Chapter 3 “Pla-toon…Ten-Hut!”

Chapter 3 “Pla-toon…Ten-Hut!”

I was drafted in the only draft that the U. S. Marine Corps conducted after World War II. Since my girlfriend and I were planning on marriage anyway, we went ahead and tied the knot in September of 1966. She was a quiet girl whose family background featured a divorced mother who’d remarried a younger man. He and I got along great, even though I always felt uncomfortable around her mother. Their house featured French provincial furniture, wall hangings, carpet, rugs, blinds, pictures, lights and anything else that could be deemed to be French provincial. I didn’t really care what it was, but it did piss me off that I had to take my shoes off every time I walked through the back door (we weren’t allowed to use the front… it was for company). Also, if we sat down on the furniture, we had to first check our clothes to make sure no dirt clung to our pants. Once I farted while sitting next to my wife on her mother’s Louis XIV loveseat, and judging from my wife’s reaction, you’d have thought I just dropped my pants and took a dump. She jumped up, pulled me to my feet, and searched the upholstery for signs of leakage. Despite finding none, she admonished me to never do that again and proceeded to go get a wipe cloth and some fabric cleaner, which she rubbed into the cloth with all the vigor expected of her. I glanced at her step-father, Lee, and he shrugged his shoulders in his best Welcome to the family, you poor bastard expression. I think that was the first time I realized I’d made a terrible mistake.

But, I did love the girl, at least in the context that I thought of love. We were very different people, though, perhaps too different, ultimately. Our biggest sin was getting married without ever really getting to know one another first. In those days, sex before marriage was considered blasphemous, especially given the fact that her grandfather was a Methodist minister, and he’d be performing the matrimonial ceremony. So, instead of pressing the issue and demanding carnal knowledge of her, I honored her principles and wishes to be a virgin at her wedding. My father tried to give me some advice, for perhaps the first time since my baseball disappointment.

“Son,” he told me while setting his hand on my shoulder, “ask yourself one question. Would you ever think of buying a pair of shoes without trying them on first?” However, I didn’t listen. The wedding was already planned, dresses were being ordered and the church was on reserve… if I backed out now, I risked being vanquished from two families. At the time, I honestly didn’t think either mother could have withstood the embarrassment of becoming jilted mothers-in-law. Somehow I forgot that from time to time we’d be doing something other than having sex; that an occasion might possibly arise requiring us to actually have a conversation, which, of course, we were incapable. Plus, since I was probably going to be killed in Vietnam, I needed to have a bun in the oven before I left. We’d come too far… there needed to be a wedding. Blake was born in September of 1967, exactly one week after our first anniversary. Kimberly followed in June of 1969. Two years after that, not having yet found the wherewithal or desire to purchase any French provincial furnishings, I was given my walking papers. We were a No Fault test case in Colorado in 1971, the divorce procedure that requires only one ground—irreconcilable differences. Truth be told, she wanted the divorce, I didn’t. That fact had no bearing on the proceedings. Wait just a minute here, I can be sued for divorce, lose my children and everything I have without having committed adultery, without beating her or abandoning her to the whims of an uncaring world? Apparently so, because I received papers in the mail declaring that my estranged spouse had obtained a judgment against me requiring me to pay child support and other expenses for the welfare of my children. Well, let’s see if I have this right: I lose everything I love and she loses only what she doesn’t want (me). She keeps the house, the car, all the furnishings and I get a picture of each of the kids and a pillow. Sounds fair to me… I sought the advice of counsel and he told me that I would waste my money by hiring him. The courts were obliged to pretty much give the wife whatever she wanted. Son, you are screwed, blued and tattooed.

Sorry, I jumped ahead a little. My Marine Corps years are pretty much a blur. Honestly, I think that’s a defense mechanism my brain uses to keep from recalling events that hurt too much to think about. I will tell you, this; I went in, did what I had to do to stay alive, and honorably served my country in the best way I knew how before getting out. Along the way, I learned how to fly helicopters and airplanes, how to keep my mouth shut until spoken to, and I learned a whole lot about myself. I’m proud to say I’m a former Marine.

