GUNNY ROGERS, AND SERGEANT VANCE

Though 19, I was still a kid: skinny, glasses, trying to be bigger than I was, I guess. And I also guess that like most of the kids/young men among whom I was standing on this particular day in Marine boot camp, trying not to show it...

Semper Fidelis

                     

Gunny Rogers 1: Mama's boy

     We were in formation on the platoon "street," the narrow asphalt strip between the Quonset huts that were our billets at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers was the Duty Drill Instructor. He was strict about boot camp's spit-and-polish regimen, though not as strict as the others. You could see that he pushed it more for the sake of discipline than of "military appearance," a phrase we heard a lot. Gunny was a combat man. He was said to carry a bayonet scar across his chest from the First Marine Division's great battle at the "frozen Chosin," Korea's Chosin Reservoir. Some of the guys in the platoon said they'd seen the scar one day when they'd been in the Duty Hut on cleanup duty, and "Guns" had his shirt off.

     His older brother had been killed in one of the first tanks to make it to the beach at Tarawa, a name that resonated among us like Mecca does among Muslims or Calvary among Christians. So he'd enlisted in the Marines as soon as he was seventeen, and sure enough volunteered for tanks. I didn't get the impression that he did it out of a desire for revenge so much as just wanting to continue the bloodline, but revenge was probably in there too. Japs had killed his brother, and there would probably be more gooks to fight before he retired, if he made it that far.

     I had done something wrong. Wrong, or at least inadequate, according to the Gunny's way of thinking. He was squared off in front of me. How could he make me feel so small, when he was several inches shorter than me?

     But he did. I can't even remember what I did, or didn't do. Gunny had decided it was time to get in my face because he had sensed some weakness in me, some hesitation about our common enterprise that could cause me to fail in combat, and he was just using some excuse to get his personal welding torch inside my machinery and plug the leak before it was too late. "You're weak." His voice growled from beneath his Smokey Bear hatbrim, that icon of Marineness. The brim nearly touched my nose. His force field was overpowering. I had to struggle just to keep standing at attention, which of course was the point. 

     I was a mama's boy, he said. He couldn't figure how I'd made it this far; he'd had me figured for one of the washouts. He said I was one of those pussies who write complaints about mean ol' Drill Instructors home to their mommies, and their mommies write letters to their congressmen, and their congressmen send some civilian puke out here to fuck with My Marine Corps. 

     "Do YEW write letters like that back home to YER mommy?" Gunny Rogers sneered into my face.

     "No sir."

     "I can't hear you." 

     "NO, SIR."

     "Are yew SURE?"

     "NO SIR!"

     "You're not sure?"

     "Sir, I mean YES SIR!"

     His left hand came up and cuffed me on the right side of the head, knocking my glasses askew. 

     "So, you been writin' letters home to your mommy, sayin' bad things 'bout My Marine Corps?"

     "SIR, NO SIR, I HAVE NOT WRITTEN ANY BAD THINGS HOME ABOUT THE MARINE CORPS, SIR." 

     I hadn't, either.

    "Will yew ever in the future write such letters home to yer mommy, like for instance telling her that mean ol' sonofabitch Gunnery Sergeant Rogers hit her precious little puke of a son?"

     "SIR, NO SIR, I WILL NOT WRITE ANY LETTERS LIKE THAT, SIR."

     The Gunny kept at it a while longer. He went to great lengths to let me know, and in the process let the whole platoon know, that mothers, and mamas' boys, were the biggest problem the Marine Corps and, for that matter, the whole goddamn country, had. He said that if the Marine Corps wasn't allowed to operate in its own good goddamned time-honored, battle-tested fashion, the country might just as well forget about defending itself. 

     The real point he was making, of course, was that if I could stand up to him, I might be able to stand up in combat. After a while, he seemed satisfied that he'd gotten his welding done, and moved on down the line. 

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."