Anchor Struck

My first duty station in the Marines was in Georgia on — stay with me — a training detachment at Naval Air Station Marietta at Dobbins Air Force Base north of Atlanta. It was largely uneventful except for the funeral detail I posted about recently (“undignified transfers” below). But I did have a solid piece of luck there. One evening I was sweeping out the Sergeant Major’s office and saw a Table of Organization chart on the wall behind his desk. The T/O shows all the personnel a unit was authorized to have, and we were allowed to have a full time public relations person.

The next day I told the Sergeant Major that I had extensive journalism experience and I was immediately reassigned as the PR guy. That put me across the hall from the main office, in with the gunnery sergeant who handled enlistments into the reserve units we supported. The gunny had plenty else to do, so he was most welcoming. Gunnies in the Corps are its backbone, its middle management. If you’ve got one looking out for you, your life gets a lot easier.

The gunny’s main job of recruiting was quite enough to do. The Vietnam war was really heating up, as was the draft. Guys would come in and tell the gunny that they really wanted to serve their country. They’d leave and he’d tell me, “This is such bullshit. You know that we’re the last branch they came to.” When one of the reserve units we supported had a change of command, I was able to get some footage of the ceremony onto an Atlanta TV station. The next day the gunny said, “You could go shit on the Old Man’s carpet today if you wanted to.” Wisely, I chose not to.

Time flew and our office got orders to send one of the clerks to WestPac. That would be Western Pacific, an area that ranged from Hawaii to Japan, but almost always meant Vietnam. Just about every Marine on a two or three year enlistment was going to pull that, so I figured I’d get it over with and cut my fellow clerks a break. So on my 21st birthday I was getting my WestPac physical. A year earlier on that day I was ending my adolescence (or at least my teenaged years) in boot camp.

What followed would change everything for me.