I’d heard a lot about the reputation of the Marine Corps, about their devotion to duty, their ability to kick anyone’s ass at any time, anywhere. Some of it was true and some wasn’t. Boot camp was all everyone said it would be. San Diego in February of 1966 was balmy even though it was nearly ten o’clock in the evening. As I stepped off the airliner and walked down the ramp along with eighty other men, an oriental man dressed entirely in khaki and wearing a wide-brimmed ‘Smokey Bear’ hat barked orders and slapped the cigarettes out of the mouths of several bewildered recruits. We were told to shut up and were herded onto a pull-behind ‘bus’ we came to affectionately call ‘cattle cars’. Stacked like cordwood and forbidden from sitting down, the driver drove us to Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) while in the front of the car, the same oriental man told us that ‘the first maggot who opens his mouth will have it filled with my fist’. No one tested him.

After a short ride, I recall passing a small guard shack where a Marine in dress blue uniform stood guard with his M-14 rifle, offering a salute as we passed. When the doors to the cattle car opened, two more Smokey Bear hats joined the oriental and the real harassment started. Eighty men were told to stand at attention, look directly to the front and not to move a muscle. A Hispanic man about twenty-five years old or so stood in front of me and the conversation went something like this:

“What are you lookin’ at, maggot?”

“Nothing!”

“You’re saying I’m nothing, maggot?”

“No, I—“

“Shut the fuck up, you civilian piece of shit! If I every catch you looking me in the eye again, you’ll wish to Hell you were dead! Do you understand me, faggot?”

“Yes, I—“

“That’s ‘Yes, SIR, shit-for-brains… do you underSTAND me?”

“Yes, sir!”

“What? I can’t hear you!”

“YES, SIR!”

Immediately he turned away from me and started to berate another man a little farther down the line. I’d met my first drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Zavala. I don’t think he had a first name, and even if he did, no one would have dared use it. At that time, I remember thinking that the Jews must have felt a little like this when they were taken to the gas chambers. I honestly didn’t think I’d live to see the sun rise. But the best was yet to come.

We were made to stand on yellow footprints painted on the tarmac. Once there, we were again threatened innumerable times with punishments worse than death, while we were read the entire Uniform Code of Military Justice. I’m not really sure how long it took, but I’d make a conservative estimate of three hours. What in the hell have I gotten myself into? This was the first time I remember hearing jets landing at San Diego International, somewhere off into the night. Palm trees stood as sentinels at the edge of this huge tarmac that I would soon come to know as the parade grounds or ‘grinder’. In the background I could see neat two-story adobe-colored buildings with red Spanish tile roofs and lavish porticos. If this were anywhere else other than Hell, maybe I’d be standing in front of my accommodations at a villa in Puerto Vallarta. However, of course, I was in Hell and things had not yet begun to get interesting.

Next, we were herded into a building where we stood in line to watch everyone have every bit of hair sheared from his head. As we came out of the barber’s chair, we were expected to sprint across the grinder, other drill instructors posted every fifty yards or so, into another building where we removed our clothes and a man with a hose sprayed cold water on us. Four or five men shared one bar of soap and the entire process, thankfully, was completed in about five minutes. There, we stood, naked as the day we were born, shivering and listening to our Platoon Commander, Gunnery Sergeant Freed, explain to us how insignificant we were and how he wished he’d been killed in Vietnam rather than come back to a slimy, disgusting, filthy sack of human garbage like us. Puerto Vallarta? No, I doubt it.

Next came Marine Green, our first uniform. Of course, we weren’t fit to wear it, but we should be thankful the government thought enough of us to overlook our slimy civilian background and provide us with clothing that would become, if we were lucky, the uniform of real men—Marines! One by one, we held our arms out while a man with stripes on his uniform threw underwear, socks, tee-shirts, trousers, a web belt, a duffel bag and one pair of boots into our arms. Moments later, I was directed to a table where I laid my new belongings. Without waiting to be told, I began to get dressed. Suddenly, I felt a hand grab me by the back of the neck and turn me around to face him. I looked directly into the oriental eyes of Sergeant Ho.

