My Men are My Heroes

by Nathaniel R. Helms

  Kasal describes Cornelison as his occasional nemesis as well as one of his closest high school friends. He claims Cornelison and Troy Tucker were at the root of most of his minor scrapes with trouble. The big ones, Kasal jokes, he managed on his own.

  All who knew the infamous trio remember the eyes of the teachers fastening on them when a disturbance unexpectedly broke out in the halls of East Union High. Whether it was skipping school, riding bicycles through the halls, or playing “grab ass” in the classroom, the three of them were usually involved in it together.

  Kasal remembers Cornelison as a big, gawky kid with a crazy sense of humor and a strong devotion to his two best friends. Cornelison in turn recalls Tucker as a “wild man” and Kasal as the quiet type.

  “Troy was a fast-driving, tough-talking country boy who didn’t mind egging on his buddies to stir up some shit on Saturday night when things got a bit dull,” Cornelison says. The three liked to play practical jokes on each other, get loud, and drive the nine miles to nearby Creston where they cruised the loop, driving aimlessly around on the main drag looking for girls or trouble or both.

  Their behavior was nothing exceptional. Like millions of young men from Small Town, USA, fighting and fornicating were the two most popular pleasures of the day in the early ’80s, although most of Afton’s young men weren’t usually successful in either pursuit. Kasal was an exception, Cornelison says. He backs up his assertions with stories from his private annals that present the trio as a cross between the Three Musketeers and the Three Stooges.

  “Troy and Brad and I would be somewhere,” Cornelison says. “Brad was such a nice guy he would never cause any trouble, but he was a tough guy—I mean tougher than shit. We would try and get him in a fight. We would walk up to some guy and tell him, ‘That guy over there wants to fight you because he thinks you’re a punk’ or ‘That guy over there has been checking out your woman.’ Something like that. But that was back in the good old days when after a fight you would get up and shake hands. Nowadays you’d get shot.”

  MEMORIES

  More than 20 years later Kasal hasn’t forgotten his nights with Randy and Troy. The memories still make him chuckle, a kind of rasping sound he makes when he is telling a joke or relating a fond memory. He claims his life would have been much quieter if it weren’t for the antics of his buddies.

  “I would be standing there drinking a soda at the refreshment stand somewhere,” he says, “and the next thing I know some big guy would walk up and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, I heard you want to fight me.’ I’d think, ‘that damn Cornelison.’ Just about every time we went out, he would try and get me in a fight.

  “He would walk up to the biggest guy he could find and tell him I wanted to fight him. Right away, we would be heading to the bathroom or out in the alley or somewhere to fight, and I didn’t even know the guy.”

  Cornelison knew he was playing with fire. “Brad could kick me and Troy’s ass at the same time,” he says. Kasal played football and was a standout wrestler, gaining a cauliflower ear in the process. He lifted weights constantly and ran for pure pleasure.

  “We used to give him hell,” Cornelison says. “Troy and me were always hitting him or telling him we were going to kick his ass, or getting him in headlocks, and he never did anything to us. I think secretly he liked being a badass, even in junior high school. Brad was very timid and shy when you met him; once you open that door and unleash that beast, look out!”

  Cornelison adds, “He could be one ornery son of a bitch. One time in school Troy and Brad put me in the trash can during break—put my butt in the can and Brad stomped me in until only my head and legs were sticking out. Then put me up on the sink. They did it more than once. Sometimes they would shut the lights off on me too. I would have to tip the trash can off the sink and fall on the floor to get out of it.”

  But Brad Kasal didn’t just hang out with the guys. No one would expect that. Shawn Essy is a lifelong friend and a devoted follower of his Marine career. Back in high school she was Kasal’s confidante and frequent companion. They shared parking spots on the square on summer nights under the big Iowa sky and talked about the future waiting for them. Although they have been separated by thousands of miles since Kasal joined the Corps, they have remained close friends.

