Preface

I own only three things I carried with me in Vietnam in 1967: a pair of well-worn, scuffed combat boots–today they are hard as cardboard; a precious poncho liner–a symbol of safety (and for emergency use) I keep in my car at all times; and two map sheets (taped together in 1967) I used during visits to a forbidding place, a place in which many–military men of both sides and civilians–died, were hurt, and suffered. The map will help with this two-part episode, as will Bud’s remembrance of it from his January 2015 visit.
(photo above courtesy of Ltc. Joe Gibbs, USMC-Ret)

* * *

Part I: Introduction

Of the many books written about the Vietnam War—30,000 by one, probably iffy, estimate—and in particular of the books written about Marines in that war, I dare say the majority have dealt with the bloody, conventional war-like fights in the northern tier of I Corps, the combat zone abutting the “Demilitarized” Zone separating the two Vietnams.  First Platoon, Lima Company, would find itself there in December 1967.

Until then, as I’d noted before, Lima patrolled territory just below Danang, serving as part of the shield protecting our major facilities in Danang, which was located along the South China Sea about in the middle of I Corps.

The units then assigned to that part of Danang’s shield,  Lima and the other three companies of the 3rd Battalion, First Regiment of the First Marine Division, were regularly pulled out to participate in large regimental or even division-sized operations in areas thought or known to be occupied by major North Vietnamese units. For the First Marine Regiment, most of these operations took place well south and somewhat west of this patrol area. It was territory usually patrolled by the Fifth Regiment of the First Division. (Don’t ask about the numbering system—the explanation is historical.)

At least twice during Bud’s and my tours, Lima was brought into such operations. In each case the territory was in and around the Que Son Valley (also the name of a village in it), which, more or less, is thought of as the space between and above two communities almost worthy to be called cities, Hiep Duc and Tam Ky (see my combined two sheets, “Map 1,” below [give it time to load; it is a large file, and once opened it can be enlarged and scrolled around. And forgive the wrinkles of the folds; it hasn’t been opened in some decades before now.]).

Both the territory—mountains, foothills, and paddies—and the enemy were unfamiliar to us, putting us in something of a disadvantage on each visit—at least at a greater disadvantage than the 5th Marines, who had worked the region, painfully, for months.

We were also at a bit of a disadvantage because the full strategic picture wasn’t totally clear to us, at least it wasn’t in my memory of those days. Perhaps I knew better then, but for years I wondered many times about the larger meaning of our, Lima’s, relatively brief operational efforts in the Que Son region. These were efforts that felt different, very much more important than the toings and froings in the mortar and rocket belts around Danang.  We were really part of something much bigger. Still, even though we experienced a notable, even newsworthy, win, I have felt for years that in the case of Operation Cochise, we really missed a big opportunity to damage beyond repair one of the NVA’s best fighting units, its Second Division. And although Operation Pike is hardly worth talking about—only legal trouble would follow me from it months later—Cochise was memorable.

The more memorable to follow in the next installment (together with some references for further reading).

* * *

The recently reported killing in Syria of Kayla Mueller by the despicable ISIS (ISIL in official US government parlance) murderers brings me back to distant memories of undergraduate and later days at the University of Rochester and the Vietnam War era.

The love of my last two years of life at the University of Rochester (1964-66) was a smart, beautiful, redheaded, English major named Sandra Lee Taplin.  She was from Clarence, a town near Buffalo, New York.  That she cared for me at all is, in retrospect, a little hard to understand. She took her studies seriously (a straight A student, while I scrapped along at a few hundredths of a percentage point above a passing C), didn’t drink much (I was a fairly typical frat bozo who kept too many empty beer bottles on display to prove manliness), and spent much time in Rush Rhees Library (where I regularly joined her in studying–most likely the only reason I possessed those few hundredths of a percentage points noted above).

As my first posts noted, I was destined for the Marine Corps— provided  I graduated (thank you, Sandy.) At some point during the five months of training after my commissioning to be an officer in Quantico, Virginia, Sandy wrote to tell me that our relationship was over. I don’t possess her “Dear John” letter any longer, but my memory of it ties her decision to my impending  involvement in the war in Vietnam and her inability to support it. I could be wrong in remembering it that way, and even if that is what she said, there may have been other reasons of her own, but it doesn’t matter. I accepted it. Anger toward her was simply not possible for me. I did love her.  Love is not “ownership” and love allows for parting.