“Who tell you to put you fat, civilian body into this beautiful clothes?”

I said nothing.

“You fucking deaf, ass-ho?”

“NO, SIR!”
“Wait until told!”

“YES, SIR!”

Then he screamed so that everyone could hear, “From this point on, any time you address a drill instructor, the first and last words out of your mouth will be ‘Sir’! Do you understand me?”

Eighty men called out, more or less in unison, “Sir, yes, sir!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“SIR, YES, SIR!”

He stared at me some more then spat and muttered, “Pussy…” before hurrying off to berate another recruit. After everyone was finally allowed to dress, we were put in lines of four and joined arms with the person to the side. In this manner, we shuffled out of that building back onto the tarmac. I say ‘shuffled’ because we had no laces for our boots and it was difficult to keep the boots on if you raised your foot off the ground more than a quarter-inch or so.

“I want to hear from you cattle! Come on, ladies, let’s hear you moo…”

Now, there were twenty ranks of four men, arms locked together, shuffling across the grinder, lowing like the cattle we’d just become.

“That’s right, you reeking piles of crap, sing it out!” The crescendo of moos suddenly increased until Gunnery Sergeant Freed waved his swagger stick (a short decorative ceremonial baton carried by a few higher-grade non-commissioned officers and officers). In unison, the other drill instructors yelled in unison, “Platoon, HALT!”

By now, I was sweating and the ‘shower’ had lost any effectiveness it might have had, but I wasn’t alone. The guy to my right was a full head taller than me and his black, sweat-soaked skin shone in the moonlight. Now, Sergeant Zavala stood where he could be seen by eighty terrified young men and said, “Give that pussy you’re holdin’ hands with a great big kiss! On the cheeks, please, ladies, you haven’t been properly introduced and I wouldn’t want any of you rutting in ranks!” Then, they passed through the ranks until each of us had gone through the motions of kissing the man to his right and/or left.

Hours passed before they took us to our ‘hooches’, small, tin hovels with rounded roofs, just big enough to house four men in two sets of two bunks stacked on top of each other. There, we found our racks (beds) with a pile of blankets, sheets and mattress covers stacked on the end. Each of us was given an olive drab footlocker with a lock and some toiletries and miscellaneous supplies contained inside a small leather pouch. We were home.

Over the next sixteen weeks, we were alternately berated and encouraged, put down and brought back up, the Marine Corp way. We learned military bearing and Corps history, infantry tactics, weaponry of all types and the art of functioning as one man… one Corps of Marines, but never were we allowed to refer to ourselves as such. That would be the reward for perseverance. And persevere we did, too… at least, most of us. I dislocated my shoulder during bayonet training during my sixth week, and the platoon voted whether to let me stay or make me go to a platoon where I would convalesce until the doctors deemed me fit for active duty. Luckily, my platoon voted to keep me. If I had been forced to start over, I don’t know if I could have stood it. All of us teetered on the brink from time to time under the best of situations. The outer perimeter of MCRD was a chain-link fence about twelve feet tall. I remember watching planes land in the evening and wishing I had the balls to jump that fence. But, I was convinced that snipers with automatic weapons kept them trained on that fence twenty-four hours a day, and would not hesitate to shoot some maggot turd who lacked the stones to gut it out.

We progressed through the rifle-training segment, two weeks at Edson Range, Camp Pendleton, probably the best two weeks of Boot Camp. There, the harassment was drastically toned down because it was so important that each of us become intimately familiar with our weapon, the M-14. Even now, nearly forty years later, I still remember the nomenclature of the weapon and could repeat it in my sleep. If you were to put one in front of me today, I could disassemble and re-assemble it completely in under five minutes. I learned how to use the sling as a weapon, how to configure it as a tourniquet, and how to fashion it to facilitate every firing position from prone to kneeling to offhand. I also learned to hit whatever target I aimed at within a range of 500 yards. On Qualification Day, I earned the distinction of becoming one of seven men in Platoon 153 who scored high enough to receive an Expert badge for marksmanship. I didn’t know it yet, but it also got me promoted to Private First Class.

