From Maggots to Marines: Boot Camp Revisited

By Jackie Greene

Every year, approximately thirty-eight thousand recruits pour through the gates of Marine Corps Recruit Depots at San Diego, California, and Parris Island, South Carolina, for a chance to line up on the historic yellow footprints. And once on it, the reality of the situation sets in and almost without exception, they immediately ask themselves one question: "What the f---- did I get myself into?"

In From maggots to Marines, male and female Marines from WWII to present day share their sometimes hilarious and always insanely interesting stories of their boot camp experience.

Read their personal accounts of the shock and awe of arrival; those fun-filled trips to the sand pits; close order drill adventures; and most importantly...tales of some of the insane (and funny) "training aids" implemented by their DIs.

Then flip to the DI chapters to get the word from the duty hut--straight from the "hats" themselves. The rigors of a 100- to 120-hour workweek, the strain placed on their marriages, and the opium they rely on to get them through it all: humor.

One day early on, we were waiting our turn outside of a warehouse while others were inside getting some equipment issued. While we were standing at parade rest, the senior asks for a volunteer for some undisclosed mission.

"How many of you have one year of college," he asked. A bunch of us raised our hands. "How many of you have two years of college?" A smaller number of hands went up. "How many of you have three years of college?" Only one guy raised his hand. "Come here, maggot," the DI barked.

At this point, I'm sure the kid probably thought he had just won the boot camp lottery and that his educational background had just staked him to some advantage. Until he heard the next words, that is, "Grab this f----ing coffee cup, puke, and run back to the duty hut and get me a cup of coffee." And just like that, the recruit got a slice humble pie along with the realization that his schooling didn't mean jack here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684982066

Jackie Greene

As a wife, mother, pastor, Bible teacher, author, and dentist, Dr. Jacqueline "Jackie" Greene is an inspirational speaker and faith leader focused on emboldening women to own their God-given individuality. Through her Permission Movement, Dr. Jackie empowers women to be brave enough to step into the lives God has prepared for them. Along with her husband, Grammy–nominated recording artist Travis Greene, Jackie copastors the fast-growing Forward City Church in Columbia, South Carolina.

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Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Life Before the Marines

My Southern Roots

Chapter 2: Draft Board Blues

Chapter 3: It's Fun To Stay at the YMCA

Chapter 4: My Arrival at MCRD

Chapter 5: Why the Marines

Chapter 6: Your Arrival Stories

Chapter 7: Marine Corps Recruit Depots

San Diego

Parris Island

Chapter 8: My Drill Instructors

Your Drill Instructors

Chapter 9: Reveille: Lights On, Hatches Open!

Chapter 10: Mess Hall: Ready, Seats!

Chapter 11: A Day in the Life…

On the Drill Field

Off the Drill Field

Chapter 12: Rifle Range

Chapter 13: Boot Camp Funnies

Drill Instructor Funnies

Chapter 14: Women Marines: Not for Wussies

Why the Marines?

Arrival at MCRD

Meeting the DIs

The Mess Hall Nazis

Chapter 15: The Daily Grind

Boot Camp Funnies

Chapter 16: The Male DI Perspective

Motivation to become DIs

DI School

The DI Hierarchy

Family Life

An MCRD State of Mind

Smile and You Smile Alone

Chapter 17: Ask the DIs

Chapter 18: The Female DI Perspective

Motivation To Become DIs

DI School

Uniquely Female

The DI Schedule

Breaking Through Barriers

Training

Chapter 19: Ask the DIs

Lights Out

Meet our Contributors

About the Author

cover.jpg

From Maggots to Marines

Boot Camp Revisited

Jackie Greene

Copyright © 2023 Jackie Greene

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2023

BOOK COVER PHOTO CREDITS:

Top left: Panicked recruit. USMC photo (Photographer unknown)

Top Center: Parris Island DI Sgt. Michael Nygaard. (USMC Photo by: Cpl. MaryAnn Hill).

Top right photo: DI GySgt. Paulette Newcomb. (USMC photo by: LCPL Bryson K. Jones).

Bottom squad bay photo: USMC photo (Photographer unknown).

