Late 1962. Marine Corps boot camp, San Diego, California.
Sergeant Vance
Sergeant Vance was a recruiting‑poster Marine, a redhead who wore his hair so short that what little was left blended with his skin, leaving the impression when he wore his Smokey the Bear drill instructor's hat that he had no hair at all. Can't get any neater than that.
He had stood some serious sentry duty. One day he was instructing us on how Marines went about doing this. He told us of having a prestige assignment in Washington, DC, where he'd been posted at gates and doorways used by high‑ranking government officials to attend important meetings. There was this high muckety-muck conference, he said. It was more important than usual, and it was even more important that no one but people with this certain pass be allowed to enter. Some would try, he was told. They might even be legitimate government officials. They might try to pull rank on you. But if they don't have this pass, you stop them, period.
Vance was put on the gate because his appearance was always impeccable and because he could be counted on to follow orders and not to be intimidated by powerful people trying to go where they didn't belong. Sure enough, here came this long black limousine, with the driver in a black suit and tie, and a very authoritative-looking older gentleman in the back seat, dressed in a tuxedo. Sgt Vance thought he recognized him from news photos, but wasn't sure. He didn't spend a lot of time with newspapers.
The driver stopped at Vance's guard shack and rolled down his window. Vance asked for the pass. The driver said he didn't have one, but it was okay because his passenger was Senator So‑and‑so, whom everybody knew. Vance told him he was sorry, sir, but his orders were not to allow anyone to enter without a pass. The senator rolled down his back window and spoke to Vance, saying he was in a hurry and indeed had a pass but had forgotten it and didn't have time to return for it, or he'd miss this very important meeting.
Vance said, "Sorry, sir. No pass, no entry."
The senator had had enough of having his authority usurped by a lowly Marine sergeant. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to drive on through the gate. The driver barely had the limousine in gear when Vance's .45 service pistol was out of its holster, he'd jacked back the slide and chambered a round, and touched the pistol's muzzle lightly against the driver's temple.
"You move this car one inch, and I'll kill you," he said softly.
The driver and the Senator both turned pale. The limousine turned around and left. The senator squawked like hell, and tried to get Vance busted. His commanding officer said he'd done the right thing, and quietly transferred him to another unit.
When Vance had finished his story, one of the recruits raised his hand. Vance nodded: "Yes, Private?"
"Sir, would you have shot him, Sir?"
Vance looked the kid in the eye, letting the tension in the Quonset hut build as if he were conscious of only that one recruit and not the other seventy of us who fretted around the edges of the seconds he waited to speak.
"Yes," he said quietly, with a slight shrug. "And so will you, if those are your orders. The point, Privates, is this: nobody gets by a Marine sentry who's not supposed to."
A little over three years later, I’m on sentry duty on the tiny Vietnamese island of Ky Hoa, just off the coast near 1st Marine Division Headquarters at Chu Lai. It’s daytime, and I am alone on a cliff overlooking the beach and the South China Sea.
Ky Hoa
Ky Hoa was an island just off the coast of South Vietnam near Chu Lai. We were posted on its seaward side, along the top of a cliff that dropped steeply to a narrow rocky beach.
One afternoon I had sentry duty on the cliff. With the rest of the outfit at my back, my orders were to watch the cliff and beach below me, making sure no Vietnamese climbed the cliff toward our position, or moved along the beach past a point even with my post. If anyone was moving along the beach (it could only be approached from the mainland side of the island), I was to halt them. If anyone continued after I'd given the command to halt, I was to repeat it, and wave them back. If they still didn't stop, I was to fire a warning shot just in front of them, in the forbidden direction. If they still refused to stop, I was to shoot to kill.
A Vietnamese man came around the corner, clambering along the slippery rocks just up from the water's edge. He seemed to be looking for something in the tidepools. He was barefoot; his only clothing was something wrapped around his hips. He carried nothing in his hands.
He saw me standing on the cliff, rifle at the ready, watching him. He kept moving across my front, with a cautious eye in my direction. I held up my hand. He saw it, but kept moving. “Dung lai!” I yelled. "Halt!"
He kept moving, looking among the rocks, looking up at me. I yelled again. He moved again. Sergeant Vance leaned across three years and nine thousand miles to speak in my ear: "Nobody gets by a marine sentry who's not supposed to." I lowered the muzzle of my rifle, pointed it at the beach in front of him. He gestured earnestly toward the rocks ahead of him as he moved past the point to my front which I wasn't supposed to let him cross. I challenged him again; he kept moving forward.
I jacked a round into the chamber of my M14, put the rifle to my shoulder, braced my feet along my line of aim, and sighted at a point one foot in front of him. I picked out a rock situated so that, if I fired at it, my shot would - if he were lucky - throw rock fragments into the man's lower leg, then ricochet out to sea. If he were unlucky, it would ricochet into his vitals and kill him. I tightened my right hand's hold on the rifle's grip so as to be able to support its whole weight with that one hand, and slowly, threateningly, waved the man back with my left hand. He paused.
He said something in Vietnamese, and pointed again at the rocks in front of him. There was something there he really wanted. I brought my left hand back to the forearm of my rifle, quickly checked the elevation setting on my rear sight, lowered my cheek to the stock, sighted on the rock at the man's feet, began to squeeze the trigger - that crisp light slip of steel on steel - and braced myself for the kick of the rifle butt.
The man turned and walked dejectedly back the way he'd come. My trigger finger eased forward as slowly as it had been squeezing back. I lowered the rifle without firing, clicked the safety on, and began years of thinking how close I'd come to shooting, he'd come to being wounded or killed, how some part of me had desperately hoped the man would reach under a rock and pull out a weapon so I could finally do what I was there to do.
The man was unarmed. But I was already squeezing the trigger, and would have fired my rifle, had he not turned back. He’d have been injured or killed, depending on the direction of my bullet’s ricochet. The nuances of moments like this are what we don’t have time for in combat, yet they shape, or end, many lives.
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