Graduation Day was one of the proudest days of my life, even though no one came to see me. I really didn’t mind, because after the thirty-day Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Pendleton, I would earn thirty days of leave, during which time I would get to leave San Diego and be reunited with my family. Then, it would be off to Naval Air Station Memphis in Millington, Tennessee, where I would attend Fire Control Avionics School. However, I had no reason to suspect what else would transpire. Soon thereafter, having been promoted twice more to the rank of corporal, I took a test that would change my life. The Marine Corps offered me the opportunity to take a college equivalency test as a prelude to attending Officer’s Leadership School. I really had little interest in becoming an officer, but they told me that if I successfully passed the equivalency test and completed the Leadership School at Quantico, Virginia, I would be allowed to become a Naval aviator. This was beyond my wildest dreams. Nevertheless, I took and passed both the qualifying test in NAS Memphis and, after completion of Platoon Leaders School at Quantico, I was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned to duty at Whiting Field, Pensacola, Florida where I would attend both ground school and flight training. Thirteen months later, in November of 1967, I completed my flight training and was promoted to first lieutenant. I’d now been in the Marine Corps for nineteen months, promoted five times, and accepted orders for Fleet Marine Force Pacific. Soon, I would be assigned to a duty station in the Republic of Vietnam.

If you’ve come here in quest of tales of daring-do and battlefield heroics, you’ve wasted your time in reading any of this. First, they’d be fiction, and I owe it to a lot of very good people to tell the truth. Second, even if such stories did exist, I couldn’t do them justice because I’m not a good enough storyteller to astro-project any of you into ‘the bush’. I simply won’t insult the memory of good men who died for people who sent them into hell with neither the intelligence necessary to properly execute their missions nor the blessings of the people for whom they served. And, that, my friends, is a tragedy. So, I did my job to the best of my ability and crossed the days off my calendar, in hopes that I’d one day leave southeast Asia upright.

Nineteen months later, I disappeared in the summer of 1969, having completed two tours of duty overseas. It was a sunny day in August, and Los Angeles International Airport became the perfect venue. The Continental Airlines flight from Danang offered hours to reflect on my experiences since I’d last touched down on U.S. shores almost nineteen months previous. I suppose I did reflect some, but mostly I drank. Some Marines opted for flights to Sydney or Honolulu, choosing to spend a little time in paradise, a buffer zone between the horrors of combat and the rigors of trying to explain the unexplainable to family and friends. I’d heard the stories of vets who’d gone to Australia on R&R and never returned. I think I chose to go home because I knew that if I didn’t go home now, I might find an excuse not to ever return. I wanted to see my family, but Lord knows I didn’t look forward to the questions I knew would come. People don’t seem to understand that each inquiry about the war is a wire brush digging scabs off wounds that are only now beginning to heal.

I’ll never forget the anticipation I felt as I waited for the Captain to attain the proper altitude and assigned flight coordinates for the trip. I sat in the crew cabin of my first Boeing 707. I say ‘mine’ because I honestly felt I was a part of this glorious bird, not that I’d have had any idea how to start it up, much less fly it. I’m convinced that 123 other passengers also felt the same way. I was allowed to sit in the crew cabin because I was a transport pilot, holding the rank of captain. What’s the old saying? Rank hath its privileges? Truthfully, the invitation came as a result of a camaraderie extended one pilot by another, not because of any particular rank or career status I held. I was twenty-seven days short of my twenty-second birthday and because of the kindness offered me by these guys, the war suddenly became a little less of a reality. Anything short of being shot down because the crew got drunk and flew us into Russian air space, in a few short hours I would make it home.