Bus arrival, opposite copyright page: DI SSgt. Ferriola. (USMC photo by: Cpl. Brooke C. Woods)

Neither the United States Marine Corps nor any other component of the Department of Defense has approved, endorsed, or authorized this book.

ISBN 978-1-68498-205-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68498-206-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Get off my bus, maggots! Move it! Too slow! Too slow!

We don't care about your emotions, or what you did as a kid, or what part of the country you come from. We have a mission, and you're either onboard or you're a problem. That's never going to change.

—GySgt. Terence D'Alesandro

We were screamed at and called names none of us had ever heard before.

—Sgt. Bill Schrum

It was about the third day before we got introduced to our regular DIs. I thought, Oh, my god, there's more b——hes like this? And that's when they told us, You girls haven't seen nothing yet!

—Sgt. Maj. Holly Prafke

Preface

I didn't grow up clamoring to be a Marine. And I didn't come from a long line of military heroes who died in this battle or in that war. I certainly wasn't like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump who believed he had a destiny to die on the battlefield, and that Forrest Gump's saving him had cheated him out of it.

In fact, when I got orders as a twenty-one-year-old for ground forces, Westpac in July 1969 and landed on Okinawa for staging in country, I didn't feel the slightest bit of resentment when those orders got rescinded. If my destiny was to remain in Okinawa and become the sports editor of the Okinawa Marine newspaper, then so be it.

A number of former Marines I interviewed for this book told me they had wanted to be a Marine since their youth. Their parents even tried to talk them out of it, hoping to steer them toward the more traveled road—the one that leads to the good life. But their minds were set. Oh, some listened to their parents for a while, gave school, or some other endeavor the old college try, but ultimately, they caved to a conviction that they were to become Marines.

I've often wondered, what is it that resides in the soul of mankind that drives him to go where angels fear to tread? What compels a young boy to join the military with the hope of going to the battlefield as some have told me? Patriotism? A sense of adventure? A death wish?

Working as a 4312 (informational services person, a journalist), I never got orders for hell holes like Con Thien, or Khe Sanh, but I did spend a year in Norfolk, Virginia (formerly Camp Elmore), interviewing those who did.

The Portsmouth Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, was a thirty-minute drive from my office and a popular landing spot for Marines fresh from the jungles of Southeast Asia. They were sent there to convalesce from wounds suffered in combat. Sadly, I realized that many of the Marines I interviewed there would never recover—not completely anyway.

One of my jobs each week was to stop by the medical center and write stories about regularly scheduled award presentations there. High-ranking officers from colonels to generals would appear and present Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, Purple Hearts, handshakes, and heartfelt thank-yous for their sacrifices.

Most of the time, these young men were unable to even get out of bed for the occasion. I would attempt to get as much information from the honored Marine as possible, write a story, and then release it to the local media as well as his hometown paper.

There were young men confined there for God knows how long, with no arms, no legs, and in many cases—no hope. There were those with faces badly disfigured, horribly burned, and scared, wondering how their friends and family would perceive them upon their return as half the man they used to be.

These young men had been shot up, blown up, and now, they were bandaged up—and screwed up. Many of these Marines would never again do many of the simple things that most of us take for granted.

They left their parents and girlfriends as boys, putting their lives on hold for their country with the expectation of returning home to press the Reset button. They left with dreams but returned with nightmares. Yet here I stood not with a gun in hand—but with a pen—questioning them about experiences that I could only imagine.

To me, each of these young guys were supermen who had raced across the bullet-swept terrain, disregarding his own life to save those of others. Those were words read from the typical citation accompanying a specific ribbon or medal. I heard this characterization, or one similar, repeated at presentations more times than I can remember. But somehow, those words always rang hollow as I contemplated the gravity of their situation.

I didn't realize it at the time, but those boys lying in those beds left a scar deep within my soul. Years later, I found I could never watch a Vietnam movie without sobbing, and I could never understand why. After all, I hadn't been in combat. Finally, it dawned on me that those guys still lived on within me, always just below the conscious level somewhere.

It's to the memory of these brave young men and women that I dedicate this book. You are my brethren.

