Things were made even more interesting because Gussy’s was a hangout for many of the Rutgers fraternity guys, some of whom adopted me as a kind of mascot. I spent a fair amount of time in the Rutgers Greek houses, which ultimately turned out to be a great and enlightening experience. The exposure helped smooth a few of my roughest edges. When most of the kids from backgrounds similar to mine were sporting pegged trousers and motorcycle jackets, and styled their hair tike Elvis or Dion, I dressed in button-down shirts, chinos, and Harris tweed sports coats. I learned how to drink beer at an early age, and — more important — how to handle it, too.
My fraternity friends also instructed me in some of the finer points involved in the constant search for meaningful female companionship.
The inculcation worked. The summer between my sophomore and junior years — I was fifteen — I met a beautiful and sophisticated young student teacher named Lucette at one of the fraternity parties. We hit it off right away. She was a French major, and I spoke my pidgin Italian, and we clicked.
I was big for my age and always had cash in my wallet, and I talked and dressed like I went to Rutgers and acted like I owned the goddamn fraternity house, so she never realized I was a high-school kid.
She found out the hard way. With what the inscrutable Orientals might call a dose of Real Bad Karma, she was assigned to teach a third-year high-school French class in September and saw my beaming face in the third row. Zut alors!
By the time I was seventeen I’d gone through a bunch of changes. My parents split up. My mother took a job at Sears, and we — she, my younger brother, and I — moved into public housing. My father rented a furnished room over a Slovak bar called Yusko’s, just a few doors down from the luncheonette where I worked. He’d spend a lot of time there and I’d drop by Yusko’s to visit. The place could have been transplanted from Lansford, with its pickled pig’s feet in big jars, and hard-boiled eggs sitting in bowls, and three or four guys who looked like Joe Pavlik sitting on the barstools from ten in the morning until closing time, drinking steadily and chainsmoking Camels. My old man was happy there because it reminded him of home. George Marcinko never got used to New Brunswick.
Meanwhile, I was spending less and less time in school— cutting classes regularly — and more and more of my time with a young Italian woman who was married to a guy twentyseven years her senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping, which I was all too willing to provide. I quit Gussy’s and went to work as a counterman at a Greek place in the heart of New Brunswick. The money was good — about $200 a week including tips, for about half the time I’d been spending at Gussy’s. Moreover, the chefs were willing to teach me some rudimentary cooking and baking skills, so I saw the job as a way to learn a trade. That was a first for me. I’d never really considered what I’d do with my life.
I finally quit school altogether. As I would refer to it some years later in official-sounding language, I “voluntarily disenrolled” in February 1958. Continuing Just didn’t seem to make any sense. The classes all seemed to be b.s. anyway.
And who needed a high-school diploma? There was money to be made, and women to be hustled, and you could drive down to the shore and lie on the beach, for a couple of days at a time — I didn’t need an education for any of that. So I split.
I also tried to join the military. When President Eisenhower sent Marines to Lebanon, I volunteered. I liked their dress blues and their swords. So I went down to the Marine recruiter, walked in, and probably said something asinine like,
“Well, friend, I’d kind of like to go shoot a few bad guys.
Where’s my rifle, where’s the ammo, and when can I leave?“
And the recruiting sergeant most likely restrained himself from reducing me to a pile of rubble and said, “Look, sonny, you gotta go to boot camp before we let you kick any ass, and besides, you’re underage and you haven’t finished high school. So why not get your diploma, and then we’ll talk.”
Well, I knew for damn sure that by the time I did all that, the Marines would have the Lebanese problem solved without say help. So I walked away and had a lovely summer on the beach, and I worked on a serious, class-A, surfer-grade tan and got laid a lot. I also spent some time trying to toss a good-looking neighborhood girl named Kathryn Ann Black off the three-meter board of the Livmgston Avenue swimming pool (off the board and into the sack). We dated most of the summer, when I wasn’t catting around with other women, and discovered that we liked each other. We must have: despite my proclivity toward outside activities, I kept coming back. There was something out of the ordinary there.