Home… the very word carried a heavy burden. The concept, until the last few hours when I picked up my orders, seemed unattainable. If they’d have given me a set of orders to Mars I wouldn’t have been any more dumbfounded. After awhile, it become cliché to even suggest it, as if by uttering the word, you would jinx your chances. Short-timers refused to speak of it, lest disaster would befall them. How many times had I heard the word in the last nineteen months? Certainly it had to be thousands. Every crewman, every squad leader, every artilleryman, every corpsman, every grunt carried the word as a holy grail. Home… that magical place that existed as nowhere else. For fifty-eight thousand Americans, it took on entirely different meaning as it existed only in the religious sense of being ‘carried home’ to meet with ones departed loved ones. Even so, I doubt there was a single man killed there who didn’t have home on his mind when he took his last breath.

But, there I was, strapped into a leather-detailed crew seat, a set of headphones over my ears, listening to the ICS as three veteran jet jockeys monitored instruments, scanned gauges and set course headings for a voyage I honestly didn’t think I’d ever get to take. Something would go wrong, inevitably. Nervously I ticked off the seconds in my mind, counting ‘wheels-up’ time, the amount of ‘roll’ an aircraft requires to lift off the runway. Twenty-one seconds… I had no idea if that was the correct amount of time or not and it mattered little, but I filed it away for extraction at some future take-off when I was so nervous that if I didn’t count seconds, I’d pass out from the sheer terror of anticipation. As many take-offs and landings as I’d completed, I never got used to it. Giving control to another pilot seemed foreign… and dangerous. Even as I felt the thrust of the four huge Boeing turbines force me back into my seat, I suspected that we’d lose two engines on takeoff and fall into the ocean in a spectacular orange fireball or blow a tire upon landing, causing us to skid off the end of the runway at San Francisco International and drown in the shallow waters off the coast, scant yards from home— fulfilling life’s ultimate irony.

Once we attained our 30,000 feet of elevation over the South China Sea, the bar would be open, the smoking lamp would be lit and so would every passenger on that aircraft. It had been a long time since most of us had experienced American liquor… too long, in our estimation. Even a guy who received the occasional warm San Miguel beer while ‘in country’ could build up a thirst for decent booze. I didn’t drink too much in Vietnam, not because I felt any sort of moral restriction against it, but because I simply couldn’t afford to take the chance. Many of my missions were unscheduled, and I needed to be as alert as possible. It was easy enough to die under the best of combat conditions without adding insobriety to the equation. Too many Marines counted on us for rations, medical assistance and close air support. A drunk pilot was a stupid pilot and if I was going to die in that God-forsaken cesspool, it was damn sure not going to be because I didn’t have command of my faculties. In fact, if I suspected one of my crew was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, I’d have grounded him in a heartbeat. They all knew how I felt and, as far as I know, always respected my wishes. Esprit de corps has long been talked about in reference to Marines. I like to think that it went deeper than a few recruiting poster slogans. I always considered it to be the simple respect and care offered a family member. To me, it was esprit de crew. Yes, we’re Marines, and that’s interesting… but we’re also a team, and that’s important.

Listen, I don’t mean to make my job sound like drudgery… far from it. Every mission I ever made promised a high unlike anything ever experienced on any drug. Moving the collective and feeling the pure power jerk us off the ground, listening to the radio crackle into my headphones, feeling the inverters turn electricity into power enough to launch a strange green capsule (complete with door gunner) skyward, and realizing I held the future of at least four other Marines in my hand, was a thrill unlike anything else I’d ever experienced. And that was just the start. Depending on whether we were flying into an unsecured landing zone or not, my adrenalin levels went off the charts, especially if the accompanying zing of enemy rounds trying to pierce my aircraft’s shell added to the commotion in the cockpit. But mostly, it was the satisfaction derived from returning safely, knowing that someone might have gotten to go home because we were able to get him to a field hospital, or that a few grunts would live to fight another day because we got them the extra ordinance they needed to do their jobs. No, it wasn’t the danger that made me love it, it was the expectation that I could do it that made me love it.

