train must have started in Boston because there were new marine enlistees from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. Almost everybody on the train had either just finished boot camp or was on their way to it, so that it was really a troop train. A couple of sergeants rode with us and checked our orders and checked our tickets and made sure we were all in the right places.

The train first stopped in Fredericksburg, Virginia. On the platform at the train station stood some older ladies and gentlemen with hot coffee, which they served us through the windows of our coaches. We were not allowed to leave the train, but these nice people made sure that we had some hot coffee inside us. And that was my introduction to Fredericksburg. Before my father left to go overseas in 1944, I had taken care of my sister for a long weekend while my parents visited Fredericksburg. They had returned enthralled with the beauty of the city, which was later to become my home. After living there for forty-eight years, I still have an abiding fondness for Fredericksburg.

The train continued on to Richmond, Virginia, where we encountered the same generous coffee treatment. We must have reached the station at about ten or eleven o’clock at night, but there were people serving coffee to us even at that late hour of the night.

As I tried to open my window to reach out for some more coffee, I realized that it was stuck and would not open. I began hitting the frame with the heel of my hand, and suddenly my hand slipped, and the window broke and cut the palm of my hand. It was not a very deep cut, but it bled. The conductor, who was clearly not happy about my busting a window in his train, came with a first-aid kit and grudgingly bandaged my hand. I can truthfully report that after my arrival at Parris Island, with all its rigorous training, I never once thought about that cut, or even noticed it. That cut simply ceased to exist.

The train had two destinations. First, it went to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where all the marines headed for Tent Camp at Camp Lejeune got off and streamed into acres of buses waiting for them. After that stop, minus a number of cars, the train continued on down to Yemassee, South Carolina, a tiny village almost to the Georgia border. There we transferred to a little pokey train, which took us through the bowels of the universe to Port Royal, South Carolina. One of the many carefully planned features of boot camp for the recruits was the loss of a full night’s sleep en route to it. We had departed from Washington at six in the evening and arrived at Parris Island early the next afternoon, having sat up in our coaches all night.

Between Washington DC and Rocky Mount, we civilians had to listen to some more horrendous sea stories, told to us with some relish by the recent graduates, about what was going to happen to us once we arrived at Parris Island. Dan Stearns’s stories paled to insignificance compared to some of the accounts I heard on that train, and I am sure the Marine Corps planned all this quite deliberately and thoughtfully, because by the time we arrived, we were not only tired, but we were in a state of shock.

At Yemassee, late the next morning, we were pulled off the train. Yemassee intersected with the little local rail line that snaked down to the tiny town of Port Royal. Throughout my life, the name Port Royal has, with some regularity, escaped me for reasons that will become clear in a minute, when you will fully understand why I am apt to block it from my memory.

This second train was really ancient. The seats were not upholstered; I remember they were simple wooden benches. That creaky railroad car had to have been at least sixty years old. The train moved very slowly, never more than at most thirty miles per hour, through a semijungle, with very heavy, succulent tropical vegetation. What I remember most distinctly on that trip of about forty miles is that the train was moving through what had to be the backwater of the South. Here and there, farms had been hacked out of the jungle, but what was most profoundly memorable to me was the enormous number of Negroes, living in shacks along the railroad tracks. As the train crept along, stopping about twenty times, a crowd of little boys, the oldest one being probably eight years old, would come out and start dancing for us. And what they were dancing for was money to be thrown to them. Most of the guys on the train got into the spirit of things and, as these boys were dancing, threw nickels, dimes, and quarters, which the boys would scramble to catch.

It was very sad, and I remember looking at the shacks these people were living in, and the conditions under which they existed and their obvious and deep poverty. The children were dressed in nothing more than dirty rags. There did not seem to be any obvious industry to support these people, not even much farming. I remember thinking at the time that this was a face of America I had never quite seen as starkly as on that day on that train from Yemassee to Port Royal. As long as it seemed, the ride finally bumped to a close, and now the excitement was going to begin.

We arrived in Port Royal into the waiting arms of dozens of marine corporals and sergeants, all very sharp-looking in their immaculate uniforms and panama hats. As soon as the train stopped, they swarmed onto every car and pulled us off the train in about two minutes. Once off the cars, they got us lined up into what, to a civilian, might have looked like a military formation. When we finally stood at some semblance of attention, these sergeants began briskly walking up and down the lines.