Then in September, after I’d had my fun, and Kathy went back to school, I walked into a Navy recruiting office, volunteered tor service, and after taking a battery of tests, was accepted for duty. Oh, if they’d only known.
On October 15, 1958, I reported to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. For some inexplicable reason, I felt better about walking through the gates of that camp than I’d ever felt going anywhere in my life before.
I was the perfect MARK-ONE, MOD-ZERO sailormat’s military jargon for the most basic model. Talk about gung ho — I even spit shined the soles of my boots. I was the one asshole in a hundred who actually believed the chiefs when they told us, “He who shines only half a shoe is only half a man.”
There’d been a cabdriver I’d gotten to know in New Brunswick — Joe something or other. He’d been a sailor, and he gave me his old Blue Jacket’s Manual, which I’d read by the time I was sixteen or so. He’d taught me how to roll and tie a Navy neckerchief, as well as a bunch of other Navy procedures, so by the time I got to boot camp, 1 was already ahead of the curve. I volunteered for everything — from the football squad to the drill team — and was even made the acting athletic petty officer for a couple of weeks. There was an incredible amount of b.s. involved in the training, but overall, it seemed like a good deal: I gave the Navy a full day’s work, and it gave me a full day’s pay — and I even had some fun in the process. I really liked the swimming and the shooting and the marching. The book stuff they could keep.
After Christmas I qualified for radioman training. But there were no openings at the school- Instead, I took a temporary assignment to Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where I helped teach swimming to naval aviators during their survival training.
Then, one night in Rhode Island, I went to the movies and saw a terrific flick called The Frogmen, with Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews. It was the story of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams in action in the Pacific during World War II. Lots of action. Lots of heroism. Lots of songs. Like the “Marine Hymn” with new words:
From the halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli, We will fight our country’s battles—
Right behind the UDT!
I walked outside afterward and thought, hey — I could do that. I mean, I was a reasonably aggressive sort of person;
I’d wanted to join the Marines. So the prospect of “Demolition Dick, Tough-Guy Shark Man of the Navy” was a lot more satisfying than “Fingers Marcinko, Pencil-Pushing Teletype Operator.”
The Demo Dick/Fingers Marcinko identity crisis climaxed a few weeks later when I was finally transferred to radio school in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk, it turned out, is just a stone’s throw from the Underwater Demolition Teams, which were based out of the amphibious base at Little Creek, across the harbor. I saw radiomen close up. I saw Frogmen close up.
No contest.
The answer was simple: let’s bag this radio crap and go straight to Frogman. So I visited the UDT command and told them what I wanted to do. The news they gave me was like the Marines all over again. I couldn’t become a Frogman until I had a permanent assignment. They didn’t take applicants from temporary commands — and radio school was a temp.
Good-bye, Demo Dick; hello, Fingers Marcinko.
It would take me almost two years to get back to Little Creek. My odyssey meandered through Dahlgren, Virginia, where the Navy ran a space surveillance
center to track Sputniks, and Naples, Italy, where I worked as a Teletype clerk at the Naval Support Activity Station.
After five months at Dahlgren I applied for UDT training-1 made it through the first step, which in those days consisted of being sent to the Navy Yard in Washington, where they put me in one of those old-fashioned canvas diving suits with the hard-hat helmet and thick air hoses, and dropped me into the Anacostia River to see whether or not I had claustrophobia.
I passed the claustrophobia test and was just about to leave for UDT training when I broke my hand slamming it against something hard — the side of a very stupid sailor’s head. It wasn’t my fault. He should have ducked. Good-bye, UDT.
Hello, Naples.
Naples turned out to be more fun than I’d expected, even though the job sucked. I realized that I was not cut out to be a Teletype operator. The job was a dead end: it required no imagination or ingenuity. Worse, my watch-mate drove me crazy. He was a real sniveler, a pug-nosed, acne-faced momma’s boy named Harold who picked his ears all day and complained about everything. I called him The Whiner. Harold’s sea daddy was the chief petty officer who ran the Corn Center, a self-important’s.o.b. black guy in his mid-forties named White, who acted as if he were royalty. Between the two of them, I plotted murder. No jury in the world would have convicted me.
