And so we sat, wide awake, mesmerized by the latest twist of a mismanaged war, wishing for permission to pump a couple of HE (high explosive) rounds into their smart asses. We were staring into our own death, almost powerless to prevent it. It seemed to be getting colder, but it wasn’t. I began to feel sorry for my crew and myself; I could see how it was affecting them. How did I get into such a stupid situation? I began to wonder. It had been only nine months ago, on a similar dark, cold morning, that things went out of control—but all of that now seemed like years ago.
Nine months before, it had been an unusually chilly Southern California morning much like this on the DMZ. While chilly isn’t strange for Southern California in February, that particular morning the air was damned near freezing. Odder still was that no one recognized the frigid cold snap for the harbinger it was. Recognition would come only days later. That morning’s briskness was a silent starting gun for a series of events that would forever change me and most of the men around me.
To a casual passerby in that predawn darkness, as if any civilian would even be awake at 5 a.m., we must have appeared in the dark, cold air like a giant phantom locomotive, idling motionless at a station, steam venting from its vitals. But it wasn’t steam. It was the combined breath of eighty men standing silently at attention waiting for the engineer’s throttle. The engineer was a staff sergeant left over from the Korean War.
I’m freezing! I thought to myself. Come on, forget the headcount, and let’s get going.
None of us had bothered to put on a field jacket, for once it warmed up, it would be something you would have to lug around the rest of the day. But that morning we had all been caught by surprise by just how cold it was. Five minutes of standing stationary had us all shivering, dying to get to the warm confines and hot coffee of the mess hall.
It was our next-to-last day before graduating the two-week NCO (non-commissioned officers’) Training School at Los Pulgas, or simply Pulgas, as all Marines referred to it. It was one of several camps that made up the huge sprawling Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base on the California coast about forty miles north of San Diego.
Once fed and warmed with a couple cups of caffeine, we made our way back to our all-too-familiar classroom, glad to be out of the cold for a second time that morning. The classroom filled the entire interior of a Quonset hut whose concrete floor had long ago been bleached white from years of washing with lye soap. Quonset huts were the pre-fabs of their day. Their curved metal sides served as both wall and roof, making them look more like miniature airplane hangers than the barracks they really were—a throwback to what we young Leathernecks called the “Old Corps.”
Crammed inside the hut were eighty wooden desk-chairs, each showing decades of abuse by a thousand NCO classes before ours. The building, in fact, looked every bit as weathered and worn as the sergeant major who ran the school.
Our class was made up of corporals from all over Pendleton. We had been sent by various unit commanders who thought we showed promise for future responsibility and higher rank. Many of us found ourselves outside our own units for the first time. People surrounded me from every MOS (military occupation specialty) imaginable. There were mechanics, truck drivers, artillerymen, amtrac crewmen, and cooks. I was one of three men with an MOS of 1811—tank crewman. Although there were a myriad jobs represented in the room, more than half the class was composed of 0300s, Marine riflemen—the backbone of the Marine Corps. Any other job existed merely to support them.
The NCO training program had been a little too much like boot camp—that beginning ten-week initiation that, once we completed it, earned us the title “Marine.”
Most of us had put boot camp behind us at least a year and a half earlier. Yet here we were, facing it again. The previous thirteen days found us treated more like new recruits than the veteran Marines we thought we were. But it was part of a leadership program that was essential to advancing in rank: Before a man could start giving orders, he had to learn to take them.
My normal billet was at Las Flores, another of Pendleton’s many camps. Flores was the home of the armored units of the 5th Marine Division, to which I had been assigned for the previous thirteen months after graduating from tank school. Living up to its Spanish name, Las Flores was indeed the flower of Camp Pendleton. The newest of all the bases, it looked less like a traditional Marine camp and more like a series of college dorms. The envy of Pendleton, it made my stay at Pulgas only that much harder to endure.
I’d been doing well in NCO School; I was in the upper twenty percent of a class due to graduate the next day. Things were finally winding down a little; it had been a tough two weeks. That day’s schedule called for an all-morning lecture, which meant that we would be sitting inside, thank God. The topic was Marine Corps history, something the Corps holds in very high esteem. A history lesson would start with the Corp’s founding in a Philadelphia tavern in 1775 and take us right up to present day. Most of us would never make it to World War II.
Two hours into the lesson found us finishing the Corps’ exploits in the Caribbean between the two world wars. A loud crash sounded from the back of the room, startling everyone, including our instructor. It was the school’s sergeant major, slamming open the door.
“Sergeant Lewis!” he growled, staring at our history teacher. “I will take over now.” His startling entry got everyone’s attention instantly. It was the very effect he desired, the way of a sergeant major. The door slammed for the second time as it shut behind him while he strutted up the aisle.
Staff Sergeant Lewis stepped aside without a word, and the sergeant major centered himself in the front of the room. We hadn’t seen much of him since the first day we arrived, when he had “greeted” us. It was an address that only reinforced my limited experience with sergeant majors. Eighteen months in the Corps had taught me that changing one’s direction was easier than crossing paths with a sergeant major. Simply fall within a sergeant major’s field of view and you could easily find yourself assigned to any number of mindless jobs, like painting the rocks around a building or grooming the pebble walkways with a rake.
They were always tough old birds, and this one was no different. His chest was bedecked with half a dozen rows of ribbons that, to the trained eye, showed that he had served in China before World War II and fought in “The Big One” before serving in Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, and a half dozen other garden spots around the globe. His weathered face revealed the hardship of thirty-plus years in “my Marine Corps”—a phrase he used often, as in, “You don’t do that in my Marine Corp”—as if he owned it. But one ribbon on the top of endless rows—a Purple Heart with several stars across it—meant that he had been wounded in combat several times and probably did own a piece of the Corps. Next to it were a Silver Star and a Bronze Star, both medals for valor in combat.
Those of us sitting in the classroom could only look down at our solitary “fire watch” ribbon. We were “Snuffles,” still wet behind the ears, with no combat experience. To say we were intimidated would be a gross understatement.
This sergeant major was born in the Old Corps, a reference to the endless Marine beach landings that were the legacy of World War II and Korea. Old Corps was a term of respect for those who served before us and who were now our mentors.
Thirty years of smoking and bellowing commands gave him a rough, raspy voice that only added to the impact of anything he had to say. And like all sergeant majors, he had a quality the Corps called “command presence,” whose immediate impact almost paralyzed young Marines like us. His announcement to the class was direct and to the point—the only way a sergeant major knows how to speak. It would have an impact upon the rumors that would start right after his departure.