Loon - Jack McLean [9]
Jack Richards and Tom Lyons, both history instructors and strong supporters of me academically and personally, understood my decision. “Not an everyday thing around here, Jack, but a brave decision,” they said. That was really all that I needed—some assurance that I hadn’t completely lost my mind.
My graduating class comprised 251 boys. Of that number, more than fifty made the decision to attend Harvard University, twenty-five would go to Yale, twenty to Princeton, and twelve to Stanford. Matriculation to those four institutions alone represented more than 40 percent of the graduating class. The balance was evenly spread among many of the other most competitive colleges and universities in the land, including MIT, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Amherst, Duke, and Columbia.
By the beginning of May, many seniors began to evoke an increased identity with their new institution. College T-shirts appeared. Boys who were headed to Yale began to act like Yalies—treating their Harvard- and Princeton-bound classmates with mock disdain.
“When was the last time your ice hockey team beat ours?” Ice hockey was king at Andover.
These dialogues did not include me.
The last big game won by my new team had been the Second World War.
There were two marines who took particular interest and pride in my pending military service. One was Fred Stott, a family friend and member of the Andover administration who had worked closely with my father on alumni matters for many years. He and his family had been especially kind to me during my five-year academic struggle at Andover. Fred had served with distinction in the Marine Corps during World War II, having been awarded the Navy Cross in Saipan. He also had been wounded and evacuated from Iwo Jima. He was quick to support my decision. No doubt he also made a consoling telephone call to my stunned father.
The other was United States Marine colonel Hank Aplington. Colonel Aplington was a distant cousin of my mother’s from Derby Line, Vermont, the small town that sat across the border from her childhood home in Stanstead, Quebec. He and his family would make an annual summer day trip to our cottage there. This was the extent of my relationship with him. I had not really been aware at that time that he was in the United States Marine Corps, although I do have a vivid memory of him standing in his bathing suit on our dock by the lake with a rock-hard body and a shaved head. Aplington was, in fact, a full colonel and, as I learned many years later, a highly decorated survivor of the World War II Pacific campaigns. He had been awarded both the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for gallantry in combat, in addition to several Purple Hearts.
He heard news of my enlistment and sent the following letter of introduction to me. In retrospect, it was an extraordinarily perceptive view into the marrow of one of America’s outstanding institutions.
APO San Francisco
June 25, 1966
Letter from Col. Henry Aplington II, USMC
As of today I have been in the Marine Corps for twenty-six years. I’d like to take the occasion to welcome you to the USMC and give you my thoughts, which you may use or not as you may wish.
The men who have passed through our Corps have found it a rewarding and lasting experience. You will hear the expression, “Once a Marine, always a Marine” and it is true. As you embark on your military career, there are two things which you should keep in mind. First is that from the moment you signed your enlistment contract, you established a permanent record which can rise to plague you in the future or to which you can point as a matter of pride or reference. Second, the Corps has its fair