By the time the stewardess (the girls were still light years away from flight attendant status) poured me off the airplane, I imagine I probably drank a case of Budweiser… cold Budweiser. The brew took on epic proportions as it slid down. Seldom stopping to swallow, I just opened up my throat and poured. No Viking ever drank better mead after battle. After two or three bottles, I felt warmth in the pit of my stomach and a feeling I can only describe as glorious. In hindsight, perhaps I was merely licking my wounds.

We arrived in San Francisco in mid-afternoon. I proceeded to a telephone and called my family to let them know I’d arrived safely and I’d be home as soon as I could make a connecting flight. In those days, military people were offered half-price fares if they didn’t mind flying ‘stand-by’. This meant that if there were cancellations or if a flight wasn’t fully booked, I could get on the airplane. The next available flight was early the next morning, so I called my friend, Mike McCrory, who lived in Los Gatos, a town south of San Francisco, closer to San Jose. We chatted for a few minutes and he told me to hang tight and he’d pick me up. I went to the bar and had a couple more bourbon and cokes. Maybe I lost track of time, but everything taking place around me fascinated me so much, I couldn’t get enough of it. People came and went as they pleased, apparently no one to answer to, no agendas to fulfill. At that moment, I realized that I wanted to be a civilian again. I loved the idea of being a Marine, but the actuality of it paled by comparison. While everyone around me wore nice clothes and sported long hair, I had on my yellow Marine Corps sweatshirt and Levis… and almost no hair at all. I stood out like a nun standing in a crowd of Buddhist monks.

“Thay, Thally… buy a drink for a lonely thailor?” The voice was sugary sweet and effeminate. I turned and looked up at a grinning Mike McCrory. His hair was much longer than I remembered, but there was no mistaking that grin. Mike and I had been close friends in high school. He was about 6’4” and weighed in excess of 240 lbs. He’d told me that he intended to move to San Francisco after high school. His folks had some money and his sister was some kind of attorney.

“Shoo, faggot… I got no time for fairies. Go bugger one of those Army creeps, they’d probably love the attention.”

Mike grabbed me with both arms and squeezed me hard enough to make my ribs hurt. Then, he kissed me hard on the side of my cheek and said, “Welcome home, Bob.”

We talked for a while, paying exorbitant airport prices for the booze. Mike drank Johnny Walker Black scotch while I stuck to Jim Beam, chased by the occasional Coors beer. I tried to pay for a round or two, but Mike would hear none of it. “Save your money, pal, I have plenty for both of us.”

Mike explained to me that his sister, Carol, had made millions in the lucrative San Francisco market. She sold a few houses, but her prime source of income involved downtown property that she controlled for wealthy investors. Evidently, she had just closed a big deal and was celebrating it with a black tie party tonight at the Trans-America building. Three hours later, Mike and I stepped out of a cab into a funny-looking building located in downtown San Francisco. Standing at its base, I looked up and saw lights in windows that seemed to point to the stars. In the lobby, so outlandish was our attire we were confronted by security guards. Mike took point, explaining to the gentlemen that we were invited guests. A phone call confirmed our status and we were whisked in a private elevator to the 27th floor, where we found men in tuxedos and ladies in chic dresses. The two of us couldn’t possibly have looked more out of place were we nude and singing the National Anthem at the top of our lungs in the key of F.

“Relax…” Mike whispered to me. “Just mingle and have a good time. I’ll go find Carol.”

Sure… just go mingle. I had so much in common with everyone here. One guy asked me if I could bring him a plate of hors de oeuvres. Not inclined to get into a fight my first night back, I merely walked away. At some point, I noticed the glass door leading to the balcony. Mike was nowhere to be found, so I sauntered out onto the balcony, beholding the lights of the city currently offering illumination to the dark and identifying silhouettes of some other buildings. In the clear night sky I observed the stars, wondering if they would look the same to the guys looking up at them, still hunkered down in bunkers on Hill 881 or the Rock Pile.

From behind me, a voice asked, “Looking for inspiration out there?”