  TALK ALL NIGHT

  “When we weren’t working—especially in the summer—we would hang around the square,” Essy remembers. “Brad would be in his Charger—later he had a Cutlass—and I would have my four-door Ford LTD, and we would sit on our hoods and talk and talk all night. Sometimes we would go to Creston and cruise around, but most of the time we hung out in town just talking.”

  Essy says Kasal showed a different side to the girls. “He was different than most of the other boys in Afton. By the time he reached high school Kasal was already confident and self-assured. He was already serious about what he wanted to do and how he intended to get there. He just didn’t let people too close to him until he got to know them. In school he was fairly shy, but out of school he could talk your leg off.”

  Kasal says Essy was one of the few people he was comfortable confiding in. “She was my friend,” he says. “I would tell her things; we were very close. It was a brother-sister thing.”

  Essy now lives with her husband and two sons near Randy Cornelison in Adel. On a shelf in the family room of her well-appointed home is a picture of Brad in formal dress looking boldly into the camera. Behind him are an American flag and the golden battle flag of the Thundering Third. To her two boys, Brad is a real-life, honest-to-God Marine hero, she says. They idolize him and Brad reciprocates with letters and emails letting them know what he is up to.

  His stern countenance in the photograph is a far cry from the Brad she grew up with, Essy says. “If I could say one thing that I know we did, it was laugh. Brad could be a complete crack up when he wanted to be, when he got to know someone.”

  Essy’s younger sister Tracey shares her sister’s fondness for their favorite Marine. Tracey remembers how much pride Brad took in the appearance of his car. “Brad’s cars were always in mint condition. His car was his pride and joy and always spotless. He would go about 15 miles an hour when driving on backroads so the gravel wouldn’t nick the paint.”

  Tucker and Cornelison razzed their buddy mercilessly about his cautious driving. “I could get out and run faster than he was driving,” Tucker says with a laugh. “I did it one time, and he drove off and left me!”

  Cornelison also gets a chuckle out of Essy’s characterization of Brad’s innocence. In Cornelison’s memory Kasal was a bit of a rake in Creston. He speculates that at least some of the trouble Kasal found himself in while cruising the Creston loop came from his propensity for seducing local girls.

  “When it came to women Kasal was something else,” Cornelison says. “He knew how to turn on the charm for the Creston girls. We liked to watch him work. He wouldn’t try anything with the girls from Afton because we were all too tight. We were very close friends, and everybody would have known what was going on. So we never really knew what he was up to, but we were like everybody else. We talked about cars, girls, and jobs, but mostly girls—except for Brad. Even then he was a gentleman. Brad wouldn’t ever say anything. He would just smile.”

  KASAL AT SCHOOL

  Male or female, Kasal’s friends remember him as a natural leader at school. He never bullied anyone and he always watched out for his friends and classmates. Even though he could hang out with a rowdy crowd, he generally had a settling influence on the other students without being menacing.

  Kasal wasn’t particularly interested in high school except for sports and reading. He was a good wrestler and played varsity football, but he liked challenging himself better. “It takes more self-discipline to do hard things when nobody is making you,” he explains.

  Most of the subjects he studied in high school bored him almost to distraction, but he was very interested in history. He liked to read about milita
ry operations and wondered what it would be like to fight in battle. He discovered his heroes in the books he read about war and combat, particularly stories about Marines.

  When his thoughts began to mature, he shared them with his friends. They say that by the time they were in high school they already knew he was going to be a warrior or a cop or something like that. They saw a sense of adventure already evident in their friend long before he knew it for sure; they just didn’t know how to define it. Then he told them.

  “Brad knew what he wanted and where he wanted to go,” says Essy, “and he wanted to go in the Marines. He told me when we were maybe sophomores or juniors in high school, but he had mentioned that kind of stuff before then. I didn’t understand it, but I could respect it. Most of us did. Brad was always a leader in school, and the Marines didn’t seem too far-fetched for him.”

  There was one problem though, and Kasal finally got up the courage to admit it to Essy. He didn’t know how to swim. In fact he was terrified of the water.

