This was the first time I heard of the Marine Corps. It was just a couple of minutes in a gun shop, when I was a kid…
Dress Blues 1
Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30‑30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30‑30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30‑06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere.
We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me.
The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by ‑ of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town ‑ an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals ‑ some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth ‑ on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers.
The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform.
The man in the uniform was watching me ‑ with approval, it seemed ‑ handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world.
I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in.
"No," I said.
The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that."
The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained.
I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.
"Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval.
I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are.
As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.
I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.
Several chapters - and several years - later, boot camp is over. Now we’re at Infantry Training Regiment (ITR), Camp Pendleton, California.
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.
On the way to my first permanent duty station: Twentynine Palms, California, a Marine artillery and bombing range in the Mojave Desert. The Greyhound bus dropped a couple of us off sometime in the night…
Banning
Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twenty‑four hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.
It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night. I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.
Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit. One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.
The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."
I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.
"Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."
I’d made it home. One thousand, four hundred and fifty days after I enlisted in Seattle, I was alive, free, unwounded (physically, anyway), and on the street. A few days after leaving Chu Lai, I was on campus at Colorado College (see earlier posts “Danang,” “Kicking the Leaves,” and later).
That Christmas, I took a bus to Missouri to visit my aunt and uncle.
Missouri Squirrels
That December of 1966 I decided to visit my Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman in Wheaton, Missouri. They'd made another of their moves between Oregon and Missouri. I'd go by Greyhound, of course: even the accumulated wealth of a year's overseas pay, combat pay, and a corporal's wages was quickly gobbled by the cost of life at an expensive private college; a plane ticket was out of the question.
The bus didn't go through Wheaton; it was too small and out of the way. It was nearly dark when I got off the bus. I asked directions. There were no local buses, no taxis. Bessie and Lank lived several miles from where I stood.
I walked half the night along rural Missouri roads. Dogs would awaken with the crunching of my boots on gravel, bay their alarms, passing awareness of my presence to the dogs at the next farm. It was a little scary, but none of the dogs came after me. Sometime in the night I got lost, and had to knock at a farmhouse, waken someone, and ask directions. I apologized. They said it was no trouble.
A few days later I was stacking firewood on Bessie and Lank's porch. An old man was walking by out in the street. He stopped to watch me. At least, that's what I thought at first, that he was just watching me stack wood, to pass the time like old men will, maybe to pass judgment on my ability to lay up a neat and stable rick of wood, which is a recognized art among country people. I began to be more careful.
Then I realized that he wasn't so much watching me work as looking at me personally, at who I was. I straightened, nodded. "Howdy," I said.
"You kin to Bob Metcalf?" he asked. No preliminaries, no introductions, no chitchat about firewood or the rare skift of snow that had Wheaton drivers sliding all over Main Street. "He was my dad...." A dozen questions bubbled in me, but none formed quickly enough. "Y' look just like 'im. I delivered mail in these parts for thirty years." He turned and walked on.
We were going out to see Dan Metcalf, my grandfather, who lived near Monett, a town even smaller than Wheaton. He'd long since separated from my grandmother Elizabeth, a woman who'd had long flowing black hair as a young woman, who my dad had always claimed, with some pride, was part Indian. Maybe Cherokee;([1]) she'd come from Oklahoma.
Dan's current wife was Rose, who was always spoken of (though never in her presence) as "a reformed prostitute." Even out of her presence, people never said "prostitute" without "reformed" being attached. They were trying to be generous to her because, they said, she was good to old Dan. But you could tell they were working at it. And you could tell she felt it, but she just went about her business. I wasn't quite twenty‑four, but had probably seen more prostitutes than most of the Metcalfs and their neighbors combined. Rose didn't look like the ones I'd seen. She looked more like Aunt Bessie to me: a plain‑spoken, plain‑looking, hard‑working country woman. Except for an extra air of worldliness about her - a tinge of sadness, it seemed to me, at knowing and having lived a truth that everyone else also knew (some more directly than others) but would never say aloud.
Dan was a lean, kindly old man who was glad to see me but was clearly holding back. He didn't say much. Bessie and Lank figured later that I reminded him too much of his son, dead only six years. My dad had committed suicide at age 40, in 1960.
