Loon - Jack McLean [32]
“They’re going to make you a grunt and send you over,” he replied curtly. “Adios, motherfucker. Be sure to write.”
With that, he grinned and sat back down.
“Anybody else get orders?” I asked when I was again able to speak.
“Take a look,” he said as he pointed to the pile on his desk. “Every one of you guys is going. I’ve been passing out the good news all afternoon while you all come back from leave.”
Every one of us meant all of my supply school friends and then some.
“What about MacLeod, Sid MacLeod. Is he on there?”
“Yeah, he’s here, but he’s not due back for a few more days.”
“Thanks for nothin’, Sarge,” I said as I picked up my bag and headed back across the parade deck to the barracks.
Many of the other guys had returned from leave earlier in the day and had their orders out of the envelope and under intense scrutiny. They laughed a gallows laugh when they saw me enter with the large white envelope in my hand.
“0311,” I blurted. “Are we really all going over as 0311s?”
“Fuckin’-A right,” responded Tom Ferguson, a short fair-haired private from Nebraska. The others nodded in quiet agreement.
We all had been ordered to report to Camp Pendleton to retrain as grunts—basic infantrymen. Like so many of our brothers from Parris Island Platoon 3076, our orders too now read “0311 WESTPAC.” It seemed frighteningly real as I looked up and down the squad bay at the faces of my comrades to observe their initial reactions to being sent off to war, a war that was escalating rapidly, building to what would become the bloodiest twelve months of the conflict.
Our timing could not possibly have been worse.
Camp Pendleton was a huge mass of large dusty hills spattered by low brush on the Pacific coast north of San Diego. We were stationed about twenty miles from the main camp at Camp Horno, the center for Marine Corps combat infantry training. Except for the three Special Infantry Combat Retraining companies, of which I was a part, the camp comprised boot privates directly out of the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot at San Diego.
We were housed, three thousand strong, in an ever expanding tent city that sprawled up the side of a hill to accommodate the ballooning Marine Corps troop levels in Vietnam. The area around the tents was devoid of growth and inches deep in dust baked by the unforgiving late summer sun. It was incredibly filthy. Yet I was ready to be back in the real Marine Corps. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed the structure and discipline.
The training was largely a repeat of what we had had at Camp Geiger. Here, however, we were all training to be 0311s and we were all going to Vietnam. We listened to our instructors more carefully, knowing that our lives now really would depend on our ability to read a compass and perfectly master each weapon. Yet, the more we learned, the less I felt I knew. I wondered to myself how in the world I would ever be ready in time to join a combat infantry unit in the thick of the shit.
The feeling was surreal.
Though unrelated to my training, two events occurred in the sporting world during my time at Pendleton that struck me. One was the five-hundredth home run by my childhood idol, Mickey Mantle. I had been alive for every one of those home runs—the first player about whom that could be said. I felt I was getting older.
The other was the decision by the World Boxing Association to strip Muhammad Ali of his world championship title because of his refusal to enter the military. It was increasingly apparent that the white-bread American idealism of the 1950s, so well represented by Mantle, was giving way to a more confusing time, when sports, race relations, and the war in Vietnam were all colliding in an enormous train wreck for the country. The signs were all there. Ali’s comment, when asked why he refused to be inducted, was, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”
Come to think of it, neither did I.
13
STAGING BATTALION AT CAMP PENDLETON IN CALIFORNIA was