I remember that a couple of guys reported in wearing a zoot suit coat. During World War II, zoot suits had long tapered coats with very heavily padded shoulders, worn with pants pegged in at the ankles. Oh Lord! The sergeants just had a ball with them. They made these guys take their coats off, spread them out on the ground, jump on them, and then leave the mangled coats behind. The coats were gone; they were finished forever, left behind in the dust. Then there was a guy who brought his tennis racket to Parris Island. Man, that thing went flying off into the boondocks. You wondered what that misguided young man had been thinking of. That poor fellow must have thought that, surely, there would be some time for recreation provided for him at Parris Island.

I was a little better prepared. Once I had firmed up my intention to go into the Marine Corps, I made it a point to talk to Dan Stearns and some other marines. Having learned that the physical aspect of boot camp was going to be very rough, I had embarked on a conditioning program during the weeks and months before I had enlisted. Two features of the program were a good deal of running and push-ups to build upper-body strength. My push-up routine every night before going to bed was to add one push-up to the number of push-ups I had performed the day before. By the time I left for Parris Island, I had reached fifty-nine, which for athletic fellows these days is perhaps not a whole lot. But when I arrived at Parris Island, I was at least not completely soft, though as we will see, even after my very careful preparations, I was still not completely ready for the rigors awaiting me.

After jumping on the zoot suits, the tennis racket, and on all of us on general principles, our sergeants had us all thoroughly terrorized. I must say that I had never been more frightened in my life. On the other side of the train yard were lined up a number of stake body trucks—great, big eighteen-wheelers. The flatbed of this kind of truck was fenced in by vertical and horizontal slats about five feet high. We were herded aboard these trucks, and the speed with which we scrambled up just completely dissatisfied the sergeants. They stood at the end of the stake bed, bang-bang-banging with sticks. Get on, get on, get on!

Once you got on and stood up on the flatbed, you saw that the first guys who had made it up were able to get a place to hold on to the stakes around the perimeter of the big rectangular truck bed. But the sergeants and corporals must have packed a couple hundred people on each truck, and most of us had nothing to hold on to except each other. It soon became obvious that the drivers had been carefully instructed to drive as vigorously and erratically as possible, and being good marines, they strictly followed their orders. The ride to Parris Island quickly developed into one of the scariest truck rides imaginable. While humanity was packed solidly enough to force us to stand up, we were forever losing our balance and swaying back and forth wildly as the truck whirled around every curve, with the drivers slamming on their brakes at inappropriate and most unexpected moments, then quickly accelerating. The ride could not have been more than, at the most, three or four miles, but it was four miles of pure terror.

Parris Island, for those who have never been there, is a rather large island. In World War I, it was used as a marine training spot only to be reached by a boat, but between the two world wars, the government had built a causeway between the island and the shore.

We now drove out across the causeway and entered a large formal gate guarded by very sharp sentries. The driver of each stake body truck poured his vehicle crisply through the gates, slammed on the brakes, threw everybody toward the front of the flatbed, and took off again. As soon as we cleared the gate and arrived inside the base, which completely covered the entire island, we were surrounded by all kinds of marine activity. We began passing marine pedestrians, and as they saw the trucks driving by, the immortal call went ringing up to the skies, You’ll be sorry! And drawn out, You’ll be sooorry! If you weren’t fully demoralized already, by this time, you were quickly approaching the last stages of deep melancholy.

We finally slammed to a stop in front of a complex of long, low buildings, which, I later found out, carried the wonderful name of Sanitary Unit. At the time I arrived at Parris Island, the Sanitary Unit was commanded by a Marine Corps legend, Master Gunnery Sergeant Lou Diamond, and we had somebody in our group who knew him by his reputation. It was Master Gunnery Sergeant Lou Diamond’s job to welcome us to Parris Island.

Diamond had been in the Corps in both World War I and World War II. He had been a hero at Guadalcanal and had reached the status of a legendary figure. He did not deal with us directly, of course. He just oversaw our reception and periodically issued enormously loud and intense commands to his enormously attentive and intense subordinates.

