The Tarnished Shooter

by Charles James

  It didn’t take long to learn there were two kinds of Marines in the regular Marine Corps. There were the squared away Marines, and there were the shit birds. You were considered a shit bird if your cover and your utilities weren’t starched to perfection or your boots didn't have any polish applied to them in more than two days.

  It was easy to fall into the status of a shit bird, especially if you liked to be social and go out to the clubs after duty. The squared away Marines never did anything that wasn't related to the Marine Corps; they always looked like they were going to have their picture taken, or were going to see the commanding officer. Squared away Marines were also the biggest jerks because they thought they were better than everyone else just because their uniforms were so neat and tidy. They acted like rich kids did on the outside, always wearing their Sunday best. I was somewhere in between, I took care of my uniform, but I didn't make love to it like those squared away suckers.

  Military life was fun when we were in school. We all had a common goal, went to chow together and partied on the weekends. Our class of fourteen consisted of all white guys. Not many minorities, if any, were in the electrical or electronics programs, so we didn't have any racial problems within the class, but there were plenty of race problems at the school and at the base as a whole.

  The blacks roamed around in groups of three or more and if they came across a lone white Marine he got harassed. Sometimes the lone Marine got jumped, and was beat up. Black power handshakes were everywhere, some blacks seemed like they were at war with the whites. One night while I was at the enlisted men’s club a big city black Marine came over to the table where I was sitting with a couple of my buddies and demanded I buy him a beer. He was egged on by other blacks sitting at another table. I refused and he just kept insisting I buy him a beer, I just kept refusing and he finally gave up, pissed off and swearing he would get me—then he left me alone. One black guy that I knew well and liked was sitting at our table. He said to me, “Man, that dude was just trying to see if you were a punk—seeing if he could play your lily white ass.” There were a lot of big city blacks who just hated white people no matter what. With the black power movement going on; it just fueled the fire for racial hatred.

  If I had bought that black Marine a beer he would think he could get over on me at any time. That's the way it was. Someone was always testing you to see if you were weak or if they could run a game on you. Some of those motherfuckers would rip you off in a heartbeat if they knew they could get away with it. Just because you were a Marine, didn’t mean you were totally honest. Semper Fi didn’t mean much to some in those days.

  At the school, there was a black gunnery sergeant instructor who spotted my weakness in mathematics and pounced on me at every opportunity. The instructor could have tried to help me out instead of constantly humiliating me in front of the class. It felt like I was back in high school. It was because of instructors and teachers like him that I hated learning in a classroom. I had to learn advanced mathematics, almost overnight along with doing the computations for calculating electrical circuits using algebra and a slide rule. It was almost impossible for me to keep up with the fast pace. I understood all of the theory behind electricity and electronics, but when it came time to analyze a circuit using algebraic trig functions and converting them into logarithms to use on the slide rule, I had trouble fully grasping the concepts. I had failed every higher math class I had when I was in high school. I never thought I would need to know things like algebra and trigonometry. Now, here I was, sitting in a military school with what felt like a shotgun to my head. If I didn’t learn the math, I would be dropped from the class. And then what, I wondered? I tried to learn what needed to be learned only to find myself getting more frustrated because the others were grasping what I couldn’t. I should have just signed up to be a truck driver.

  I was cut from the class a couple weeks before graduation and was then installed as chief coffee boy, go-fer, and runner for the staff NCOs at the school. I hated the way those assholes treated me while I waited for the next class to form. They kept telling me I was too stupid to be an electrical equipment repairman and I was going to be just another nail bender in a shit bird combat engineering battalion. Then they sat back in their squeaky office chairs and laughed as they slopped the coffee I’d just made them. Again, there I was, stuck in the control of egotistical assholes.

  While I waited for orders to go through the class again, I was made an assistant to the platoon sergeant for the barracks of the school. One of my duties was to fill the guard roster with names for daily and weekend guard duty. Guard duty was four hours on and eight hours off during the weekends. It was a job that required a Marine to walk around a designated area with a rifle, a shotgun, or a forty-five caliber pistol. I guarded all kinds of shit when I was on guard duty. Once I guarded an ammo dump from a platform two stories up with a huge spot light. It was spooky to be there alone at night, even with a weapon; many times I thought I saw things as I fought to stay awake. Another time I guarded a mess of amphibious troop carriers, called Amtracs, at a small guard shack, with a forty-five caliber pistol strapped to my side. It was fun walking around with that pistol. “Go ahead, make my day!”

  The officer of the day on guard duty tried to sneak up on us and catch us sleeping. If we got caught sleeping, it would have been grounds for a court martial. The thing is, we never really knew if the weapons we had would actually fire. We were given five live-rounds of ammunition for defending ourselves, or others in case of an assault. But everything was a court martial offence and half the time we never knew what the fuck to do.

  My job as an assistant to the platoon sergeant was the greatest job I ever had while I was in the "SUCK", slang for the Marine Corps during the late sixties and early seventies. I started a little guard duty business where the guys I had assigned to guard duty paid me to find someone else to walk the duty they were scheduled for. If a guy had planned on going home for the weekend and I had scheduled him for guard duty, I charged him twenty bucks to find someone else to walk his guard.