I did look Sandy up after my tour ended  in February 1968. She was a senior then. I recall meeting her, with others, in Todd Student Union on campus and talking about the war. Knowing she had come to oppose it, I remember defending it. I told her of the acts of the Viet Cong–stealing the harvests of the peasants and forcing young men to join their forces and of their atrocities on the battlefields. It was our last conversation. I can’t say it ended badly or well. It just ended.

I suppose we all think back on past relationships and wonder where those acquaintances, friends, and loves have gotten to. A couple I have had the good fortune to reconnect with–and I am happy for reconnections.

This would not happen with Sandy. Somewhere along the line I learned she went into the Peace Corps after graduating and on her first assignment (I wrongly thought in El Salvador) she had died. I had details wrong—the location and the reason. But she had died for a serious cause in Bolivia, a seriously good cause. One source: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19690920&id=RfRNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=sYoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5994,2267724

I recount this story here because I want to make plain that sacrifice for a greater good takes many forms—not all of them having to do with warfare and arms. English-major Sandra Lee Taplin turned to the Peace Corps, and she made the “ultimate sacrifice.”

I often wonder if a conversation Sandy and I had about the study of English (English literature, actually) had anything to do with her decision. We shared the major. She majored in the subject because it was her passion. I majored in it because I couldn’t succeed in (or like) biology, psychology, or math. I had told her the major was pointless. What effect could one ever have on anything by studying that field? It was a tearful exchange for her. It was easy for me (hatefully so in repeated, involuntary recollection). English mattered little to me as a field. I managed a BA and a commission in the Marine Corps and–it turned out–a living. The major mattered almost nothing in that equation.

Did Sandy’s decision to go into the Peace Corps in any way grow out of that conversation? I’ll never know.

But I admire and hold her in great esteem for having made the decision.

These days the talk of “ultimate sacrifice” comes easy and has become kind of trite sounding when applied to those who have died bearing arms.

In Sandra Lee Taplin’s case, her dying in Bolivia is not at all so. I was and continue to be awed.

So, in June 1967, from 3/1’s base area on the beach–where “Circumference’s” companies had patrolled an area within range of mortars (inside the “Mortar Belt”)–Lima was detached and assigned westward to a more distant protection zone, the “Rocket Belt.”  Our new, company-sized base area, Hill 41,  was located on a piece of high ground just east of a mountain range that provided safe haven for Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units.

We were now well-removed from the beach and sand that defined the topography of our lives during the late “winter” and early “spring” of 1967.  We were done with a period of experimentation with a new weapon–the Stoner weapon system, another story entirely–but we were still in a life of patrolling.  Here, at the edge of territory owned by main force enemy units, we tended to patrol in larger, platoon-sized units. Our goal: stumble on (that is, in more formal language, “engage”) enemy units looking to infiltrate Danang’s defenses and attack, directly or through mortar or longer-range rocket fire, the major installations of the city.

Indeed, we patrolled, and we patrolled, and we patrolled. And much of that patrolling took place at night. What sleep we managed was most often achieved during the hot days of June–to say it was fitful and unsatisfying sleep is an understatement. At night, we moved, we watched, we stopped, we listened, we moved, and hoped we were alert enough to the other dangers, the booby traps, the mines, the ambush, etc. And as Bud will recall below, we took casualties.

Each meant a helicopter medevac, usually with me in the middle of a rice paddy guiding a Huey helicopter to a night-landing, as a corpsman and Marines prepared to rush the wounded to the bird—always anticipating sniper fire from a nearby tree line. Somehow, this impossible scenario always worked out. Those pilots were heroic wonders!

Of course, Lima wasn’t alone in this defensive mission inside the “rocket belt,” and at least once Lima 1 came within a hair of taking under fire a nearby patrolling Marine platoon from another zone within the belt. (I remember some very fiercely spoken four letter words in a radio exchange with a platoon leader of another unit that had strayed into our territory, and which we were poised to wipe out on my command.)  It was a period of extraordinarily high tension and great fatigue.

And, even though I had come to believe that, as fighting units, Lima Company and Lima 1 really worked and moved magnificently well together, by mid-month, one could argue we had failed our mission, as Bud’s remembrance of the period will show:

Woke up early this morning [January 2015] and travelled about twenty miles to the vicinity of Hill 41 where Lima spent the month of June. Memories from that month:

SSgt Dean lost his foot to a booby trap and insisted on trying to walk on his own power to the helicopter. SSgt Dean was hard Corps. He had captured the last Japanese soldier on Guam in 1964.