On the other hand, Naples was terrific. I worked and lived in the same apartment house in the middle of the city, not on the naval base. So unlike a lot of sailors in Italy, I actually got to see the natives. The Italian I’d learned from Old Man Gussy got me by. And while my hand healed, I jogged through the Neapolitan hills, lifted weights, did calisthenics and swam.
But I was still a shore-duty, pencil-pushing Teletype operator. And there was still this little voice inside me that kept saying, “UDT, UDT,” louder and louder. The question was, how to get there.
I had one immense problem to overcome: my commanding officer. How immense? Two hundred pounds. And the ugliest female I’d ever set eyes on in my life. I called her. the Big Female Ugly Commander, or Big FUC for short. Big FUC was also a rule-book creature, and she was shorthaoded, a combination that made it impossible for me to leave (I’d made the mistake of signing on for a one-year extension of my assignment in Naples — hoping to transfer to UDT as soon as possible). To Big FUC, a year meant 365 days. Transfer was not a word in her lexicon.
Ultimately, I forced her hand. The next time The Whiner pissed me off, I tossed his typewriter out the window. I would have stopped there, but the little son of a bitch just wouldn’t let up—“I’m going to put you on report and tell Chief White what a bad person you are.”
Something in me snapped, and I busted his face wide open.
He was in sick bay for a month. That set the chief off. He was an extra large — six two or so, two hundred pounds— about the same size as my father. He grabbed my ass and hauled me off to the bathroom by the belt and the scruff of my neck and shoved me up against the tile.
“I ought to beat the shit out of you.”
I was in the mood for anything at that point. “Hey, Chief, if you’re feeling frisky, let’s have at it.”
He grabbed me with his big ham hands. I stepped between em and gave him a knee in the balls. He went down like a bag of cement. He struggled to his feet, came at me again, and I slammed him in the gut — I’d learned my lesson about hitting sailors in the head the hard way — clinched him up close so he couldn’t do much, and kneed his groin as if I were stretching wall-to-wall carpet onto a tackless batten, lifting him five, six inches in the air with each pop. When his eyes rolled back, I dropped him on the deck.
He lay there sucking air for a while. Then he rolled onto his knees, crawled on all fours to the toilet, and was sick. “I’ll get you,” he wheezed at me. “You’re gonna be outta here.”
Oh, please, oh, please, Br’er Bear, toss dis rabbit into de briar patch.
So the next day, after he’d cleaned himself up, he hauled me in front of Big FUC. Think of a cross between Jabba the Hutt and Roseanne Ban- stuffed carelessly into a tight, white uniform. Big FUC read me the riot act. It was full of “The chief wants you out of here” and “I should toss you in the brig.” But they were all empty threats. She couldn’t bring me up on charges because it was the chief who’d laid his hands on me first — that would cost him his job. Maybe I’d take a demotion or a couple of demerits, but so what?
Anyway, I was anticipating the bitch. I had two transfer request chits in my hand. I gave her the first. “I’ll tell you what, Commander — here’s a request for transfer to any goddamn ship that pulls into port. I don’t care if it’s the USS Lollipop. Then I gave her the other. ”This one’s a transfer to UDT training- I don’t give a damn which one you do.“
She called me back two days later. “Sea duty would be too easy for you, Marcinko. I’m gonna send you where they’ll knock all this aggressive shit right out of you.” Big FUC put her fat cheeks and all six chins up close to my face and sneered,
“You’re going Stateside, to UDT training — immediately!”
And people say there is no God.
Chapter 4
Little Creek, Virginia, is a masochist’s dream. It’s the place where the Navy used to take large groups of mean, aggressive, self-confident, ass-kicking, extrovert volunteer sailors and turn them into small groups of mean, aggressive, self-confident, ass-kicking, extrovert UDT animals during sixteen glorious weeks of torture, madness, and mayhem. I walked through the main gate at Little Creek on June 21,
1961, alongside a skinny little son of a bitch named Ken MacDonald. He was a wiry, 135-pound petty officer second class with the remnants of a Brit accent, whose straight hair was so long he held it in place with a bobby pin. He took one look at me, shook his head morosely, and said, “Mate, you ain’t never gonna make it.”
