The Last Fire Team

I was still about half drunk when my plane touched down in San Diego. It had been three weeks since I signed my enlistment papers, and I used that time wisely. I had partied. Large. So I was neither looking nor feeling my best when I stepped into the terminal and presented myself to the sergeants who were there to collect us recruits. Moments later, with my body rigidly locked in the position of attention and my nose firmly pressed against the wall of the terminal, that pleasant buzz was replaced by a powerful sense of dread.

I always knew that I would end up in Marine Corps boot camp sooner or later. I had kin who either had been in the Corps or still were, so I grew up hearing the stories and spending time on the bases and I had a pretty good grasp of Marine Corps history and philosophy. I figured that I knew just exactly what I was getting myself into. 

I figured wrong.

When all the recruits had been collected at the terminal, we were herded at high speed down the airport corridors, past crowds of amused travelers, and out to a waiting bus. The bus ride to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego was short but intense. Some poor fool asked one of the sergeants a question and received an amazing high-decibel ass-chewing that quickly expanded to include the entire bus. We pulled through the gates of MCRD at midnight, and by the time we stopped at the brightly lit receiving barracks and saw the line of drill instructors waiting for us, a cloud of fear was pouring out of that bus thick enough to feel.

It took about a day for enough recruits to arrive to form a company. But it didn’t take anywhere near that long for us to realize that we were no longer on Earth. This was like some surrealistic concentration camp on Altair 4. A bad dream. We were all bald by now and dressed in ill-fitting camies, so we were admittedly a pretty goofy looking bunch as we were chased around at full sprint all night and day from one mysterious place to another by really big, really mean, really pissed-off men. 

And these men did not like us. All of them were deeply hurt and offended that the idea of becoming a United States Marine had even fleetingly entered our pathetic, insect-like civilian minds. We were the scum that grows behind bathroom cabinets. They wanted to just take us out and shoot us but apparently there was some sort of regulation preventing this. But they could certainly make us each just as miserable as a fellow not in prison could ever hope to be. We were in their world now, and they owned us.

A company was formed comprised of four platoons of about 60 recruits each. The platoon was further split into four rifle squads, and these squads were broken down into four-man fire teams. And naturally God made sure that I ended up in a fire team that was peculiar to say the least.

Domres was a tough-talking punk kid from Indianapolis. The kind of guy whose mouth was always writing checks his body couldn’t cash. The young lad was an ass-kicking waiting to happen.

Rudnik was a skinny bespectacled nerd who probably got chased home from school by bullies every day. He had flown in from Salt Lake City, and I suspected at first that he had gotten on the wrong bus and ended up here by mistake.

At 25 I was older than everyone else in my platoon including the drill instructors. And I hadn’t exactly been leading a healthy, spiritual lifestyle back in Northern California. The most exercise I ever got was trying to kickstart my Harley after drinking tequila all night with the boys. So it was all I could do to keep up with the young bucks fresh out of high school.

And then there was Hansen.

This fellow was one of the most repulsive humans I had ever seen. He hadn’t just been smacked by the Ugly Stick, he had been beaten by it repeatedly over an extended period of time. And Hansen was definitely adrift in his own little world. Like maybe his mental circuit-breaker had blown when we pulled in the gate and it hadn’t reset yet. If he was like this back in Minnesota it’s a miracle he survived childhood.

It didn’t take long for me to realize just how screwed up our fire team was. If the platoon was marching and we were supposed to turn right, one of my boys would always, without fail, turn left creating a huge snarl of recruits. They were forever dropping their rifles, which is not a good thing. One of them would usually leave something necessary in the squad bay, forcing the rest of the platoon to double-time back there to get it. Rudnik couldn’t run ten paces without darn near passing out. Domres couldn’t spell his name. But Hansen was the Master of Disaster. He put his boots on the wrong feet. Quite regularly. He would come out of the chow hall, form up with the wrong platoon and go marching off with them, still holding his dirty food tray. He shot at the wrong targets on the rifle range, usually when we weren’t supposed to be shooting at all. I watched in open-mouthed amazement one day as he put his shirt on backwards then fumbled around trying to button it behind his back. The boy was lost, to put it mildly.