Don Lappegaard was wounded by a booby trap and had about 100 shrapnel wounds including the loss of part of his foot

USMC had run out of M26 grenades and issued us old pineapple grenades which had shorter fuses than the grenades we were accustomed to. One night I was in a foxhole with Harry Gross, he pulled a pin on the grenade and let the spoon fly. He held the grenade too long before he threw it. The grenade exploded too close and Harry got a good-sized hunk of shrapnel into the bridge of his eye. It was pitch black and no one had a flashlight. Harry spent the rest of the night moaning and did not appreciate my muffled laughter.

My squad was detached to a CAC Unit [these were small Marine entities assigned to villages that were important to perimeter defenses to help prevent   takeovers of them] which Intel said was supposed to get hit by an attack. Sure enough the next night the V.C. started pushing about 100 civilians carrying lanterns in front of them as cover for the attack. I put some M79 rounds around the flanks of the crowd which resulted in the people dispersing and the V.C. calling it a night.

On June 18th the platoon was set up in the jungle. About 2000 , I took four Marines out to set up listening posts. About 50 meters outside of our position I saw three or four figures moving toward us. We ended up having a running gunfight. We had just returned to our platoon night time position when the ground started vibrating. It turned out that an NVA rocket position was less than a click away. Their first salvos hit the bomb storage area at the airbase in Da Nang. It was pure bedlam and probably the most costly attack on an airfield during the history of the Vietnam conflict. More than twenty aircraft were destroyed and the runways were shut down for days. As we rushed towards the NVA position our own aircraft nearly got us. I had a smoking pipe I had picked up on R and R and never saw it again. It was my only creature comfort.

Bud is right. That night defined “bedlam.”  World War II seemed to have erupted again: the rockets, the mass of artillery fire from Danang directed toward the not too distant rocket firing place (but seemingly toward us!!)  — the rocket shooters were tucked in a draw at the foot of the mountain range to our west. Then came “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” a C-47 equipped with machine guns that exploded onto the scene.  No July 4th scene has ever surpassed the power of what we witnessed, and heard, that night.

I know we ended that night frustrated beyond words. Even though we had a fix on the origins of the rockets, we were not allowed to run them down. A big disappointment, as I remember it.

And, as to Bud’s reference to creature comforts, yes, they were few, amounting only to whatever precious things one might have carried. In my mind, it was a matter of basics: field rations, cigarettes included, a poncho and a nylon poncho liner–a most precious piece of my gear that I possess and treasure, for symbolic reasons, to this day.  It is wrapped up and fixed to my belt, behind me, in the below image.  Now, I carry it with me in my car, wherever I go,

Enough for now. More reflections next time.

(And as usual, these are my and Bud’s memories so many years later. Corrections, different perspectives, and different interpretations from Lima 3/1 Marines are most welcome. –Lima One Actual sends)

Forgive this pause en route Hill 41.

Was caught up short this morning listening to public radio’s “Story Corps.”  These recordings are gemstones of American life. Today’s was a remembrance of a meeting between former Marine Corps Sergeant Kevin Powell and the mother of a member of his platoon in Iraq, Brian Parrello.  Brian was killed (by an IED) in Iraq 10 years ago. (Here is the url: http://storycorps.org/listen/kevin-powell-and-shirley-parrello/)

Sgt. Powell and 19 members of the platoon did what we could not do during the Vietnam War. Together, after their unit returned to the United States, they paid a visit to Brian’s mother to express their sorrow and their support to Brian’s family.  As a unit, we had no way of doing the same thing for the families of CPL Alexander, LCPL Zagerac, LCPL Ottey, and LCPL Hahn. Captain Gibbs wrote letters to family—he was supremely devoted to this task—but the policy of rotating troops out of country as tours expired, rather than rotating whole units in and out as was done in Iraq and Afghanistan, made it virtually impossible for us together to create such moments with the families of those we had lost, or even to connect with those whose wounds sent them home.  Once gone, generally, these Marines  were out of our lives–though seldom out of mind.

In the traditional Marine Corps sense, Alexander, Zagerac, Ottey, and Hahn were “my” First Platoon Marines, as were those who were wounded and sent home. Their families were “mine,” as well. And yet, as I listened to Sgt Powell and Mrs. Parrello  this morning, I could only cry.  Not only for young Brian, lost in Iraq, and his mother, but also for Alexander, Zagerac, Ottey, Hahn, and the many others later for whom and for whose families I was not “there” as Sgt. Powell could be for Mrs. Parrello.  If only I knew how to make amends.