We were herded into long rooms and ordered to take off all our clothes. We stripped. We were given baggage tags to fill out with our home address, and we had to fold up our clothes and put them in a cardboard box, along with our watches. Our underwear and socks were thrown away, compliments of the Marine Corps. The label we had written out was put on each box to be sent back to our mothers. We were received into the Marine Corps, so to speak, as we had been born, stark naked and defenseless.

After we had showered our naked bodies, we moved from the shower unit to the barber shop. There were long lines of barbers. I use the word barber loosely since these guys appeared to have absolutely no training, although this in no way prevented them from manning very fine clippers with which they sheared off all our hair, turning us into what was then affectionately known in the Marine Corps as skinheads. This term has received some bad connotations in recent years, but in those days, a skinhead was a boot.

After the barbershop experience, we found ourselves in another room, where people behind long counters threw six pairs of underwear or drawers, as they were called, and six T-shirts at us. In those days, all of this underclothing was dyed green, I guess for jungle warfare. At the next counter, we were asked our shoe size and given two pairs of boondockers, the field shoes at that time. We were given socks and a seabag. We put on our underwear, first, and then received our utility or field uniform, our dungarees.

Next, we were given what was known in the nice parlance as a fore-and-aft cap, more familiarly known as a piss-cutter. This was the hat for boot camp in those days, although very soon after I finished boot camp, the policy changed, and boots began wearing utility caps made from the same material as the dungarees. We were given belts and buckles and some little thin pieces of rope, which were a complete mystery to us. It turned out that those were tie-ties used to tie laundry to clotheslines when it was hung to dry. All these items we were told to place in our seabags. The next room equipped us with soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, a razor, and all the provisions necessary for personal care because, by golly, the Marine Corps was not going to let you be without these articles of personal hygiene. The interesting thing, though, was that all these toiletries were deducted from our first paycheck. We had to pay for them, and that was the procedure for such luxuries.

We were run through this course as quickly as we could be made to run, and there were any number of people constantly yelling at us, Move over here, move, move, move! Pick up this, pick up that, MOVE! We were under constant pressure to get everything we were supposed to get as quickly as we could get it, but with the clear understanding that we were never, under any circumstances, quick enough.

We were finally disgorged from the end of this building complex, and as we went out, we passed by sergeants standing there with clipboards and rosters, who checked our names and pointed us in various directions. On the day I entered the Marine Corps, I think something like ten platoons were organized. There were 75 men in a recruit platoon, so there must have been about 750 of us going through this initial processing.

The only word I can use to describe the foregoing process is traumatic. By the time you emerged from that building, everything that you thought of as you, the person, or yours, as any personal belongings, were gone. Your watch was gone. Your clothes were gone. Your hair was gone. You had been broken down to the basic human being. And the brutal process of turning a maggoty, low-life, absolutely worthless shit-bird into a marine was about to begin. There were two corporals and a sergeant waiting for the group in which I ended up, and as soon as we came out, with a good deal of yelling and screaming, they got us lined up. We were all carrying a seabag full of stuff and had just put on our not-always-well-fitting brand-new utility uniforms. Mine was a bit too large for me in the chest, and as I remember, we all looked a little like scared and ridiculous misfits. But here we were. Too late to run.

When all seventy-five of us were lined up, the senior drill instructor, Sergeant Hendricks, got out in front of us and introduced himself. Next, he introduced the two junior drill instructors, who were Corporal Bonin and Corporal Bartell. Bonin took us all the way through, and Bonin was the man who probably had the greatest impact on us all. God, he was a mean little son of a gun, and he was a terror! Sergeant Hendricks was a relatively quiet man. He was a Southerner, with a soft drawl to his accent, and for the most part, of the three—but only relatively speaking, mind you—seemed to be the most gentle. I learned quite by accident that Bartell had taken some college courses at Cornell before coming into the Marine Corps, but this was not evident when we first met. All in all, he was pretty mean too.