As the weeks went by, the composition of our platoon changed considerably. If a recruit could not complete a particularly brutal phase of our training, he would be pushed back to a platoon that had formed after us. And he would often be replaced by a recruit who had been kicked back from a platoon ahead of us. So it was theoretically possible for a recruit to stay in boot camp, pushed from platoon to platoon, until the end of time — a thought which chilled me to the bone. We lost a few recruits who had failed to mention an arrest or something when they enlisted. We lost several more to accidents and for medical reasons. A whole group of guys tried to flee over the fence at night and ended up in a punishment platoon. Some recruits just vanished overnight and we never did hear why. So while the size of the platoon stayed more or less the same, the original members were dropping like flies.

Somehow the members of our fire team managed to keep from getting kicked back. But we weren’t exactly shining examples of America’s finest fighting force. We were always the last fire team to fall into formation. The last fire team to assemble our weapons. The last fire team to finish the run or obstacle course. Naturally the four of us spent a considerable amount of time wedged between screaming drill instructors. And when one man screws up he is rarely the only one to pay. Sometimes the whole platoon pays. Sometimes it’s the squad or fire team. But the fire team leader always pays. That would be me. I was soon spending more time doing push-ups and such than I was standing upright.

This was the New Corps. A kinder, gentler 80s kind of Marine Corps. Which meant that the drill instructors could no longer beat the living piss out of you whenever it struck their fancy. Sure, they could exercise you until you were slipping around in a pool of your own sweat, praying that they would just kick your ass and get it over with. But they couldn’t physically harm a recruit. This didn’t really matter though, since there were plenty of gung-ho recruits who were more than happy to throw a blanket party, either on their own initiative or at the discrete suggestion of a drill instructor. A blanket party being where a group of recruits sneak up to the sleeping victim at night, wrap him up in his own blanket and just flat go wailing on him. It’s a sad, depressing thing to hear in the middle of a long, lonely night. In our platoon it eventually became almost a nightly occurrence.

Domres was the first member of our fire team to receive one of these midnight motivational sessions. They beat him up so bad that he was in sick bay for two days. When he got back he looked like a bruise with lips.

I knew that they were coming for Hansen next. And I decided that I wasn’t going to let it happen. Watching my team members being picked off one by one like crippled lambs hardly seemed in keeping with Marine Corps principles of leadership. Besides, I liked a good scrap now and then, so I got the boys together and quietly explained what was coming down, and what we were going to do about it.

None of us slept a wink the night we made our stand. And sure enough, in the wee hours of the morning, silent, shadowy figures emerged from the darkness and converged on Hansen’s bunk like ninjas from the mist. The four of us leapt to our feet and immediately started swinging. It was so dark that for all I knew I was punching on my own team members. And the battle was a quiet one for fear of waking the drill instructors. Just the sounds of impact and pain. This eerie brawl went on for quite some time before the shadows finally disappeared back into the night.

There were a lot of bruises and split lips and such in the old squad by the next morning. I personally felt as if I had crashed a motorcycle at high speed. But that night seemed to be a turning point of sorts. The rest of the platoon pretty much left us alone afterwards. There were no more blanket parties. Even the drill instructors seemed to back off maybe half a notch. And while I can’t honestly say that our fire team began to operate like a well-oiled machine, at least we became… less hopeless. I even managed to join the elite few recruits who were allowed to stand at parade rest outside the squadbay and smoke a cigarette on Sunday afternoons. Simple mind, simple pleasures.

When our platoon marched across the parade deck for the last time on Graduation Day, there were less than 20 of the original 60-some recruits who had formed the platoon 13 weeks before. But among that group was Domres, Rudnik, Stevens and Hansen. United States Marines, for better or worse. I’m not exaggerating a bit when I say that if I live to be 100 I will never forget the overwhelming feeling of pure and total joy I experienced when I was finally able to get the hell out of that God-forsaken place.

I never saw the guys from my fire team again. But I would occasionally hear something of them through the grapevine.

Domres was in one of the 332 Marine Corps body-bags to come back from Beirut in October of 1983. Another victim of our own State Department.

Rudnik went into the MPs, buffed himself out and re-enlisted as a drill instructor, of all things. I always suspected that some of those Utah bullies got a stern talking to when Rudnik went home on leave.

I went into the infantry, where I became deeply involved with that classic oxymoron: Military Intelligence.

But Hansen had a real Cinderella story. For reasons known only to God and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Hansen was selected for microwave communication technical training. Go figure. I hear that after he got out he went to work for AT&T, making the big bucks. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he still put his shirt on backwards from time to time.