Introduction

Most of us have seen the movie and snickered and laughed at R. Lee Ermey's portrayal of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman—the colorful drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket. We got a kick out of Ermey, a former real-life Marine, running roughshod over his recruits probably because he reminded us of our own DIs. We sat there mesmerized at Hartman's behavior because we had seen this script before—and not on the movie screen. We all had a Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.

And we've all had drill instructors we thought to be somewhat disturbed and others we respected and hoped to emulate. They made an unforgettable and lasting impression of us. And now whenever an opportunity presents itself to revisit those memories, if only for a moment, we cherish the opportunity.

That's the basis for writing From Maggots to Marines, to take you back to the days of our youth to relive that two- to three-month period of your life spent at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) at Parris Island or where the really tough guys like myself went—San Diego.

On the back pages, you'll see photographs of the forty-one Marines and one Navy Corpsman, whose memories of boot camp are enshrined within these pages. You'll hear their experiences—and mine—with a focus on the funny, goofy, and unbelievable incidents that no doubt occurred within every platoon.

Among those photos, you'll note there are thirteen former drill instructors (eight men, five women) who spent time talking with me to lend a perspective you likely haven't heard before.

If you're like me, you left boot camp with a less than favorable impression of the men wearing the Smokey Bear hats. But to be fair, did any of us ever really get a chance to know them as human beings? Personally, after graduation I never ran into another DI again. Hence, the basis of my opinion and probably yours was formed over that short little window of time.

But after spending a ton of time talking with these men and women, I've come to a realization that the Marine Corps may not want out there. I'll just whisper it to you…Shh. Marine drill instructors are in reality a bunch of really nice guys and gals!

Did you catch that? Yes, I said they're regular human beings: extremely intelligent, patriotic, hardworking, and devoted to duty. People with a sense of humor. They simply had a job to do, and they did it. More importantly, they had a truck full of great stories to unload. Did I say they are funny?

From Maggots to Marines is a compilation of these forty-two men and women sharing boot camp stories that have remained largely untold—until now. Together, they detail their late-night arrivals, dining experiences, and drill field stories; they even commiserate about their never-ending run-ins with sand fleas. But it's the experiences with fellow recruits (with their own special quirks) and with their drill instructors that deserve the headlines.

Comedian Steve Martin liked to say that comedy is not pretty. That line is especially relevant at recruit training where things can be dreadful yet funny at the same time. Some of our favorite memories are courtesy of our DIs, folks who would have gone nuts working a hundred to a hundred and twenty hours per week except for occasional comic relief. And much of the time, they had to manufacture it themselves. And so they did.

Our short stay at MCRD was one for the books, unlike the boot camp of any other. Everlasting memories were created.

General George Patton famously said, No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his. I liked General Patton's idea. I wanted the other guy to die too. And like a lot of others, I figured the Marine Corps was better at making the other guy die than any other branch.

I'm seventy-three now, and it's still a blast to get together with other Marines—young or old—and reminisce and laugh about our Marine Corps experiences—especially boot camp. I hope you laugh as much at these stories as I did while uncovering them.

Sit back and let's take a trip back to our younger days.

Chapter 1

Life Before the Marines

Just a few months prior to shipping out for Marine boot camp, Mike Turner and I had been enjoying a carefree college freshmen year at Southwestern Community College (SWOCC), in North Bend, Oregon—just twenty-seven miles up from the coastal community of Bandon.

At Bandon High School, we had been among the eighty-six graduates that made up the Class of '66. It was a unusually large graduating class for a school of barely three hundred.

In those days, Bandon had a population of 1,650, according to the city limits sign that greeted you as you entered town and was the self-proclaimed Cranberry Capital of Oregon.

The Coquille River winds its way through the port of Bandon there on its way to the Pacific Ocean less than a mile from the downtown boat docks. The coastline from Bandon south to Brookings is among the most majestic and rugged found anywhere and is known for its many well-known rock formations.

As you might expect from a cranberry capital, many of its residents like Don and Ruby Fraser who lived a rock's throw away, owned cranberry bogs. Their son Danny was my neighbor and classmate and roomed with me at SWOCC.

