Marine OCS Part 3

Top Row:  Paul Fitzpatrick, Bruce Culp, Clayborne, Dan Hunter, Wright, Booher

Second Row:  Kramer, Jim Schloss, John Robertson, Wilson, Greg Sanchez, John Ormbreck, Jerry Moore, Ken Zebal, Olsen

Third Row:  Jim Mullen, Walczak, Laviglio, Smith, Stuart, Darwin Newlin, Raese, Kent Nix, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Langdon

Bottom Row:  Lt. Nickle, Tourek, Moffatt, Dennis Zito, Campomenosi, Hudnall, Unknown, Delacroce, Sgt. Blazer, Sgt. Williams

Not pictured:  Palms, Kelly Stage, and one unknown from California

B Company, 1st Platoon


Here we all are.  Dennis Zito helped me fill in some of the names.  For several of the guys, we did not remember their first names.  Unless you became buddies in some cases, you talked to them using their last names.

Marine Corps OCS Part 2

I was told by the OCS recruiter that at least two others (possibly three, my memory is no longer clear on our number) from Southern California would be in my OCS class at Quantico.  All three or four of us would be flying from LAX to Dulles airport on an American Airlines 707 where we would find government transportation to Quantico.

A few weeks before we left, I visited one of my potential platoon mates, Bruce Culp, who lived in Bell, CA, not far from South Gate.  Bruce was blond and 6'1", lithe with a swimmer's body since his parents had installed a pool and he kept in shape.  We spent a couple of hours chatting at his parents' house before I headed home.  Bruce and I would not become buddies at Marine OCS or elsewhere--I cannot fathom why--but our paths would cross more than once over the next few years.

We would both end up leaving Marine OCS at some point during the program.  We would both be at Air Force OTS in 1973.  Both of us would go through missile training at Vandenberg AFB in the Spring of 1974, and be housed in the same Bachelor Officer's building at Minot AFB in North Dakota for the next four years.  Bruce, however, did not take well to being a missile officer.  I believe at the time he deliberately did not do well at Vandenberg missile school.  Back at Minot, they had to find him another assignment.  Very quickly he found his calling as a Security Police officer and remained doing that for the rest of his time in Minot.  After that, I lost touch with him and where he went when I transferred to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.  As I said, though, we really did not become buddies in any of these shared military assignments.

Fortunately, the transcontinental flight--my first--was not particularly full, especially in coach.  While we might have chatted with one another for awhile in our assigned seats, eventually we each found a separate, unoccupied row, after putting the arm wrests up, and tried to catch some sleep on this red-eye.  I know I was not the only one who was nervous about what lay ahead for the next several weeks and more, and I don't believe that any of us slept much.

After arriving at Dulles at dawn, we did not find any government transportation to Quantico.  The four of us decided our only alternative was to hire a cab and split the fare four ways (I suspect there were four of us at this point since I seem to recall that I was in the front seat with the cab driver, and the other three filled up the back seat.)

We drove through the Northern Virginia landscape that was not snow-covered but decidedly bleak and foreboding.  Growing up and spending most of my life in Southern California, or visiting a place like White Cloud, KS, only in the summer, I had never seen so many miles and miles of trees without leaves and leaf-covered grounds in the woods on either side of the highway.  The sky was also gray that morning.  I think most of us felt a sense of gloom and doom as the cab drew closer and closer to Quantico.

We finally arrived at the main gate.  Not knowing where to go from there, we went inside to speak to someone there who might know where we ought to go.  A sergeant came out from a back room bunk in his T-shirt and underwear, entirely out of sorts and berated us for not knowing where we ought to be.  We later realized he was a sergeant instructor for another platoon, not ours, fortunately.  Our early arrival must have cost him a few minutes of sleep, but he must have explained to the cab driver where we ought to go and we were off again, further into the bowels of the base.

He dropped us off at the correct barracks, we paid him, and went inside with our bags from the trunk.  Once inside, we advanced to a desk at the end of a squad bay where a guy was sitting who seemed to be in charge.  He had a list and checked off our names as we gave them to him.  Why he picked me out, I do not know, but he said, "Sanchez, I broke a bottle of shampoo in one of the showers.  Could you go clean up the pieces of glass?"  Two guys who had been sitting next to one another on a small couch seemed to chuckle at his command to me and perhaps at my obvious nervousness.  (These two characters would be John Ormbrek and Dennis Zito, who would become buddies and explain that the guy who was acting so officious was actually just a candidate as we were; but he had dropped out and was in that barracks, awaiting his out-processing paperwork to be completed.  He had no more authority to have me clean up his broken shampoo bottle than the lowliest civilian employee on the base.  But not knowing this, I cleaned up the broken glass and reported back to him that the shower stall was safe to use again.)

Bruce Culp and I ended up being assigned to the same platoon as were John Ormbrek and Dennis Zito.  But I think the other two in the cab with us from Dulles ended up in a different OCS platoon, and I never saw them much after that.  Such was the apparent randomness of military assignments.

