Loon - Jack McLean [24]
After the initial euphoria, which included my first private visit to a bathroom in more than three months, I began to feel uncomfortable. Back under my parents’ roof, I settled into old routines that made me feel more like a boy than the man I was becoming. Dad went to work, Barb went to school, and Mom went about her daily life. I was bored. I actually missed the structured daily regimen of boot camp.
Several days after my arrival home, I took a bus up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to surprise my Andover friend Lou Maranzana with a visit. He was a freshman at Dartmouth College. As night fell, I trudged up three flights of stairs, found his room, and entered. I slowly looked around, and the sight was an assault on my barracks-trained sensibilities. Books and magazines were strewn about the dormitory room floor, intermingled with empty beer and soda cans, and food wrappers. One glaring overhead bulb brought the only illumination. As I absorbed the scene, I cringed at the thought of how Staff Sergeant Hilton might have reacted to such chaos.
I was, in fact, cringing at the chaos myself.
Lou was reclined on a threadbare sofa reading a book. Our eyes caught as the door opened fully. We were speechless. Something was very different. Had I changed, or had Lou? He looked the same to me, but his expression told me that the feeling was not mutual. He rose slowly and exhaled loudly while taking me in. I was twenty pounds heavier, shaved bald, and in perfect physical shape. As many friends and family members told me during those weeks, I was a formidable sight to behold. Lou broke into a broad smile, muttered a disbelieving “holy shit” under his breath, and we hugged.
He found me a beer while I lit a cigarette and flopped onto the corner of the sofa. It was a difficult moment. It was hard to know where to begin. The books on the floor related to subjects as diverse as Einstein and romantic poetry. I was more aware of what I did not see than what I did see, however. There was no footlocker, no rifle, no spit-shined boots, and, well, no control.
Lou, like most people that I encountered during boot leave, wanted to know everything about where I had been and what I had experienced. Like Lou, however, most people had no place to put the information. To them, I was devoid of context. I was, after all, the only person among my family and friends who had become a United States Marine. There was an enormous disconnect. I asked Lou about college, his courses, girls, and the Ivy League football he played. “It’s college,” he said dismissively. “Just college, Jack, that’s all.” With the wave of a hand, he outlined the panorama of the room. There was nothing to it.
His life could be explained to me with the wave of a hand.
My life, however, had become complex. I could find few words to describe it. The previous March, word of my enlistment had made me a curiosity among my Andover classmates. Now I was a marine, and they were college freshmen. The chasm had become deep and institutionalized. We were increasingly very different. Although everyone I knew from my previous life was like them, they knew no one like me.
Not even one person.
For an entire generation of college boys, the thought of joining the military was beyond remote. The college draft deferment ensured that the ignorance would continue for another four years. My closest friends occasionally tried to appreciate my experience and to understand my rapidly changing life, but for the most part, they had no place to process the information—my experience was that remote to them. I was regarded as an oddity.
The balance of my leave sped by, and I felt increasingly disconnected. The Marine Corps, to which I’d be returning shortly, was putting me in the backwater of supply. I was about to go from the central focus of war preparation to the exiled purgatory of supply school, followed by a remote duty station. Vietnam was now where the action was for the Marine Corps. It was all that I had been trained for. Most of my former platoon mates were on their way. In both my personal