I turned and looked at a very thin man about 40 or so, his fingers tugging at his bow tie, a lit cigarette perched between two fingers, perilously close to his neck. I couldn’t tell whether the question mocked me or not, but I sensed that the guy was pretty drunk.

“And if I am?”

Quickly, the man finished removing the tie and flicked the ashes from his cigarette. Raising his hand to chest level, he waved it back and forth. “Don’t take offense. I was merely making small talk; I am so rarely confronted with our nation’s fighting elite.”

“No offense taken…” I lied, turning my head back to view. “If there was, I’d have already ripped your throat out and stuffed that cigarette up your ass.” The words surprised me as much as they did him, in all likelihood. I hadn’t intended to be confrontational when I walked out here, but something about this guy’s smugness pissed me off.

The light from the room backlit his silhouette and he resembled Peter O’Toole at first glance. “Well… I guess that would provide an opportunity to quit smoking.” When he started to laugh, I laughed right along with him. Motioning me to sit down with him, he opened the sliding glass door and barked out an order for someone to bring us some more drinks.

Small talk filled the air, mostly concerning my contributions to the war effort. I’d been told that many people, especially Californians, were either pacifists or non-supportive of Nixon and his dirty little soirée into Southeast Asia. Eventually, I guess he became bored with my company, because he stood up, shook my hand, and offered me a few words upon leaving. “I hope you live to be an ex-Marine.” Then, he walked back into the party.

I said nothing in return, but now my thoughts were back in Vietnam.

By the way, there are no “ex-Marines”. If someone tells you he’s an “ex-Marine”, don’t believe a single word he says from that point on, because he’s lying to you. Once you’re a Marine, you’re a Marine forever. Forever… it doesn’t end at death. Every Marine learns that thousands of good men gave their lives for the privilege of wearing that uniform. In every case, the uniform is earned, never given. Three words guide every Marine’s journey through his duty: Courage, Honor, and Commitment. No matter where your journeys take you, if you have all three, I promise you that you’ll be successful in whatever you do.

Shortly after my Marine Corps career ended, I took my wife, Pat, and our two children, Blake and Kimberly (that could be Mom or Pop to some of you) back to Denver to start a new life, not knowing that even now (as she informed me during the proceedings) she was considering divorce. I’d been accepted to the Colorado State Police Academy at Camp George West in Golden. It was now 1970, and I held the world by the tail. Sixteen weeks later, I emerged from the Blue Cocoon (as it was called by staff) as a fledgling rookie officer. My first duty station was Granby, Colorado, located in the north central Rocky Mountains. I enjoyed most of my duties as a police officer and, if circumstances had permitted, would probably have spent the remainder of my career as a cop.

On June 28, 1971, Mom died, and a big part of me died with her. Mom was my emotional fortress. I knew I could always count on her because she never gave up on me. It was like I suddenly had a gaping hole in my heart that no one could fill. She was only forty-seven years old. It was all very sudden and very final. She went into Presbyterian Hospital for a lung biopsy, a simple procedure that can be done in a doctor’s office, and never came out. Life is cruel, I guess. As she lay in a coma for seventeen days, I tried to make deals with God to let her live. I guess He figured she’d suffered enough.

Not a day passes that I don’t think about her or miss her. I know that all of you would have loved her as much as I do. She was fun to be around, especially if you were a kid. Mom had high standards for all of us, but she made it fun to behave, because if we did, we knew we’d be rewarded in some fashion. My biggest failing in this life was not getting high enough grades in school. I know she was disappointed in me; she felt I should have been class valedictorian. I blame my teachers for that, because they incessantly told her that I wasn’t working up to my potential. In an adult retrospective, I now realize that they may have been right, but I was a kid. Later on, when I went to college, I got nearly straight A’s, due in part to my desire to make Mom proud of me, even if she could only look down and smile a little. After her funeral, Dave Fisher took me to his place and fed me whiskey while I cried for hours and hours. The next day, I went back to work. It’s just what you do… that’s what Mom would have done.