Rainbow Arc of Fire team image, work in progress

I commissioned artist/writer Max Spragovsky to create a group image of my Rainbow Arc of Fire superhero team. Two of the newest characters, Kora (Mercuria) and Kalisto (Liquide/Liquid Lord), really did not have her own costume since they were created after I'd had the superhero name and costume design contest on the Gay League site. This gave him a chance to use his talents to enhance those two characters. The team drawing is not yet complete, but I thought people would enjoy the work in progress. Haunt (mostly wearing black) is in the background, Harvest (in shades of green) in the foreground, and Firefrost is on the far left. Mercuria is to the left of Harvest and Liquide/Liquid Lord is to the right of him as you view the image.  When you click on the image, you can view it much larger.

Marine OCS Part 1

Yesterday, I was loading music onto my Sony player when I realized that I had not created a Marine OCS folder for the music we listened to on personal radios in the barracks on weekends or on the Juke Box at the "slop shoot" down the road from our barracks.  Sunday mornings especially, guys tuned their radios, those who stayed behind and hadn't gone into DC, to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 countdown.  We all relaxed on our bunks, wrote letters home, and just took it easy, all the while dreading Sunday evening when the rest of the guys returned and we all had to start getting prepared for a new week of training.

But while we relaxed, Casey would introduce a song like Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)" or America's "Horse With No Name" or Malo's "Suavecito", and I would look out at the gloriously green woods, well beyond our barrack's windows or look down at the brown Potomac River flowing by and be transported, if just for a few minutes or a few hours.  All these years later, now that I am 70, I still can sometimes remember where I was when I listened to a particular song on the radio.  

The first time I heard "Horse With No Name", I was accompanying Dennis Zito, who might have been driving John Ormbrek and I and John Robertson, using John Ormbrek's tan VW station wagon into D.C. on a Friday evening.  John was going to let us have his car for the weekend, so we were driving him to the train station where he intended to take the train into New York City for the weekend.  I remarked that I liked what I was hearing from the car radio, and the other guys told me the name of the group and the song title.  It was raining that night and the drops splashed on the side windows as I sat in the back seat and tried to catch glimpses of some of the D.C. landmarks.  I remember seeing the Capitol dome well down the avenue ahead, through the rain and the light of street lamps that night.  (An aside:  I did not listen to radio in those days.  I always had an 8-track player in my '66 Mustang convertible and a Roberts 8-track tape recorder attached to my stereo system at home, so I made my own music tapes and listened to them.)

I heard Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" on the slop shoot (the fast food joint) Juke Box for the first time.  It was still on the Juke Box but was no longer on the top of the charts.  However, if I heard a song there or on a car radio or a radio in the barracks, I forever associated it with Marine OCS.  This was the Spring of 1972, approximately mid March to mid May when, after I was forced to remain at OCS until I could voluntarily leave after 10 weeks (9 weeks with the course and 1 week to out-process).

I wasn't intending to be at Marine OCS at all.  

Richard Nixon was in the White House, the Watergate burglars were not going to be caught until June 17, 1972, well before the election in November.  But the Vietnam War was still raging strong.  Nixon had instituted a Draft Lottery which was held on December 1, 1969.  My number was 119, the same as Bruce Springsteen since we were both born on the same day back in 1949.  

I had been lucky enough to able to graduate from college in December of 1971.  Prior to that, I had decided to try to get into the Marine Corps Reserve as a clerk typist.  I'd been accepted and was going to be able to ship off to Marine boot camp in San Diego after I graduated.  I had already had my draft physical, a humiliating affair.  We were treated indifferently at best, contemptuously at worst, by the various staff members.  My blood pressure was judged high at one point so some officious barked, "What are you nervous about?"  I admitted, "The whole thing."  I was told to sit aside for a few minutes.  They tested me again and I passed.

Weeks later, in contrast, I had my Marine physical in the same building, processing through the same steps but the treatment was totally different.  Instead of being looked upon as some slacker who probably was trying to get out of serving his country (we were all treated like this, not just me), I remember feeling like royalty.  I was one of the Marine's own, I was volunteering, and I was doing my patriotic duty instead of trying to dodge military service.  Besides, potentially joining the Marine Reserves bought me enough time to graduate.

But that summer of 1971, a guy I had become friendly with at Cal State Dominguez Hills, Mark Lombardo, found out I was going to be just a Marine enlisted man when I was about to graduate college.  Why did I not want to attend Marine OCS in Quantico, Virginia, as he had just done that Spring of 1971, and be an officer instead?  His argument quickly made sense to me.  So, I saw the Marine OCS recruiter and I got switched.  The enlisted recruiter responded, "Go get those gold bars."
My entry into the service was delayed further until March of 1972, so I could easily graduate.  Most weekends, I would drive up to Mark's parent's house on Palos Verdes and go running with him to get prepared.  I had always been able to break into a run in the past.  But that had been a few years before and, while still slim, I was not in running shape.  That first run I believe I puked at the end.  I had a few months to prepare, so I was able to get in running shape for OCS by the Spring. 

While all of these Marine exercises were occurring, I had actually heard from an Air Force recruiter based in Huntington Park, CA.  But somehow my personal scores for becoming an Air Force Navigator were not high enough to get me into Air Force OTS, and they were also not high enough to become a pilot.  But that option was still out there and I had not heard the last from that particular recruiter.