* * *

In August 1966, analysts at the CIA produced an extraordinary, 315-page document entitled the “Vietnamese Communist’s Will to Persist.” It contained the following paragraph:

“The Lessons of the Franco-Viet Minh War: Present Vietnamese Communist strategy is appreciably influenced by the 1946–1954 struggle in which the Communist-controlled Viet Minh forced the French to withdraw from Vietnam. In Communist eyes, probably the most significant feature of this earlier successful campaign was the fact it was won without inflicting a strategic defeat on the French military forces. During their nine-year struggle, the Communists successfully used military pressure as a political abrasive. They worked more on French will than on French strategic capabilities and eventually succeeded in making the struggle a politically unsaleable commodity in metropolitan France. Communist strategy, in short, succeeded in creating a climate in which the government in Paris lost its will to fight even though the French Expeditionary Corps remained effective and largely intact as a military force. The Communists suffered horrendous casualties and went through periods of severe setback, but their persistence eventually paid off.”

http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001169545.pdf (paragraph 17 on page 8)

That passage was written as Bud Eckert and I and many more Marines, including my classmates at The Basic School [for Marine second lieutenants], in Quantico, trained on opposite coasts for our assignments. Of course, none of us knew about that assessment, which was intended for Secretary of Defense McNamara and which would not be made public until about thirty years had passed.

Not that it would have mattered to us. We did have Bernard Fall’s cautionary classic Street Without Joy, which I did read (and would come to understand the meaning of that title in time), but we were Marines and Americans, and we could do anything. (Bernard Fall was himself killed by a mine near that street in late February 1967—word of which somehow travelled to 3/1.)

So, after the preliminaries at division and regimental headquarters, and introductions to Lima Company’s great leaders, it was on to command of Lima One, but only after an orientation patrol with my predecessor, Lt. Gran Moulder. (He was an effective commander, and I had substantial boots to fill.) Largely uneventful, the patrol did take some harmless evening sniper fire, my introduction to bullets that would have been happy to find me or any of my Marines. Such evening visits became a kind of routine–later, it seems to me, made fun of in an episode of Mash. (Actually, I remember reading of such sniper “visits” in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the classic novel of World War I.)

Our beachfront headquarters was not at all sumptuous or elegant–a wall of sand surrounded by sand and scrub brush with simple buildings as shown in the previous post. Still that was home of a kind. In short order, the prospect of leaving it always filled me (and I’m sure others) with butterflies (if not grim foreboding). We had our orders (always the five paragraph order famous in military units), all details of movement were nailed down: Situations in our planned operating areas clarified as best as possible (though intelligence always seemed sketchy); missions and objectives identified; routes and movements drawn; loads of ammunition and rations clarified; and communications and passwords defined. Everything in perfect order.

For the many years since then, the feeling of walking or riding out of the security of that base camp, has defined my sense of dealing with something big and new. Yes, everything has been thought through, but the first step out of the gate….

Time and again we passed through that gate. Maybe only a platoon, maybe the entire company–though more often the latter. We’d sweep through an area to disrupt any VC movements, set up ambushes of our own on trails thought to be used by VC infiltrators, or respond to some intelligence report concerning an enemy movement.

Booby traps (sorry, IEDs) were big worries, as were the snipers we inevitably would hear from. “Move out,” “spread out,” “down,” “dig in,” “go go!” the watchwords of daily life.  Days and days in motion. Nights of fitful sleep in shallow fighting holes, fighting anticipation and red ants. In this environment, there were no historic battles or even newsworthy events.

But, although the stories of wars are most often told on the basis of the actions of large units (and large arrows drawn on large maps), they are lived one Marine, soldier, sailor, or airman at a time. Tens of thousands of “pixels” of individual experience in a massive, moving image.

For the following pixels, as Bud Eckert has recalled them, I am grateful. I’m doubly grateful that he has been able to juxtapose his memories of the day with his visions of this day in Vietnam, an amazing parallax view in time. So, with thanks to Bud for giving me permission to this, I will let him describe our common experience (in italics), with my occasional notes inserted in brackets.

——————–

“Today [January 4, 2015] was an incredible experience. Early this morning I rented a Yamaha motorcycle and headed for the battalion’s old area of operations [south of Danang and Marble Mountain, in the so-called Mortar Belt]. Initially I thought I had crossed some type of time warp as everything was so different. Major highways crisscrossed our AOR along with major luxury resorts. There are no longer any hooches [bamboo structures with thatched roofs or worse]. Instead, big buildings everywhere. In Nui Kim Son (the village nearest our base camp–it is now about twenty times larger than it was in our time), I hired a guide named Tuoi, who could speak minimal English.