  I was always being offered money to tweak the guard roster. Being privy to all the information coming down the pike gave me more power. It was a fun job because the Marines fresh out of boot camp called me sir when they checked in because they didn't know any better. There was nothing like being seventeen and being called “sir.” We all made that mistake. Most of the time, I answered the phone or shot the breeze with my boss who was black and a Vietnam veteran. He drove a little yellow Volkswagen, and had many women chasing him. He said he’d been promoted to sergeant when he was in the Nam just a year before he got orders to run the barracks. His primary MOS had been an 0311 which is a basic riflemen, or grunt in the infantry. I liked him because he wasn’t like the other younger black Marines who were prejudiced against whites. He told me his life had been saved in combat by a white Marine. When he got the job to be the platoon sergeant, he had one year left of a two year re-enlistment. We were always talking about pussy and how many pictures of women we had taped up in our wall locker. Marines always bragged about how many women they had slept with.

  I did that job for about six or seven months and never did get the chance to go through electrical equipment repair school again. Instead, I was transferred to a combat engineering battalion at another location on base. I got orders to go through combat engineer school and on-the-job training to become that nail-bender those asshole NCOs used to laugh about. The only thing I accomplished at electrical equipment repair school was getting promoted from private to PFC (private first class) besides learning what the Marine Corps was really about. When I got my promotion to PFC I had to walk through six or seven Marines on both sides of me taking brutal punches to my shoulders. It was known as pinning on the stripes. At the time of my transfer I had about one year and three months of my three year enlistment under my belt.

  The combat engineering unit I was transferred to was full of fuck ups and shit birds. When I got there, I learn
ed that this was where all the drop-outs from the Courthouse Bay Engineer School came to get re-educated as a combat engineer. A dumping ground for non-conformists, short-timers, and shit birds. At least I was out of that squad bay barracks and into a modern style barracks with four man rooms.

  One of my roommates, PFC Tovar, was a Mexican who had worked as a migrant worker before joining the Marines. Every time he went out to a club on or off base, he got into fights with black Marines. At morning formation, there he stood with a couple of black eyes. The blacks hated the Mexicans almost as much as they hated the whites.

  Tovar was one tough hombre though, because he liked to fight as much as he liked to drive his duce-and-a-half truck. He was also dropped from the electrician’s course at Courthouse Bay. At the combat engineering unit he was assigned duty as the company driver. We went thru combat engineer school together and we were the top two of the class. We learned about bridge building, landing zone construction, explosives, and carpentry. We held demolitionist certification that allowed us to use explosives. Near the end of our training we were chosen to go to Puerto Rico for rock crusher school.

  If we weren't in school it was boring, because there wasn't much to do. Mostly, we hung out at the barracks, looked at porno magazines, smoked like chimneys and went to the Post Exchange, just trying to hide and slide. We got a haircut every week for a dollar. The highlight on base was the outdoor movie theater and the chow truck that rolled around every evening. It was almost impossible to watch a movie because alcohol was sold and most ended up drunk, talking loud halfway through the movie. It was a common practice to try and avoid as much duty as possible in those days, unless you were a squared away kiss ass, but this was a unit of shit birds and fuck-ups where “work” was considered one of those bad four letter words. I don't know why it was like that. It just was. When we did do “work” we put together landing zones for the Marine Corps Harrier Jet or dug ditches for drainage at various locations on the base. I also recall three or four of us working like dogs to build a concrete grease rack which was used to service the underside of the big duce-and-a-half trucks.

  It was a terrible time to be in the Marines. Morale was at an all-time low and nobody really gave a shit about anything except getting drunk or smoking pot. The Marines who had rank and seniority were mostly Vietnam veteran short timers who just wanted out. One of our fellow redneck Marines from Texas mainlined speed every chance he could, others spent their days trying to score marijuana. Pornography was everywhere and if a Marine didn't own some kind of a fuck book he would be accused of being a faggot.

  The whole place seemed like a school for wayward boys. Everyone bantering everyone else, trying to push buttons and get into fights; it was worse than high school—usually it was a group of blacks zeroing in on a white guy, then doing everything and anything to start a fight. Everything was “yo’ mama this” and “yo’ mama that.” It was referred to as playing the dozens. We called ourselves “UNCLE SAMS MISGUIDED CHILDREN” the long unofficial definition for USMC. Sometimes everyone acted like children. One Marine private had the last name of “Duck”, when he was paged to see the company’s commanding officer, everyone below the rank of corporal walked through the barracks quacking like a duck looking for him. “Quack-Quack-Quack Private Duck, where the fuck are you?” On liberty call we went to the bars in town trying to find local girlfriends. We all wanted girlfriends. Picture a whole barracks of over seventy Marines out in town looking for a girlfriend. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. When we struck out, or if there were no women to be found, we ended up at the movies. Eventually, it all got to be boring and routine with most guys being homesick for some action back on the block.

