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.
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