“I found the spot where Ottey was killed on August 23^rd. Today, that spot is adjacent to a major golf course. Another golf course lies next to the area in which we walked into a terrible ambush. Eight of the 11 squad members were hit, and Zagerac was killed. I then found the spot where I was wounded and Hahn was killed.  It lies not far from a large cemetery for thousands of dead Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers. [A search of GoogleEarth reveals the amazing extent of development since the war.]

[It fell to me days later to formally identify Hahn at the morgue of the naval hospital in Danang. In some ways, Mash, had it pegged. In thinking about the fortunes of many of my Marine comrades, I can say I was blessed not to be required to do this as often as they might have been. Still, it is duty that never leaves the memory.]

“I then drove all the way to An Hoa looking for the areas we had worked so many years ago. I had a wonderful seafood lunch on the beach and toured a number of ancient temples and counting houses before heading back to Nui Kim Son. I then spent over an hour climbing to the top of Marble Mountain, exploring a variety of caves containing among other things the statue of the sleeping Buddha. [Marble Mountain loomed over our positions. Sometimes it held snipers, and we were sure its caves held much more.]

“What happened next was amazing. I headed out to the Tu Cau area to the village where Alexander was killed in February. The area was largely like it was in our time with the exception of regular houses and electricity. Still, there was a lot of jungle and rice paddies. I was driving down a small trail when I spotted a large family gathering. I saw an old man who looked about my age. I walked up to the gathering and was invited in. It was a multi-generational family and the 71-year old man turned out to be a senior Viet Cong commander during the war. He was able to speak chapter and verse, through the interpreter, regarding a variety of major events he planned. One was the January attack on the desert position that resulted in over 20 Marine KIAs as well as over 80 dead VC.-It seemed that every event I brought up, he knew about … we spoke for over an hour and ended the meeting by toasting our dead brothers.”

Wish I had been there, Bud. Semper fi, Andy

The brothers Bud toasted from this period are: CPL Charles Alexander, LCPL Daniel Zagerac, LCPL Carl Ottey, LCPL Paul Hahn.

Next: Hill 41.

Should anyone have noticed the long interlude since the last exploration of this shack,  my apologies.  Holidays, press of work, and existential angst are my excuses. To those I’ve promised to bring in more material related to my immigration and University of Rochester experiences, I have not forgotten, and I will keep my pledges.  It is a New Year, after all, and I wish readers good luck in keeping their resolutions in 2015.

Now,  I am urgently drawn back to rummaging by a Marine comrade, a member of my platoon in Vietnam, a man I have not seen in decades, but with whom I have corresponded and talked–especially during the past few months. His name is Bud Eckert. He was wounded twice during his Vietnam tour, the second occurring not long before he was due to return home. The wound, in a way, hastened that return, as it was serious and would result in the amputation of his left leg below the knee. He was evacuated, hospitalized and returned to his home.

With Bud’s permission, in this and follow-up postings, I will tell a bit of his story. In particular, I will write of the journey he is on at this moment in Vietnam. Actually, I will mostly let Bud speak for himself about the his  visits to the battle grounds of his squad of Marines, the Third Squad of the First Platoon of Lima Company of the Third Battalion,  First Marine Regiment in 1967. (In Marine Corps parlance, we were Marines of Lima Three One or L/3/1 or Lima Company of the First Marines. )

I asked Bud’s permission to share his story–as he is writing it even now–because in many respects it is also mine–and I know it will be so for many others. I wasn’t wounded and I didn’t spend as much time with First Platoon as Bud did, but for many pieces that he describes I was there or nearby and doing the things, I like to think and pray, Marine platoon leaders were supposed to be doing.  Bud also has an extraordinary memory–it is vastly superior to mine.  So in talking to him and reading his emerging memoir, I am rediscovering very dusty and moldy boxes and their contents heretofore lost in my miserable memory shack.

As the leader of the First Platoon, I knew Bud as a genuinely fine rifleman.  Bud was also a fine point man, often serving as the Marine who was first in line when his squad, platoon, or company moved on patrol in column, one man at some distance behind another.

The point was an unenviable position. He might be the first to draw  enemy fire or the first to encounter a booby trap, explosive mine, or some other device. (In those days, 1967, our language was much simpler it seemed. Nowadays such things have more professional sounding names, such as the infamous “improvised explosive device” (IED), e.g., as a substitute for “booby trap,” which I suppose implied to some that only an idiot or fool would trigger it.)