I never stopped walking. I just smiled sweetly at him and said, “Screw you, you little faggot ” Of course, since we checked in together, they made MacDonatd and me swim buddies. We were virtually inseparable the entire UDT training cycle and have remained close friends ever since.
And what an amusing, diverting cycle it was- One hundred and twenty-one of us started it together as members of UDT Class 26. Twenty-four survived—20 percent. Many of those who washed out were so-called SpecWar experts: Green Berets and Army Rangers who wanted to get some maritime training. We also lost most of the officers — they just couldn’t take it.
Me? I found it perversely enjoyable — most of it- Today, SEAL training (UDT was phased out in 1983) takes six months. It’s called BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, and it includes parachute work, demolition, and diving we never learned during our 16-week UDT sessions thirty years ago.
I breezed through the first four weeks. I’d worked out regularly in Naples, so the PT (Physical Training — calisthenics and running) and swimming came easily for me, although the sailors who’d come from the fleet were ragged by the end of the first week because they were so out of shape. They ran the hell out of us. Every day we’d cover a five- or six-mile course that included a series of old landing craft on the beach.
You’d vault the gunwales — an eight-foot jump, drop six feet down, clamber across, struggle up, over, down, and keep going.
Down behind the rifle range was a big sand dune the instructors called Mount Suribachi. They’d run us up and they’d run us down a dozen times or so. When it rained, they’d run us through the mud. When it was dry, they’d run us through the surf. Remember how those Olympic runners looked in the opening shots of Chariots of Fire, all clean and white and shimmery running along the beach? Well, we looked nothing like that at all. We wore green fatigues, heavy “boondocker” boots, red-painted steel pot helmets, and kapok life vests that weighed eight pounds dry and twenty-eight pounds wet, and the instructors always managed to keep them wet.
The instructors, it should be said in their favor, ran with us. Most of them were real Methuselahs — old guys in their mid- to late
thirties. I remember one, a flyweight named John Parish. He smoked a pipe as he ran the beaches, or up and down Mount Suribachi. When he’d gone through the bowl of tobacco, he’d flip it upside down and chew on the stem, never losing a step. You learn to hate people like that.
There was no diving involved at first, except for some basic fins-and-face-mask shallow-water stuff. Mostly we were getting accustomed to working in a water environment, learning life-saving techniques, and being instructed in the rudimentary procedures for beach reconnaissance and clearing a beach for an amphibious assault. But we swam a lot. That is an understatement. You swam and you swam right over de dam.
We did day swims, night swims — warm weather, cold weather, it didn’t matter.
You do not test the water with your toe if you want to be a Frogman.
One night Mac and I were out on a night reconnaissance exercise. We were rolled off an LCPL–Landing Craft/PersonneL — in the Chesapeake Bay, a thousand meters off Little Creek. It’s an interesting insertion technique. Lashed to the LCPL on the offshore side (so it’s invisible to anyone watching from the beach) is an IBS — Inflatable Boat: Small.
You roll over the gunwales of the LCPL onto the IBS, hit it, bounce/roll into the water, and go under. The enemy on shore sees only what appears to be a patrolling landing craft, almost two-thirds of a mile out to sea. The Frogmen, who understand the principle of dramatic irony, know better-
Our objective that night was to identify the correct beach, infiltrate, mark the beach, then swim back the thousand meters into the bay, where we’d be picked up by the LCPL again.
(Another interesting technique. You swim out beyond where the boat will pass you and wait. Now, as the LCPL sweeps by at about ten knots, there are Frogmen in the IBS. They are equipped with SNAREs, horse-collar-like devices with which a fast-moving boat can pick up swimmers in the water.
You put out your arm, and — slam — you’re whipped aboard.
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