  One afternoon after four months at my new unit I got word of a phone call. The caller identified himself as a captain, so the marine on phone watch sent a company runner to find me. The runner informed me the caller was a captain and suggested I hurry and not keep the captain waiting. I wondered why a captain was calling me. I was paged and answered the phone, "Sir, this is private first class Barker. How may I help you, Sir?" The caller started laughing and then said, "It's Clem!" He thought it was funny impersonating an officer and so did I. I still had to play it cool because others were listening. “Yes, Sir very well, Sir.” Everyone listening said, “Man what cha ya’ll doin’ talkin’ to an officer?” Clem wanted to get together at the club for a few beers that night. I told him where I was at, and he met me at the E-club after evening chow.

  PFC Tovar, Clem, and I drank beer after beer as we talked about the good old days back on the block. Then Clem announced he was getting the “big chicken dinner” slang for a bad conduct discharge; he said he’d assaulted an officer. But first he would have to serve six months at a naval prison on the east coast. My Mexican buddy didn’t like Clem at all and suggested I steer clear of him. I should have listened to his advice.

  Clem was tired of all the Marine Corps bullshit and didn't care anymore. He hammered away at me trying to talk me into going AWOL with him for a few weeks. At first I wasn't going to do anything like that because I had a pretty good military record, except for my drop from the electrical equipment repair school. I had no intention of screwing it up like he did. If I did go I didn’t want to be gone for longer than thirty days.

  But eventually after drinking too many beers the old chemistry between us kicked in and he convinced me to go UA for a little while. It seemed like a third of the Marine Corps was AWOL or UA at the time so I didn’t think it would matter and even if it did, so what. We were only nineteen, just looking for more action. We joined the Marines for action and there sure wasn't much of that where we were.

  We hitched a ride from another Marine who’d also decided to go AWOL for a while who we met at an area on base known as swoop circle. There was usually someone with a car heading home on leave, or for a forty-eight hour pass, waiting at swoop circle for passengers willing to share traveling expenses. We were on our way home, talking shit and acting like we didn't have a care in the world. Once back home, Ma was glad to see us. Clem was still like one of the family. We’d done everything together before we joined up, so we picked up where we’d left off. We went out to our old haunts, got into bar fights and acted like tough guys. Clem, Little-T and I were in one of our favorite bars when I got into a fight with a few guys. All three of us got picked up, carried out, and thrown on the street by a mob of angry college kids. We just laughed about the whole ordeal. Apparently they didn’t like our tough guy attitudes. We carried loaded pistols Clem had stolen from a sports shop a few weeks after we got back home. We are lucky nobody ever got shot while we were out drinking in those bars.

  Before I left the base, a couple of other guys from my unit had also gone AWOL and robbed a bank. I heard they got caught and were sentenced to five years in a civilian prison. The Marine Corps made us crazy for action and if we didn't have any action we made some ourselves. The Marine Corps turned us into adrenaline junkies—at least that was how I felt.

  If we stayed gone longer than thirty days, a federal warrant would be issued for our arrest. As far as we were concerned, we couldn't really be charged as deserters because we weren't on a battlefield and we planned to go back in a few days anyway. People always make such a big deal out being AWOL; some thought and acted like we should have been executed. Most of the country was against the war to begin with, so what did it matter if we left our unit for a few days? Clem was already getting kicked out so it didn’t matter to him.

  The college town we lived in was full of naïve little college chicks, looking for action just like Clem and I and we were good at luring them in with our bad-ass attitudes towards the law and society. We made up shit about everything we were doing and said it was all classified. We couldn't go into details. Then we snickered, so nobody knew what to believe.

  Nothing was more fun to me than making up stories about my life, telling tall tales, and then trying to hold back the laughter. It didn't matter; I seemed to be living
in one big fucking lie anyway. In boot camp the drill instructors said we belonged to a brotherhood that would last until the day we died. I didn’t see it that way and seemed to be treated like just another poor sucker conned into believing that I actually mattered in the Corps. Marines treated other Marines with more contempt than I’d ever imagined. I guess there was too much testosterone brewing. Adrenaline breeding grounds would describe a Marine base on any given night. Imagine living with a bunch of guys that learned everything you learned about fighting and killing. Tempers flared over the smallest insult or remark.

  Chapter 18

  There’s a truckload of marijuana over there. My grandmother was easy going like my mother and got a grin out of some of the unusual things her grandchildren did. My cousin and his buddy, a golden gloves boxer had a few hundred pounds of pot Grandma’s basement. Strapped for cash, Clem and I went over there to check things out. My grandmother said they used a U-Haul trailer to transport all that stuff from somewhere in Iowa. She also said when my cousin, an Army Vietnam Vet, and the boxer slept there they always had a loaded gun within reach—that made things more interesting. I wondered if my cousin would really shoot me over some useless weeds.

  It looked to us like a few hundred pounds of weed, but we found out the stuff had virtually no THC, making it almost worthless. If that wasn’t bad enough, the stuff smelled terrible. We called it stinkweed, but decided to try to market the bogus weed anyway. I managed to sell a few bags to my Uncle Seth making a couple hundred bucks. It was enough money to keep us in fast food, cigarettes, and beer for a couple weeks anyway.