The first thing we were taught was our platoon number. We were Platoon 467. That meant that in 1945, that July, we were the 467th platoon, because platoon number one started each January 1. The year was about half over, about 190 days had gone by; and by that time, the Corps had already ingested 467 platoons, or an average of 3 or 4 a day. Parris Island was packed with recruits at that point. We were told to never forget our platoon number. Next, we were told to look at our orders. Our orders had our serial number on it. I looked at mine and found that my serial number was 584645. I will never forget this number as long as I live because Corporal Bonin told me that I would go directly to hell if I ever forgot it.

Now I had my platoon number and my serial number, and that was all I needed. We were given the command for right face and marched off to our barracks. Untrained as we were, we did not march very well and, therefore, had to listen to a great number of negative comments about our marching skills. You would have thought that these three guys had just collected the most miserable assortment of humanity that could possibly be scraped up from the bowels of this earth, and they steadily reminded us of that fact all the way to our barracks.

Our barracks was in a long row of barracks the rear sides of which backed up on a fifty-yard-wide open area that sloped down to the sea. There was land visible way across that water from where our barracks stood. In front of the barracks was the drill field, an enormous roughly triangular asphalt-covered plain, which must have encompassed at least thirty acres. I think it was almost one mile long in its longest dimension and at least a half mile wide. Literally, dozens of platoons could drill on that big expanse simultaneously.

Getting settled into the barracks was a total fiasco. We peeled off, lined up, and took whatever bunk popped up as we arrived at it. The bunk had a mattress, a pillow, and a locker box. That was it. We were issued sheets and were immediately taught how to make a bed the only correct way, which was the Marine Corps way. Of course, everybody screwed it up, and if that was possible, we were at once demolished some more with criticism about being the stupidest bunch of idiots our drill instructors had ever had the personal misfortune to encounter. The bunk was made up with a lower sheet and an upper sheet. We had been issued two blankets and had to learn how to put one blanket, with proper corners, as tightly as possible over the upper sheet. The other blanket had to be folded in a very precise way. Eventually, we stenciled our names on that blanket so that our name showed on the fold. And so we made our beds, which took a good deal of time because every single one of us was visibly and obviously incompetent for the task.

Our seventy-five people were to live in one big room with double-decker bunks on both sides; this was our squad bay. Whenever we were in the squad bay, we had to stand at attention at the end of our bunk, the upper-bunk man on the left, and the lower-bunk man on the right. There was a space of a couple of feet between the bunks.

Now the sergeant came in and bellowed, 467, OUTSIDE! We proceeded to tumble over each other as quickly as we could to get outside. We were on the second deck, or second floor, of the barracks. We had to go out through a door at the end of the squad bay to a small porch and an exterior wooden stairway, or ladder, leading with a 180-degree bend to a landing, and then down the rest of the way.

And we went up and down that stairway, I don’t remember how many times, because we were not exiting fast enough in our abysmal incompetence. I remember one of our drill instructors, whether it was Hendricks or Bonin I couldn’t be sure, shouting, When I say 467, OUTSIDE, by the time I say ‘SIDE,’ you should be standing at attention out in front of the building. We practiced over and over again until we got pretty good at it. We could get seventy-five people down that staircase in about two seconds. Phoom, and we were down, standing at attention. Next, we were taught the proper position of attention, although the exact sequence of events during those first few days is somewhat hazy in my memory. I have tried to recapture and recall it as best I can, but I am never sure whether I can remember it all in the proper order.

There was a lot of processing and administration to be accomplished. We were given another complete physical exam, which I will tell you about in a minute. We were issued rifles. We were measured and fitted for our uniform, the Marine Corps greens, and these were tailor-fitted. We had to sign up for pay purposes, and we had to sign up for allotments, if we wanted to make them; this was money taken out of our pay and sent home. We had to sign up for savings bonds as everybody had to buy defense bonds. At the time I enlisted, the monthly pay was $50. Of course, there was nothing to spend our money on at Parris Island; we were just saving it up in the bank. We had to sign up for our National Service life insurance, and all of the preceding involved taking the platoon to some administrative office, passing out forms, and being instructed on how to fill them out. During these administrative activities, even the clerks in these offices treated us like maggots. Everybody was yelling at us at all times, and that was part of the program of keeping us, literally, off-balance and under constant stress.

