MARINE CORPS boot camp in the late fifties was fifteen weeks of beatings, humiliations, insults, and torture. The idea was to break recruits in San Diego before they broke somewhere else where there was shooting. It was a dumb theory. But I didn’t realize how dumb until I was much older than the seventeen I was when I suffered through it.
IT IS APPARENTLY very difficult for privileged liberals to understand that since World War Two our armed services are mainly comprised of people who have no other options to the service due to poverty and faulty education. At the time I joined the Marines I had no options nor did any of the people in my recruit platoon at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. Well, almost all had no options. There were a couple of middleclass college students who had broken up with their girl friends and in the middle of the maudlin drunk following their romantic pile ups, did the most radical thing they could thing of -- they joined the Marine Corps.
THE MOST IMPORTANT thing the Marines did for me was to wake me up. I’ll explain how: The three drill instructors were a large psychotic black man named Jim Wells, a tall skinny white psychotic Texan named Mague and a short psychotic Englishman named Haughton. The last had served with the British Royal Marines in Korea. He said once that he had come to America because he calculated America’s odds for getting into shooting wars were better than England’s. These guys loved wars. They had killed people, lots of people. When the Korean War ended, so did their good times.
EVERYDAY, PLATOON 199 would be forced to doubletime and dry shave, smoke an entire pack of cigarettes with a paper bag over our heads, drink fire buckets of water with thimbles, listen to speculation as to the sexual habits of our mothers and girl friends, fight one another bare knuckles in vacant quonset huts, and stand rigidly at attention while one or another of the three sadists beat on us. In the four hours or so of sleep permitted us at night, anyone caught asleep on his back was punched in the stomach on the grounds that only masturbators slept on their backs. To this day, I sleep on my stomach.
THE BEATINGS FROM Haughton and Mague were particularly onerous because one-on-one there was no one in the platoon who couldn’t have broken their necks. Friends of mine, after we had “graduated” from boot camp, spent several weekends staking out the entrance to MCRD hoping to catch Haughton or Mague coming out. Wells was so tough he scared everybody. Getting bashed by him was much like getting hit by a tidal wave or some other awesome and preposterous natural force. Retaliation, in his case, was out of the question.
HAUGHTON’S FAVORITE torture was to knock out tall guys by twisting their collars until their wind pipes were temporarily blocked. The ensuing swoon of an unconscious six-footer sinking at his feet gave the little bastard almost sexual pleasure. He conked me out six or seven times by twisting my collar. Mague would assail, screaming his chief insult, “You Alvis Presley, you.” Mague pronounce “Elvis” “Alvis” and regarded Presley as a direct threat to the combat capabilities of the Marine Corps, I hope Mague lived long enough to scope out Alice Cooper. Mague lost it completely until he’d drawn blood and the other two di’s would drag him off and remind him it was time to take his calm down pill. The slightest resistance would cause all three to administer real bad beatings. We were all seventeen and eighteen years old. We thought the savagery was a part of life in America.
I THOUGHT THAT WAY for a couple of weeks when it occurred to me, “If these guys, Haughton, Wells, and Mague are on my side, what are the Russians like?” All three were official combat heroes with chests full of combat ribbons and medals.
ONE NIGHT WELLS CALLED me into his hut. He said he wanted to tell me a story. I knew going in that I was headed for a beating because no one ever got in and out of his hut without taking at least one good shot in the gut. To that point, maybe seven or eight weeks into the training, he’d only nailed me a couple of times. My buddies were envious because they were getting beaten much more often.
WELLS TOLD ME he and his twin brother had lied about their ages back home in Philadelphia to join the Marines when they were fifteen, right after the Marines were integrated following WWII. He said his brother “took one right through the horns at Inchon.” Wells laughed at the memory of his brother’s death. I guess he liked the idea of his twin getting shot through the head. He chuckled and imagined his brother’s startled surprise as he stepped over into the long time out. I didn’t know why he was telling me this stuff, but knew instinctively I would somehow punctuate it.
THEN WELLS TOLD ME about the Chosin Reservoir. He said several Marine battalions were completely surrounded by ten or twelve Chinese divisions. it was thirty below. It was snowing. Weapons had frozen. Rifle barrels were warped by the cold rendering them useless. The guy next to him was dead. Wells couldn’t see anybody else in the snow. The Chinese were overrunning the Marine positions. They overran Wells. Wells said he killed at least fifteen Chinese swinging his rifle like a baseball bat. He clubbed them all to death.
“WHAT DO YOU California queers think of that, Anderson?”
“SIR, PRIVATE ANDERSON does not presume to speak for all California queers, but the private - - - ”
BEFORE I COULD TELL him how wonderful I thought he was for killing Chinese with his frozen rifle by using it like a baseball bat, he apparently began imagining me as a Chinese overrunning his position. Wells hit me twice in the Adam’s Apple with the web of his hand, punched me several times in the gut and kicked me several times in the shins. To finish me off and knock me out, he hit me from behind with a metal folding chair. I hurt so bad in so many places I didn’t know which body part to turn over to death first.
I DREAM OF encountering one of the three. The bluffs behind the gas station in Albion would do fine. Haughton, Mague, or Wells, crippled and in wheel chairs on the edge of a cliff. I’ll soak them down in gasoline, ignite them and send them flaming into the sea. Wells, though, I think I’ll get from behind with a metal folding chair.
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