First days at MCRD

...well after being up something like about a week with no sleep, we, the new recruits finally head over to a place to sleep. Now MCRD San Deigo is an interesting place...there are real building there very typical of any military installation and the style out there was mostly like California. There's also a bit of real WW1 and WW2 history there....I'm not saying the dates of those great wars but the wonderful quonset hut. These are going to be our homes for now and we have at least that in common with days, many past. A Quonset hut is a lightweight prefabricated structure of corrugated galvanised iron having a semicircular cross section. The design was based on the Nissen hut developed by the British during World War I. The name comes from their site of first manufacture, Quonset Point, at the Davisville Naval Construction Battalion Center in Davisville (a village located within the town of North Kingstown, Rhode Island). If you want to get a picture in your mind, just take one of those round drive way culverts, not the concrete but the metal one, cut it in half blow it up to about 10 feet tall put walls on each end, two doors and voila...home for grunts. Oh and Grunts is what you USMC ground pounders, infantry men, and...there are a lot of other terms I'll explain later....recruits aren't really grunts yet, we're actually nobodys....and that's part of the plan to build Marines outa civilians...first you take all the individual out of an individual....sounds strange doesn't it...then from that amorphous blob and all the blobs around him, you build up a Marine. It works and funny as I'll try to explain later, I rather liked it. Back to sleep...I can't remeber when or how, but we were marched to some quonset huts with our sea bag of stuff which included sheets. pillows and wool blankets with the Eagle Globe and Anchor on it....I think we were just told or orderd to 'stow' our stuff and then....'light's out'...oh and our bed was a standard issue wooden cot. It doesn't matter, cause I just crash....I think I've been up 40 or 50 hours....can't tell any more.....when I wake up and that was some event....I'll blog more.....

Off to Bootcamp.....

Well, it was a rough 2+ months to get me on my way to bootcamp. My girlfriend then drove me to Adam's Field...that Little Rock International Airport now. I'd never been on a jet before and only once in a small plane. After good byes, it up the stair on a DC9 to Dallas Love field. There were other's there going to San Diego too. We went drinking at a bar in the terminal. I wasn't very experineced at air travel, so I ended up missing my next plane. No problem, they just put us on another plane to San Diego. Well, finally we get there and late at that. This was the few lucky things to happen to me for month. Everyone who got there earlier were standing at attention on the curb and had been for hours. We were the last ones and it was immediately off to the buss. There were these guys in uniforms and they were yelling like crazy at us. My new name was maggot. We were all maggots or ladies. It's a 10 min ride to MCRD San Diego. That Marine Corps Recruit Depot. Through the gates and then off the buss. They have these feet prints painted on the asphalt. We all had to find a place and stand. Lots more yelling. We were in this thing called receiving and there are lots of things to do....the highlights...get all your personal stuff except a watch prepaired to mail back home. Then in a line to get some new clothes. Tres Chic....green utility pants, a sweat shirt, a green cap white boxer shorts, t-shirt and tennis shoes...they were the converse allstar type. Yeeeeehaaaaaaa. And man that hair cut is fun. These civilian barbers tell you to put your finger on a mole in your hair if you have one and then it's buzz buzz buzz gone.......lots of yelling and running here and running there. We learned our first new words, three of them...."Sir, yes Sir." Receiving takes about 20 or more hours. I'm tired thinking about it, so I'll just write more later....Semper Fi.

So I signed the dotted line....4 years of active duty, guaranteed avionics school...woooohooooo I'm going to be a real Marine. That was about the 13th of August, 1969...problem was with the war going on, there was no room in bootcamp for me so I had to wait 90 days...during that timeframe, I was kinda silly, drank a lot, partied and such. I went to a sorta rural highschool and I guess you could say most of my friends were rednecks. I guess that made me one too....dunno....about a month before I was supposed to leave for bootcamp, I was out for a particularlly heavy night of drinking when a friend a couple of years older than I and freshly back from Viet Nam hatched a plan to keep me from going into the service. Very simply if he beat the crap out of me, they wouldn't take me. Not a bright plan, but...so after about 2 hours of a drunken brawl, our other 'good' friends just left us on the side the road to slug it out. Well, here comes the county Sherrif' amd he don't like what he sees. I just got in the back of the squad car as told, but my friend decided he'd kick some of their butt. Oooooo bad move. Long story short, we spent most of the night in jail after he got out of the ER and I still went to bootcamp the following week. Bootcamp......Marine Corp bootcamp.......

USMC---installment one

This is just a bit of a teaser. I was 19 in 1969, the summer of love, Woodstock etc. I had spent a half year at University of Arkansas and another half at LRU (Little Rock University.) School was always easy for me but I just didn't study hard. So I had a lot of withdrawals (from class.) I wanted to buy a '69 GTO 'Judge' and needed my Dad to co-sign. Well he'd have no part of that and I just decided it was time for me to 'move on'. After a particularly bad hangover, I asked my girlfriend to take me down to the old court house that Monday morning, I was going into the service. The USMC recruiter was the closest to the front door. Well there was more to it than that, I had taken a friend to the same place many months earlier and he was in Viet Nam (USMC) now so I just thought that that'd be the place for me. Joining was the easiest part, since I had lots of schooling and was good in math, I could go in for four years and get all sorts of neat training like working on electronics, computers etc....heck why not, I wasn't going to be a Doctor anymore....why not go be my own man..................

Thoughts on Veterans....

This coming week has Veteran's Day. I wonder what that means to people today and in this environment. We're a diverse Country with a tremendous amount of Nationalism and an equal amount of 'agree to dis-agree'...Is there really such thing as a popular war? My dad fought in the war to 'end wars' WWII. So did my father-in-law. I was a Marine from 1969-1973. That makes me a Viet Nam era veteran. That certainly wasn't a popular war. But, my musings are about what do people think of veterans these days....I'm a Vet...I don't feel like I'm different than anyone else but I guess I must be. I'll probably blog more later about being in the USMC. Who's going to care about Vets this week?

Day 4...Bek came over with Zinnie and Boone, the dogs had a great time in the back yard. I worked on my JBL Eon G20 speaker...it's been flaky at gigs. I think it's fixed. Now I'm trying to figure out how to use the unix mv command to add a file extension to a bunch of music files.

Blog day three...not much to say...had lunch with Rebekah, food was good company was delightful. Playing at the Contradance tonite. I think I need a rest and some time off..

Day two of blogging for me....I'm just going to take it slow. Did add myself to facebook today. With that and all the guitar forums/lists, I guess I should be having some fun now.

MyFirstBlog

Trying to keep up with the world as it has already passed by. Let's see where this goes.