Bandon-by-the-Sea, as the town newspaper had long ago christened it, was a friendly town to grow up in. Everybody knew everybody, and that was a big problem for children looking to be naughty behind their parent's backs. Parents there had a Gestapo-like system in place—a dragnet of tattle-tales set up to squash misbehavior. If you did the crime, you did the time. It was a very oppressive system.

My town was a place where you could leave your door unlocked since crime was negligible, a few drunken incidents now and then, kids racing their cars through town on Halloween. It was a conservative community and the local cops—Big Mac McDonald (chief of police) and his wingman Harry Franson—were never going to find one of their cases featured on a TV crime show. The two city constables were known and admired by practically everyone in town and would ask you probing questions such as How's the old pitching arm doing, Jack?

Dad and I used to spend a lot of time fishing off of one of the two jetties that usher the Coquille River out to sea. On the south jetty, you could fish on the surf side for ocean perch or on the river side and hook into an occasional rock cod or even a doctor fish. The north jetty…meh. Sometimes it was the wind that dictated which side we fished on, as the wind in Bandon can be relentless. And cold.

You may have surmised by now that I fished a lot growing up. In fact, one of my mom's favorite rehashes of my childhood—one that she would tell until her dying day—was about me and a buddy boldly fishing in the local fish hatchery.

It had been one of those days where we hadn't caught a thing when my pal Sonny and I happened upon some friends who had caught a whole string of trout. Frustrated, we decided to go where we knew the fish to be—the fish hatchery.

Long story short, we got caught. But not before we had a five-pound trout on the line splashing all over the place. (And that's what caused our problem—all that splashing). The game warden or whoever he was, ushered us into his office and pretended to call the police, but fortunately for, us they were out of town. But he promised they would come see us soon. For the next month, I would sneak up on our home…afraid what I might find parked there.

My Southern Roots

I had moved to Bandon from Quitman, Mississippi, at the end of my first-grade year due to my dad's employer closing down. When it did, Dad was unable to find work for quite a spell until he got a call from Uncle Pete out in Oregon. Pete said there were lumber mill jobs available, and in short order, Dad headed west.

Quitman is similar in size to Bandon and located twenty-five miles south of Meridian. The Archusa River, a lazy little stream that winds along the outskirts of town, provided our favorite swimming hole as kid where dad would always impress me with his diving skills off a rope hanging out over a deep hole.

Quitman is an ageless little town; it never seems to change much. I went back for a visit a couple of years ago, and as I drove down the city streets, it looked as though not a single improvement had been made to structures in the business district since I had left. The buildings, almost without exception, looked old and run down, and I actually wondered if some of them had been abandoned.

I grew up there in the early '50s, when colored folks in the town had their own schools and neighborhoods. Nothing was integrated at that time. There had been a fast-food restaurant as you first entered town from the north with a colored window at the back. Down the street a few blocks was a colored drinking fountain.

I remember driving by our swimming hole one day on the way to town and Dad telling me we wouldn't be able to go swimming for a week. Why not? I asked. Because a bunch of n—— went in swimming there the other day, he told me straight-facedly. That was a new revelation to a six-year-old kid—not that blacks were considered second-class citizens; I had already surmised that but that they were also filthy enough to foul up a stream of water. It was life in the South at the time.

Like any country town worth its salt, Quitman had a railroad track running through the city limits and a county courthouse located smack dab in the middle of town—on Archusa Avenue. People would congregate around its park benches, drink a cold soda, sit in the shade, and talk about who was having babies and how good the football team was going to be that year.

My first memories of life in Quitman was living on a 180-acre farm purchased a couple of decades earlier by my grandfather, Henry Zielinski. Up until 1905, Henry had lived in the Warsaw vicinity of Poland until he learned he was being conscripted into the Russian Army. Fortunately, he was able to arrange for someone in the United States to sponsor him to come to America. And like all immigrants at the time, he was channeled through Ellis Island in New York City.

Initially, my grandfather left Poland alone and was only later able to get my grandmother and their young daughter out. Reunited at last in Buffalo, New York, Henry worked for a while in a foundry in nearby Amherst.

At some point, Grandpa decided to Americanize his last name, changing it to Green. Oddly enough, when my dad was born, they made a mistake on his birth certificate—adding an extra e. It was never corrected.

