Poetry, Part Thirty-four

Over the years, Marine Corps training has been tough. Rarely, though seemingly with a kind of tragic regularity, it can even be deadly for a few recruits. Most of the time, the deaths of recruits are preventable. Most newspaper articles about the death of one or more trainees bring up the worst number of deaths to have occurred at one time: those at Parris Island, South Carolina, where six recruits drowned on a "night punishment march". The first two poems below were written and included in the first volume, SONS OF MEN. The third poem about a recruit who died at the San Diego depot I wrote and included in the second volume, COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE.

The San Diego Recruit Depot is on the other side of a high fence from the San Diego airport. My best friend Michael and I used to grab a window seat and look down as our flights back to L.A. took off. When we drove down to San Diego on other weekends, we'd approach the entrance but turn away at the last moment from the main gate because we did not know that we could drive inside and look around, even though we wanted to see the place first hand. One day, when we were convinced that we could visit the facility, even though we were civilians, we nervously drove up to the guard shack and were allowed to enter. This was the first time that I'd been on a military base that was not Air Force. (My dad had been in the Air Force Reserves in the 50's, and we went to March Air Force Base when I was a kid to see a static air show. My late cousin was in the Air Force in the later 60's, and I visited him and his wife in Anchorage, Alaska, while he was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base.)

Marine Corps service would have been in my future had I remained at Quantico, VA.

U.S.M.C. Recruit Depot, Parris Island, 1956

Perhaps,
when our race melts into a more forward future,
those foreigners will discipline the past.

If their thoughts, through rippling perspective,
conceive of what once was,
they may pause.

They may even allow this quaint, sad obscurity
to tingle their sensations.

We can expect no more.
All we know of aliens--
they are not human.


San Diego Boot Camp, From View

Vistas tatter further through fences.
Surely such a slashed across scene is lesser vision,
but some men make much of shreds,
and some shred smaller still
until the image pumps harmlessly.

Many follow force here--
while the world rolls, jets and wanders outside--
ignored.


Killing Marines

Unmoving nights in San Diego.
If I saw the trouble then,
no one else looking
could see. I showed you.
Like the fences encircled,
past the runway unused to escape,
how do you evade?
How do I escape the blame
who might have been there,
preventing this time? Or at Parris Island?
I showed you.

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