  His other friends learned of his problem after his local recruiter informed Kasal that one of the tasks he absolutely had to complete in boot camp was to jump into a pool from the high dive while fully clothed. Worse, he had to then sink underwater, swim to the surface, and make his way to a ladder to simulate abandoning ship. There was no way around it. To graduate from boot camp, everyone had to pass the swim test—a time-honored tradition that has washed out more than one aspiring Marine.

  “He came back from the recruiter and told us he had to swim, but he was afraid of the water,” Essy says. “He had a hard time telling us because Brad wasn’t the kind of guy who ever admitted being afraid of anything. So we decided we would teach him how to swim before he left. We told him we would take him to Shelley’s—she was a girl we knew who had a pond on her property outside of town—and teach him how to swim, get him used to the water. He wasn’t too crazy about that.”

  Tracey Essy picks up the story from there: “He didn’t want to jump in because he didn’t know how deep it was. We didn’t really care because as kids, you know, we just saw water and jumped in. But Brad hated the water.

  “It turns out it was pretty shallow. When I jumped in to show him it was safe, I hit the bottom so hard I had mud in my ear. After that I heard Brad say, ‘Uh-uh, no!’ He was fearful of it. He never did it that summer, but he did it in boot camp,” Tracey says.

  “He came home and told us he had done it,” Shawn Essy adds. “He was pretty excited.”

  GOTCHA!

  Before making it to boot camp, Kasal had to graduate from high school. That took him longer than it might have and not because of his academic record. While undistinguished, his grades were perfectly acceptable, but his reputation as a ringleader of the rowdy, along with one particular indiscretion put a six-month dent in his plans.

  Kasal’s nemesis in this case was a cranky high school principal, Mr. Goetche, a man the kids called “Gotcha Goetche” because he was always on the lookout for Brad and his buddies Cornelison and Tucker. Even Kasal’s former teachers acknowledge the principal was a stern, uncompromising man who had little tolerance for the self-assured boy whose reputation preceded him. Kasal claims Gotcha was waiting for him to screw up so he could be made an example to the other rowdies. As a result Kasal and his friends were frequent visitors to Gotcha’s office. Sometimes it was for licks from his wooden paddle; sometimes it was for detention. One thing was for certain, Brad remembers; it was never for a good thing.

  “Gotcha Goetche didn’t like me,” he says.

  Kasal found out exactly how much Goetche didn’t like him when he was slapped with a six-month suspension for saying the forbidden word “fuck” in a classroom during the final semester of his senior year. Although his invective was aimed at Cornelison, his indiscretion became a terrible embarrassment and a huge inconvenience when it came time to enlist in the Marine Corps.

  “I was all ready to leave for boot camp when I graduated in June, and then I got suspended and had to stay in school another semester after all my friends had graduated,” he admits bitterly.

  He went before the school board for a reprieve, but the sentence stuck. Kasal learned a big lesson about being a wiseass and swore to himself he was going to keep his mouth shut and get through his extra semester. Although he tried to act like it didn’t bother him, it was a crushing blow for a young man who had his eye set on being a Marine as soon as he could.

  Kasal accepted his sentence and graduated quietly from high school in December 1984. There isn’t even a senior class picture of him in the school yearbook. He left for the Corps as soon as they were ready to take him. Gotcha never got a second chance at Brad Kasal.

  BRAD’S LAST VISIT HOME

  After Kasal joined the Marines he came back to Afton one more time on leave following boot camp. His friends found him to be different: more serious, less prone to carry on. If anything, though, he was both tougher and more gracious than ever.

  “One time Brad and me were in a bar after he joined up and was back home on leave,” Cornelison says. “We were playing pool when some scrawny little skinny guy got all mouthy. He kept calling Brad a jarhead and all sorts of names. Brad really hated being called a jarhead. All you had to do is look at him and know that calling him a jarhead is pretty stupid.

  “So Brad was saying, ‘Sir, please sit down. Sir, please sit down,’ but the guy just kept it up until he really pissed Brad off. Brad ends up dragging this guy across the pool table by his neck and pinning him to the table.

