anchors away

The length of a WestPac (see previous post) deployment was 12 months for all the other services, but — Marines being Marines — deployed for three weeks longer. My tour got lengthier, though, even before I left U.S. soil. At Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where we Devil Dogs trained for three weeks before heading West(Pac), I spent another three weeks helping process the other Dogs going there.

Six weeks later, I was on a plane to Okinawa, where I spent the next six months with the 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade at Camp Hansen issuing travel orders. Some of them were for emergency leaves, most of them Temporary Additional Duty orders. At the end of each month, I would issue several TAD orders to officers, who would fly to Vietnam, spend the night and fly back the next day. They had to have some trumped up reason to go, like delivering the guard mail, but the upshot of it was that their overnight jaunt qualified them for two months of combat pay.

I quickly settled into a routine. When I wasn’t working, I was at the camp library or theatre. I didn’t hang out in the barracks because I had no interest in playing poker or bragging about getting laid. The Officer of the Day required a clerk to stay overnight at headquarters in case emergency orders had to be issued. Since that’s what I did anyway, I earned $10 a night doing it for other clerks.

But work was all-consuming. We were short-staffed. Eighteen hour shifts were common, with an occasional all-nighter. During one of those, the clerks divided into teams and had a paper clip fight. Territory was lost and gained. When we ran out of ammo, we devolved into hand-to-hand combat. Hostilities ceased when one of the other clerks flipped me into a wall and knocked me cross-eyed.

December was a rough month for me. Early on I learned that my boot camp buddy Eddie Weekfall had been killed in combat. On Christmas Day, about eight in the morning, I heard an explosion in the distance. I roused up and looked at my roommate, who had also awakened. We both went back to sleep. Later I found out that a Marine had stolen a grenade and rolled it under the bed of another jarhead, blowing up him and his roommate.

In January, after North Korea had seized the USS Pueblo, we were packing up to deploy to its area when we were ordered to stand down. When the anti-war movement started to heat up in the states, we did some crowd control training. I wondered if I would be able to confront other Americans.

In April, another NCO in my office and I scored one of those valued-end-of-the-month TAD trips. It went well, so when I got back to Okinawa, I put in for a transfer to Vietnam. There was an opening on the USS Princeton, so I took it. I figured I’d be safe at sea. I didn’t suspect that it would redefine me.