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 to not 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."
Gunny Rogers 2: The Most
Powerful Weapon
We were on the platoon street between the
tents that were our billets at Camp Matthews, sitting on our upended buckets
cleaning rifles. Each of us had a towel which had been designated part of our
rifle cleaning gear spread out between his feet in front of the bucket. M14
rifle parts were laid out on the towels. Toothbrushes scraped blued steel.
Hoppe's #9 solvent crowded other smells from the air.
Gunny Rogers was supervising. He stood
quietly, looking us over. Of our five drill instructors, he was the one who
really took it upon himself to disabuse us of the romance so often tagged onto
war stories, to forge us into warriors. One phrase we heard from him often was
"Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die." That was what
we were here for, he said. Kill or die. And since some of the people we'd be
going up against were very good killers on their own, and wanted to stay alive
at least as much as we did, we had to be better at killing than they were, or
each of us - or, what would be worse, the comrades who depended on us - could
die. And that would be against Marine Corps regulations. Sometimes he would
paraphrase General Patton, who was the only Army general who was ever worth a
shit, as far as Marines were concerned: Your job is not to die for your
country. Your job is to make that other poor sonofabitch die for his
country.
"Listen up," Gunny said. Buckets
and boots scraped; rifle bolts and operating rods clinked onto towels. Silence.
He waited a long time to speak, looking up
and down the rows of us, letting us look at him. That was his signal that what
he was about to say was important, real Marine Corps "straight scoop"
rather than "petty shit," and we had goddamned well better pay
attention. He didn't raise his voice. Once in a while he would bellow, but more
often he would let his medals and scars and combat record and personal charisma
- the whole totemic package of his stature as a warrior among warriors - speak
for him. At such times he would speak softly, and we would lean forward and
scoop up his words like a dying man just arrived at a desert oasis scoops
water, which was what he intended.
It came as a question. "What is the
most powerful weapon in the world?" he asked softly. It was repeated in
urgent whispers to recruits at the ends of the formation who hadn't heard.
Necks craned; glances danced.
It was always better to avoid answering a
question unless you were sure of the answer. These were the times when abuse
and extra duty were handed out if you guessed wrong. But this was an easy one;
the answer was obvious. A recruit raised his hand. "Yes, Private,"
the Gunny recognized him. The kid stood to attention. "Sir! The most
powerful weapon in the world is the atomic bomb, sir!"
Gunny waited another of his long pauses,
paced slowly, shaking his Smokey the Bear campaign-hatted head in an expression
that was intended to come across to us as a mixture of profound disappointment
and disgust. How could they ever expect him to make Marines of such imbeciles,
his body language said.
He turned and faced us. His face would
have made the four on Mount Rushmore look like a bunch of wimps: car salesmen,
or the like.
"B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t." The word
rolled out like far-off thunder. We looked at each other in puzzlement. My mind
flipped through everything I knew, looking for the answer he wanted. One of two
guys in the platoon with some college behind me, I had actually read quite a
few books. Aha, I thought. He must mean the hydrogen bomb. I was about to raise
my hand when Gunny gave the correct answer, parsing out his words: "The
most powerful... weapon...in the world...is a Marine...and his rifle."
Pause.
"Think about it. Carry on,
Privates."
Each of us, squatted there on his bucket,
bore a look on his face of perfect astonishment. We looked at one another,
whispered. "Gaww-awwd damn!" Delighted grins appeared as we
went back to cleaning our rifles.