  “About then four girls—a couple of them worked there and two others who were just trying to break it up—climbed all over Brad and started pulling on him and yelling at him to make him let this little skinny dude go. By now the dude was lying on the table making choking sounds. But Brad is such a gentleman that he just turned around—still holding the skinny dude by his neck—and said, ‘Ladies, please quit it; please get off me; don’t do that.’

  “He never raised his voice or got mad or anything. He said it so polite and all the time he is still choking the shit out of the skinny dude.”

  Although Kasal left Afton, Afton never let go of Brad Kasal. Everybody in town loves their local hero and they unanimously agree that Kasal makes a good one. When Read’s famous picture appeared in the Creston News Advertiser and the Des Moines Register, all the old Kasal stories were brought out of the closet and dusted off. His picture appeared in windows and folks took an active interest in his welfare. Kasal and his family were flooded with well wishes and inquiries of concern. Most of the folks in town have since watched his story unfold in the coverage of newspapers, magazines, and television. Before his untimely death from cancer, Gerald Kasal made sure his famous son’s circle of old friends was kept abreast of what was going on with Brad. Many of them drove out to the farmhouse to visit the ailing Kasal and to find out what had become of their famous classmate. Many more called or wrote short notes of encouragement that Gerald Kasal treasured until his death.

  CHAPTER 4

  JOINING UP

  Like millions of young men who enlisted before him, Kasal eventually saw the day when he achieved his cherished goal of becoming a Marine. For Kasal that journey, which has not ended, began on a frigid Iowa morning in late January 1984.

  “When I got on the plane in Des Moines it was 35 degrees below zero,” Kasal says. “When I got off in San Diego it was 60 something. We are talking about a 90-degree difference in temperature. It was hot and humid when they bundled us up and put us on a bus through San Diego. The first thing I saw that made an impression on me—something I will always remember—is when we drove down the Pacific Highway. It was a place called Dirty Dan’s—you know what that is? A girlie bar. When you are 18 and you come from Iowa, it’s a big deal to see something like that. Anyway that was the last thing I would see of civilian life for three months.”

  BOOT CAMP

  First stop for the recruit was the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD). A drill instructor (DI) j
umped into the bus and started kicking everybody off. “He was yelling, screaming, the whole routine,” Kasal recalls, “and he tells us to get on the yellow footprints.

  “I was thinking, ‘Holy cow. What have I got into?’ All night long and for two more days we were getting our haircuts, getting our gear, getting our basic uniforms issued to us: cammies, socks, boots, stuff like that. Then came the medical examination, the dental examination—all this time the drill instructors and senior Marines are yelling and screaming. After Receiving we went to our regular platoon. There we picked up our senior drill instructor and our permanent junior drill instructors. For the next three months we trained with them.”

  Marine Corps boot camp is no garden party. Former Marine drill instructor and Vietnam vet-turned-actor R. Lee Ermey did a fair job replicating the conditions and treatment Marine recruits enjoy in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. This bizarre 1987 movie follows a fictional group of Marine Boots who endure the tortures of the damned while getting ready to go to Vietnam. Kasal likes the first half of the movie for its accurate depiction of boot camp.

  Before Kubrick’s surrealistic look, Jack Webb wrote, produced, directed, and starred in The DI, a sanitized 1957 version of Marine Corps boot camp that offered more promise than realism. Kasal’s experience was somewhere between the two movie extremes. Most Marines say that the drill instructors were fearsome beasts who didn’t care for “knuckleheads,” “knot-heads,” and far harsher names they bellowed into the recruits’ faces. Most Marines remember the experience as somewhere between hell and damnation until they started feeling the pride of being Marines. Kasal remembers learning his craft and beginning to admire the drill instructors’ skills and knowledge as boot camp dragged by. It went slowly and quickly at the same time, a dizzying schedule of off-and-on and hurry-up-and-wait that ran in an endless loop. Part of being a Marine is learning to cope with stress, and the DIs’ pressure to the young recruits made sure they had plenty of it.