Dan and Rose both looked to be people who had cleaned up their acts considerably from the way they'd lived until well into their middle years. Dan came from a long line of moonshiners. The story had it that one night he'd come home likkered up and blasted a hole in his own roof from inside the house with his shotgun, just for fun.
I wanted to go hunting. Something in me needed to close that circle, to carry a rifle meant to put meat on the table instead of to kill another human and leave him to rot in the mud. Bessie and Lank thought about it a while, and said, Well, we might go out and visit Lank's sister and brother‑in‑law, Dorothy and Floyd Jennings, who lived in Thomas Hollow, one of those folds in the Ozarks like those where most of my extended family grew up. (They spelled the word h-o-l-l-o-w, but everyone said "holler". Bessie and my mother were born and raised on a 160-acre homestead in "Star Holler".
They were a little reluctant to drop in on the Jenningses, especially Floyd. They seldom saw this man. He kept to himself, didn't have a lot to do with relatives and even less with outsiders. Don't expect him to cotton to you, they warned. He's just that way.
We drove out to Thomas Hollow. Lank brought along his slide‑action Remington .22 rifle, which was very accurate, for me to use in case Floyd could be talked into a hunt.
We all sat down in their cabin's small living room. Dorothy busied herself offering us coffee and cookies. Bessie and Lank introduced me, said I was just back from Veet Nam. Floyd lit up, started rocking animatedly in his chair. "I was there durin' the war," he said. "Well," he went on, "guess I should say, durin' the other war, or World War II, or whatever." Actually, he said, he'd never been ashore in Veet Nam. But he'd been aboard a Liberty ship in those waters. "Yup. Spent quite a spell thar. Hell, most people 'round heah never had no idy they was such a place, let alone whar it was. Leastwise till this war come along. I'd say somethin' about it, an' a body'd just shrug. But I knowed. I was thar. Durin' the war."
Lank and Bessie had relaxed. Lank chimed in that he'd told me Floyd had a pretty good squirrel dog. Still got 'im?
"Oh yeah, he's gettin' on, but still does pretty good, for a collie." That was the first I'd heard of a collie being a hunting dog. I'd had two collies as a kid, Mike and Buddy, so we talked about collies for a while. Pretty soon we were up in the hardwood grove behind the cabin, Floyd and the dog and I. Lank said he'd not go this time, he'd let me do the huntin' 'cause I hadn't been in so long.
The tree limbs were bare, their leaves now a crunchy mattress we walked on. With that noise, we'd never have seen a squirrel, but for the dog. The collie would run ahead, making a big circle out in front of us. Pretty soon he began to bark. "He's got one treed," Floyd said. We walked toward the tree where the dog was, and stopped a few yards away. Floyd motioned, Be still. Squirrels, when they hear a threatening noise, will go around the tree, putting it between them and the noise. After we'd stood still a while, the dog slowly circled the tree, moving away from us, barking and making a racket in the dry leaves. When the collie got to the far side of the tree, we saw, up high, just the head of a grey squirrel peek around the tree. I looked at Floyd. He nodded back at me. I raised Lank's rifle, pushed off the safety, took my time, got just the sight picture Lank had described to me, put the front bead where its top was at the center of the head, where the squirrel's eye would be if I could have seen it at that distance. I squeezed off the shot. There was a long pause. The squirrel slid, tumbled over a couple of branches, fell to the ground.
We walked over. Floyd knelt and picked up the squirrel and examined it. He stood and looked at me, went so far as to raise his eyebrows. "Right in the eye," he said. "Don't waste no meat thataway."
We shot four or five squirrels ‑ "just enough for a mess of 'em" was how Floyd put it ‑ and walked back to the cabin. His wife made us all a big pot of squirrel and dumplings. All the while Floyd and I sat and talked about Viet Nam, even though he'd never been ashore. We talked about the South China Sea, how there were flying fish that would bust out the sides of waves and glide, and sea snakes swimming close to shore.
After all, we'd both been there, durin' the wars.
[1] In the fall of 2010, my aunt Ruth Metcalf, my father’s sister, gave me a photocopy of a photo of my great grandmother Widders, grandma Elizabeth’s mother, whose mother was full-blood Cherokee.
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