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.