But city life—and especially the sulfuric fumes that saturated Buffalo's air—grated on Henry. One day, he noticed an advertisement for some land for sale in Mississippi and, through an attorney, purchased it sight unseen. He made it a lovely little farm, and I loved living there. I can still well remember our barn and especially the chicken coop where I felt I was in mortal danger from angry roosters while gathering eggs each day. Dad grew corn and sugarcane for profit, and I still remember sucking on a piece of that sweet stalk he would occasionally cut for me.

My father was the youngest of four brothers, but since we moved out west at the end of my first-grade year, I really don't remember much about them. In fact, I never really got to meet much of my family, period. My grandfather died before I was born, and my grandmother, Violet, was killed by a gas heater explosion when I was five.

Then there was mom's side of the family—the Rasberries. In 1946, Mom was just a young country girl of fourteen and found herself attending a country social called Butcher's Day. Butcher's Day was a time neighbors would come together and prepare meat for the winter. But after the work was done, it would always turn into a social event.

A couple of years before she passed, Mom put together a book entitled My Yesterdays, detailing memorable events of her life for posterity purposes. In it, she shared meeting Dad:

It was one of those occasions when we were about to eat when in strode this tall, blonde boy, wearing a smile and a guitar. After a few songs I decided he could be the new Eddie Arnold, and I could be the new Mrs. Eddie Arnold.

A year later, that meeting had blossomed into a romance, and now Mom really did want to get married. But because she was just fifteen, Ma and Pa Rasberry weren't onboard with the idea.

But my mother wasn't the kind to take no for an answer. Soon they found themselves headed across the state line where marrying at fifteen was legal. They drove into Livingston, Alabama, and found a Justice of the Peace to perform the nuptials inside a small grocery store that doubled as a wedding hall.

And so, in the middle of that mom-and-pop grocery, right next to the pork and beans and the peanut butter, they took their vows. Not exactly a glamorous wedding day for the Arnolds, but it would have to do.

Before long, the newlyweds moved into the Green family homestead in the country where I was born two years later. I still have treasured memories of that farm, which is strange, because now I have trouble remembering what I did yesterday.

One of the earliest was of my Polish grandmother giving me a tongue-lashing—in Polish—about peeing off the back porch. I didn't always know exactly what she was saying, but I could always catch the thrust of her meaning by her tone. My father could speak fluent Polish, but I never learned a single phrase with the possible exception of, Don't pee off the porch, maggot! (Okay, maybe she didn't use that exact phraseology.)

And then one tragic Sunday evening, while we were away for the day in Mobile, Alabama, a gas heater repair went wrong. A gas leak exploded, burning my grandmother severely. She died on Christmas eve, a few days later. It wasn't terribly long afterward that Dad was forced to settle up with his four brothers by selling the farm.

That meant, of course, that we had to find another home, and we did—a much smaller house minus all the acreage—near my cousin Benny Wayne White. It wasn't much of a house really, no indoor plumbing, and a smelly outhouse in the backyard that I always feared would collapse and drop me into that nasty stuff below.

When we needed water, I was always happy to draw it out of the well, and I'd place the bucket full of cold water on the back porch shelf next to the hanging dipper. We were poor by almost any standard, but I had no idea about any of that. Compared to what my mother had lived through as a girl, however, we were living relatively high on the hog.

My mother was born Bobbie Joyce Rasberry, and in her book, a number of stories spoke to her family's state of pennilessness. Spending a night in town with a city girl and discovering something called shampoo, for example. She thought everyone used regular lye soap.

One illustrative example of her impoverished childhood days happened when she was twelve or thirteen. It was the time her home caught fire and burned to the ground. To make do, her father ran some electricity to the chicken coop, scrubbed it down with lye soap, laid down some flooring, and that became their temporary living quarters.

In subsequent weeks and months, welfare gave Mom and her younger brother Dean, a few clothes which were welcomed but easily identifiable as relief clothes by the kids at school. My biggest fear was that the children on the school bus would learn where I lived and tell everyone at school, she said in her book. When I got off the bus, I would wait for the bus to leave before I started the walk home.

