Loon - Jack McLean [26]
How cool was that?
Such was the thinking of this teenage boy. To this day, it’s a continuing marvel to me that any boy, during any period in world history, has ever reached his twenty-first birthday.
The United States Marine Corps supply center in Barstow sprawled over wide stretches of the Mojave Desert. Outside, all manner of military apparatus, including tanks, artillery, and Jeeps, were lined up for miles. Inside the dozen enormous warehouses lay the clothes, web gear, and ordnance to outfit the exploding marine population in Vietnam. That was what we did in Barstow.
Military life there was civilized. A large contingent of my supply school classmates accompanied me, including Sid MacLeod, my closest friend and constant companion. We’d been inseparable since Camp Geiger. Sid hailed from McLean, Virginia, which we saw as a curious coincidence. He had attended a year of college but had yearned for something else. Like me, with little warning to his parents, he had quietly enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.
Every payday we’d head to the slop chute for a beer. Sid would put the Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows” on the jukebox. We’d order another round and wonder what might become of our lives.
I was nineteen. Sid was twenty.
We each had fifteen months left in the Marine Corps. Sid wanted to go to Vietnam. I wanted to go as well, but not enough to actually raise my hand—not that it would have mattered. Sid had been volunteering fruitlessly for ten months.
He was six feet tall with bright blond hair worn in a buzz cut. If you were looking for a marine out of central casting, it would have been Sid. Then again, if you were looking for a more unlikely candidate than me to be in the marines, it would have been Sid. He was intelligent, sensitive, funny as hell, controlled, patient, and intolerant of chickenshit.
A year later Sid was dead, killed in action in Khe Sanh. I was a few miles away, celebrating my twenty-first birthday on the DMZ, a brief week before our unit was overrun by a regiment of the North Vietnamese Army.
On a Sunday evening sixteen years later, my eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, handed me a folded piece of yellow-lined paper. She and her mother had just returned from a trip to Washington to visit friends and had taken time to visit the newly dedicated Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I unfolded the paper to find a pencil rubbing of the name Sidney M. MacLeod. It was visible evidence of the fact that Sid was dead and not just in deep hiding like all of my other Marine Corps buddies.
In Barstow, Sid and I lived in a small air-conditioned Quonset hut with forty other guys and worked with civilians in eight-hour shifts in the office of a warehouse. Because of the increasing activity overseas, all of the supply warehouses were operating twenty-four hours a day. There was a minimum of petty harassment. We did have a brief formation every morning, sounded off, and maybe did a few squat thrusts and side straddle hops. Rifles were issued and cleaned every day—a constant reminder that we were still, in fact, in the United States Marine Corps. Off time during the day, though, was spent baking at the base pool. Evenings were spent reading, writing letters, or playing endless games of casino and hearts. Once or twice a week we would venture out to drink beer. Once a month we’d take the long bus ride to Las Vegas or L.A., spend our monthly pay of $96.50, and return to base happily broke until the next payday.
It was deathly boring.
All around us, there was evidence of the military buildup that was taking place in Vietnam. The volume of the material that we processed in and out of Barstow every