We also had to be tested. During the first few days, everybody took what was called the General Classification Test, a form of IQ test. We took something called the Eddy test, which checked our capacity for electronics. We also took a couple of language aptitude tests. And every one of these tests meant that the whole platoon had to stumble down those stairs, line up at attention, and be marched or double-timed, which is running in step, to these various places and be herded through these various processes, with our drill instructors harassing us every step of the way.

Not only did we have a complete medical examination, we also received a complete dental examination. The Marine Corps fixed up everybody who came in, and when you came out of Parris Island, your person was fixed, and your teeth were fixed. Although I had always taken care of my teeth, I apparently needed two fillings. At this point, the thought of having my teeth drilled and filled seemed like a wonderful break, because I would be able to go to the dentist by myself without any harassment from my DI. And there is another story to be told later.

I recall that all this processing began on the very first day. The first day, remember, is just the day after the evening before, when I left DC. I had had no real sleep, and we had not eaten yet. It was about five in the afternoon when we had the first part of our physical exam. The dispensary we were marched to was clear at the other end of the long dimension of the asphalt drill field. Our drill instructors took us out on the drill field, and then we double-timed; we ran from our barracks to the dispensary. I guess they wanted us to arrive for our physical out of breath. As you know, I had been doing some exercises before I left home, so I was merely exhausted at the end of the run, but I made it. A number of my fellow boots in the platoon were not so lucky. They fell down or fell out, and oh my god, the drill instructors just climbed all over them. Most of them got kicked or punched until they managed to get themselves down to the dispensary in one way or another.

And there was a tragedy in that particular run. One of my fellow boots, somebody I had not even really met and only vaguely remember seeing as we were going through the evolution in the reception center, and later in our squad bay making up our bunks, died on that double-time march. I was to learn later that a significant portion of our Platoon 467 consisted of a levy of people who had volunteered for the Marine Corps through the Holland, Michigan, Selective Service. They had been drafted, and the bulk of them were eighteen or nineteen years old. But some of them apparently went up to twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, and believe me, a person at the age of twenty-four going through Parris Island really has problems—it is that rough.

One of the gentlemen from Holland, Michigan, who had volunteered, was twenty-seven, and he had been a little soft and pudgy. We subsequently learned that he was a man who had spent his life sitting at a shoemaking machine, and as we started running from the barracks to the dispensary, this guy started double-timing along with the rest of us but soon fell out and fell down. The drill instructors went over to him and were about to begin harassing him when they realized that he was unconscious. He was, in fact, dead. He had died right there, on that run.

That put the fear of God into us, as you can imagine. We had sustained a fatal casualty our first day in our training, and I have often remembered that poor fellow whom I never got to know. He must not have thought through properly his idea of volunteering for the Marine Corps when he was drafted. He would certainly have benefited by preparing for the program and getting into better physical shape.

After we completed the first part of our physical, we were marched back out of the dispensary. Although we still looked awful, at least we moved like a platoon, and were rewarded by, finally, being taken to our first meal—dinner. I want to say, for the record, that throughout recruit training, we were well fed. The food was plain and simple, but good and abundant. I had weighed about 178 pounds when I enlisted. When I left Parris Island, I weighed 193 pounds. In spite of all the horrendous physical exercise and constant harassment, I had miraculously put on 15 pounds, most of which was muscle. Our dining hall was only about one hundred yards from our barracks, so that while we were being harassed a good deal on the way to our first meal, at least we did not have a long distance to go. And I must say that once we got into that dining hall, there was absolutely nobody yelling at us. We were allowed to eat in peace. I did not realize that on the first day, but I came to appreciate it in the days to follow. Having talked to subsequent generations of marines, I am told that this is no longer true, and I think that is a mistake. After our peaceful meal, we were allowed to straggle, individually, back to our barracks from the dining hall. We were marched to our meals, but were not marched back to our barracks. During that little stroll, we were allowed to smoke a cigarette. That first day at Parris Island was the day I started smoking seriously, a habit I had to break off, with great difficulty, much later on in life.

Once we got back to the barracks, the training began again. We trained until it got dark. The first things we learned, in addition to the position of attention, were how to make a facing movement, an about-face, and the principles of marching and flanking movements and oblique