Her father was a deeply religious man who early in life had fallen off a truck loaded with produce (perhaps with turnips) and broke his back. It kept him from ever obtaining a top-paying job but didn't seem to handicap his child-producing ability. He had twelve in all.

Mom also had a wealth of cousins, and one of her favorite clans was the Cooper cousins, especially Buddy. Buddy's given name was Wyatt, but none of his close friends called him that. Buddy always dreamed of becoming a preacher and never missed an occasion to act like one. From her book:

Any pet—animal or bird—that died in our community was indeed lucky. His or her passing did not go unnoticed. We had funerals weekly or as often as necessary. We would take the corpse, find an appropriate box and prepare a grave. With Buddy [the preacher] in the lead, Dean and Harry [a Cooper cousin], acting as pall bearers; the girls in the rear with the flowers, we would make our way to the graveyard. Buddy preached and we would sing In the Sweet by and By and Shall we gather at the River. Those were our favorites. We would pray, bury the body, and cover the grave with flowers. After Buddy's powerful eulogy, and after we had cried sufficiently, we would make our way back home.

Buddy Cooper later attended seminary for a while but eventually headed for Hollywood where he got cast in With a Song in My Heart starring Susan Hayward. He also wrote some screenplays and scripts for TV and fell in love with and married Gloria Vanderbilt—yes, fabulously wealthy Gloria Vanderbilt. Anderson Cooper, currently a CNN anchor, was one of their two sons, along with Carter.

While Mom grew up in poverty, Dad never got beyond the eighth grade. Mom dropped out of school after her sophomore year to marry—likely in the hopes of escaping her simplistic way of life. As a small child, I stayed with Grandma Rasberry from sunrise to sundown while they worked.

Mama, as I called her, would wake me around 5:00 a.m. each day and have coffee, bacon, and fresh biscuits waiting on the table—along with some Brer Rabbit Molasses to pour on the biscuits. It was mama that got me hooked on coffee at the age of one or two, routinely filling my bottle with half coffee, half milk.

Neither my grandmother nor grandfather ever owned or drove a car. Every time Mama had to go to a doctor (which was a lot), a relative or friend had to take her there. I doubt too if either had ever known the simple pleasures of a vacation.

My cousin Benny lived down the road about five hundred feet away. I was at Bennie's constantly—usually trying to read through his vast collection of comic books that reached to the ceiling of his closet three times over. I always thought it was a bit funny for me, Jackie Wayne Greene, to have a cousin named Bennie Wayne White.

If it was raining outside, Bennie and I watched TV westerns— The Lone Ranger, Annie Oakley, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and my favorite—Adventures of Superman. And then on an occasional Saturday night, he would invite me to the movies with him. I'd drop by his house, we'd hop in his '50 Chevy pick-up truck, collect one of his buddies, and we'd head into town. I rode in the back by myself—completely oblivious to the grave danger that modern-day fanatics would say Benny had put me in.

And then one day near the end of the first grade school year, Mom told us that we needed to pack our things. We were leaving. It was one of those whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis moments. Dad had found work in Oregon, and now we were joining him.

We left out of the Quitman train station one rainy night after saying a tearful goodbye to my beloved Mama. Mom told me years later that our leaving had broken her mother's heart, and if she had it to do over, she would never have taken her grandkids away from her. It broke my heart too.

Three days later, we arrived in Bandon, Oregon. Cold and windy Bandon. Nowadays this small coastal town is known for its world-famous golf courses, which replaced the cow pasture that doubled as the city municipal golf course at the time.

Living in Mississippi, I had never been exposed to sports, at all. I soon got involved with little league baseball, thanks to a neighborhood kid I met a few days after settling in. He was walking across the parking lot of Bafano's Market, which was a few hundred feet from our new apartment residence. So I thought I'd introduce myself.

In my best Southern drawl, I asked him his name. B-I-L-L, he said proudly. I was taken aback a little. This kid could spell his name. I'm J-A-C-K, I countered, letting him know I could spell too. I thought this kid might be pretty smart, and if he wanted a little thrust and parry, I'd give it to him. I wasn't about to be outdone by some Yankee as if I were a kid from some hick town. After all, it was my grandfather, not me, who had fallen off a turnip truck. Later, I found out that he had a last name—Smith.

