NIGHT MARCH

                                                   Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis

One of my strongest memories of the Marine Corps has my bayonet scabbarded, rather than parting the air in front of my rifle's muzzle as I and others walk through waist‑high grass in search of someone to kill. This memory has my rifle unloaded and slung underarm, muzzle down against the entry of December's Camp Pendleton mist into the barrel. Our enemies were the wet cold, sore feet, tired legs, not being able to sleep, not being HOME.

     Grey gun‑metal of ancient M‑1s, showing through worn blueing, was cousin to the fog. Steel rifle‑butt plates clanked black plastic canteen caps; the canteen caps' flat aluminum chains clinked. Soggy canvas packs disbalanced; straps chafed. Steel helmets weighed on stiff necks and caught our bodies' steamy heat and fogged the glasses of those of us stuck by tradition with the "four‑eyes" monicker. The column caterpillared to gravity's commands: men descending into a ravine slid and hurried and opened the distance between them only to bump against the bunched‑up men grunting up the other side.

     It was some indeterminate part of the night, closer to dawn than to last evening's muddy dusk. We were a company of novitiates, already considering ourselves legendary because we'd finished Marine boot camp. But we were unblooded privates, marching in tired column toward the quonset‑hut, fuel‑oil‑stove end of one of the last exercises of the three-week‑long Infantry Training Regiment (ITR), where we learned to fire, and to maneuver with, all the machine guns, mortars, grenades, automatic rifles, and rocket launchers in our nation's arsenal.

     Every boy‑man of us was tired. We all wanted to lie down ‑ the mud would have been fine ‑ and sleep.     

     Some one along the accordioning column of homesick nascent heroes began to sing. At first the singer mumbled; the song stumbled. Then what always happens, in life and in death, happened: another Marine helped. The song spread along the column: "O come all ye faithful..."

     Chins came off chests. Each of us began to judge footing by the bobbing of the faint silhouette of the helmet in front of him rather than by the dark-shrouded ground underfoot. "...joyful and tri-um-phant..."

     The pace quickened. The column, which before the song had been an aggregation of tired blue adolescents, became a unit. Spacings evened; we got in step to the rhythm of the song.

     We ran out of words we knew, but marched in a still attentive silence, keeping in step by the sound of our footfalls, reluctant to re‑enter the previous loneliness. A new wave rippled along the column: "Adeste fidelis..." Sure. Same song, words remembered now by youngsters brought up Catholic.

     My teenager's bones felt ancient. I felt myself to be one of a column of soldiers that was all soldiers, from all times, marching in mud, marching in snow, marching in hot sand, marching in jungles, marching on narrow trails clinging to mountains' shoulders, carrying weapons and packs, sweating and cursing, marching to a rhythm older than all of us, a cadence set by those before us, stepped off and chanted by us in our turn, to be followed after us by boys now still crawling, too young to walk, but who would be marching not many years after they learned to walk, to be followed after them by boys born of women not yet born themselves, all as we marched now.

     I did not particularly like what I was doing, this marching in history's infinite column of young men. But I felt a stirring in me, as I imagine a Canada goose feels when autumn triggers something in its body saying it's time to fly south. So we rolled, swimming in our song, swapping languages as we ran out of what we knew, and learning more each time as, with the strength a group can give to one of its own, some isolated voice would bellow a remembered phrase into the now expectant fog ....

     "...come ye, O co-ome ye..." "I'm comin', honey, I'm a‑comin'!" Laughter yelped along the column and flattened "...to Be‑eth‑lehem." Those of us who'd never yet come inside a woman laughed loudest.

     Sergeants, grinning into chin‑straps, did not bark. They knew what we all knew, even if we didn't have words for it, even though we'd have mocked the words then had we heard them: that the United States Marine Corps is one of the core repositories of American patriotism and maleness; that it is, like the values it represents, an emotional rather than a thoughtful entity; that its primary attribute is faithfulness in the face ‑ not just of death, but of plentiful, body‑ripping, terror‑borne, messy Death ‑ and that the lineage of that faithfulness has much less to do with country and flag than with each man's loyalty to the man on either side of him when the combat would become so fierce and otherworldly that none but they could have the slightest notion of what it was about.

     In my memory, it was that night that I entered the brotherhood of warriors.