Well, that broke the ice, and soon we were capturing bull frogs and playing cowboys and Indians. Over the years, we developed an athletic competitiveness between the two of us that was unrivaled. A couple of times, for example, we staged a seven game home and away baseball World Series—with baseball cards. Half at his house, half at mine. It was cutting-edge entertainment for twelve-year-olds in 1960.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus at age thirty-two and had to subject herself to radiation, chemotherapy, and cobalt treatments. It was a terrible time for the family and the incessant treatment devastated mom's immune system.

Thereafter, if a cold was going around, Mom caught it. If she had to go out of town, she had to stop and rest somewhere along the way. Holding a job became a labor of love. But she didn't complain much. She always said that she allowed herself five minutes per day to complain, and after that, she thought she should just shut up about it. My mother was a good woman—a godly woman.

Looking back, I came to realize that I had never fully appreciated the suffering that she went through as I grew up. I was young and full of myself. I wish I had been a little more in tune, Mom.

Chapter 2

Draft Board Blues

C:\Users\Jackie\Desktop\The US Marines want you.jpg

At some point during my senior year, I began to realize that just beneath the surface of this tranquil lifestyle centered on church, school, cars, sports, and girls, the Vietnam war was heating up.

Most of my friends seemed to be rushing off to college, so I assumed that was what I was supposed to do as well. But what was I supposed to study? I didn't have a clue as to what I even wanted to be at that point, so what classes would prepare you for an unknown occupation? In the end, I threw darts against the wall to fill out my credit hours.

Soon, I found myself the sports editor of the Southwestern Oregon Community College (SWOCC) student publication, playing on the baseball team, and taking enough courses to make believe I was a legit student.

But my heart wasn't in it. By the end of my freshman year, my GPA was in the toilet, and I was rarely completing any schoolwork—other than writing a lot of sports articles.

When I enrolled at SWOCC, I had rented an apartment with two other lifelong buddies—my neighbor Danny, and Terry Dornath. We lived in this three-bedroom haunt above a restaurant in North Bend and drove our cars the three or four miles to school each morning. In the late afternoons and evenings, it was goof off time.

Danny for some unknowable reason thought studying was what college students needed to do, and so he studied a lot. Terry and I were more reasonable. For us, completing our last class of the day meant party time. Soon, my school books and I were sleeping in separate rooms.

And then one day—quite unexpectedly—a rumor that my name, along with former classmate Mike Turner's, had turned up on a list at the local draft board. It proved to be more than a rumor.

I had nothing against the military. In fact, I had absolute respect for anyone who had ever served—including several uncles. It was just that I wasn't mentally prepared for my number being called. I was free from parental control for the first time in my life, and I liked it.

Suddenly, Vietnam was no longer some place in Southeast Asia where other guys came home in body bags. It had suddenly become very personal.

My inner self gave me a good talking to about how my failure to study had got me in this predicament. It looked like ol' Dan had been the smart one after all. Or perhaps my perspective that Vietnam was inevitable had been the real culprit. If we were all going there, why kill ourselves studying—let Uncle Sam do it for us. Live for today, right?

I remember a Country Joe and the Fish song that was saturating the air waves at the time: I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag. The lyrics of that popular anti-war anthem resonated with a lot of young boys of the day. I know it did with me:

And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for?

Don't ask me, I don't give a d——mn…next stop is Vietnam.

And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates,

Well there ain't no time to wonder why… Whoopee, we're all gonna die!"

At the nation's universities, the cry against US involvement in Vietnam was reaching a fevered pitch, and the wisdom of sending our boys off to war for nefarious reasons was under review. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been killed or wounded or had a relative that did.

The war came to Bandon as well. Over a six-month period, the Class of '66 twice received notifications that Vietnam—like AT&T—had reached out and touched someone. The two from Bandon became known as the Two Terry's—Terry Williams and Terry Sumerlin. The deaths of those two Marines shocked the entire community.

LCpl. Terry Sumerlin, according to official reports, was killed in fighting on September 7, 1967, while serving with M Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment in Con Thien in the Quang Tri province.

"On September 7, 1967, Con