Another thing Bud is (and has been since he was a teenager) is a wanderer, an explorer.  I think in retrospect that quality may be one of the attributes that made Bud a good point man.  The Marine walking point has to be able to move comfortably in unfamiliar environments, be observant, and, in the guerrilla war environment in which much of our time was spent,  go almost unnoticed or invisible to those looking to harm us or warn others of our approach.

Until Bud and I resumed our communications, I knew nothing of the explorer in him. In the memoir he is writing, which he shared with me, he tells of leaving home at 17 and hitchhiking across country and then sailing as a merchant marine to Europe, where he hitched more rides into the (for him) unknown. While exploring the United Kingdom, he learned the war in Southeast Asia was intensifying and decided he needed to join it. He sailed back to the United States, and enlisted in the Marine Corps–probably at nearly the same time I was commissioned a second lieutenant, in June 1966.

We would both arrive in Vietnam and join Lima 3/1 in January of 1967. Our company commander, the “Skipper,” was Captain Joseph Gibbs III.

Long since retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, Joe remains, for all intents and purposes, our Skipper. He has followed our fortunes and still writes regularly to us these decades later.

Enough for now.  I invite you to board this vehicle, on a journey through parts of Vietnam, with Bud observing the “today,” and remembering 1967—with occasional interjections and illustrations  (I hope) from me, including, eventually, a picture of Bud from that time.

A word of warning,  this journey is unlikely to accord chronologically with the actual sequence of events  we all experienced.  In a way that is appropriate. Three-one’s radio call sign was “Circumference.” First platoon’s was “Circumference Lima One.” We did, indeed, turn many circles, as may these stories.

No reservations (and no packing) needed to board this vehicle.

It’s likely that in 1964, during my second year at the University of Rochester, I had pretty simple and unrefined ideas about the course my life might take—perhaps most simply captured in the word “floundering.”

Academically, I’d slipped from a major in biology (I loved nature but not at the level of Latin needed to explain it) into psychology (seemed kind of like fitting square–theories–into round holes–common sense–yet having some face-saving connection to life sciences). I was about to surrender into something I had been doing for years, English–that is, the reading of it. New was writing about it. But I managed that well-enough to get by.

But the above journey didn’t matter all that much. My Navy ROTC scholarship guaranteed a future, whatever came after the AB degree I would receive: a minimum of four years of service for Uncle Sam in the sea service as an officer in the US Navy or the US Marine Corps.

But which? The television series “Victory at Sea” made it impossible for me to go into any service other than the Navy or Marine Corps. I was devoted to the series, never missing an episode. The opening film of destroyers plowing through heavy seas and sailors working as single organisms firing their guns, keeping the ships moving, carrying Marines ashore, and saving each other as Japanese fire rained on them were captivating. The bravery, in the face of almost certain death, of Marines in the island-hopping campaign of the Pacific was even more impressive.

And the music! Richard Rogers’ “Victory at Sea” score was beyond captivating. It pulled at this adolescent’s soul. The “Guadalcanal March” had him marching around the living room like a full-fledged Marine down Broadway!! Though he had no reason to think he’d ever be one.

And of course, there was his birth in a country, Estonia, occupied by the Soviet Union–which, in effect, made service to undermine or oppose that occupation in some way a birth-imposed duty. (His escape, carried as an infant in his mother’s arms, is a posting for the future.)

And so, then-Major Ohanesian became the instrument that would point that jumble of senses and obligations into a specific and most honorable purpose–at least so I think. And in doing so, he found a quality in me that I had no reason to believe existed.

In short, he gave birth to me as a Marine. How?

First, one must know Major Ohanesian was a model of the Marine’s Marine. He made John Wayne look like a slouch—and anyone else who played a Marine in the movies. He ran 5 miles a day before daily running was cool, even in the Marine Corps. On top of that, he was a Marine from my neighborhood in the Bronx, New York.

Navy Department policy in 1964 gave Marine Option Instructors (MOIs) each the right to bring 12 percent (as I remember) of the midshipmen in NROTC units into the Marine Corps. Put another way: “a select number.”  Make that SELECT.

The Major called me into his office in the spring of 1964, just before we were due to head home and to our summer NROTC “cruise”— three weeks playing at Marine stuff in Little Creek, VA, and three weeks making like Naval Aviators in Corpus Christi, TX.

“Midshipman Vaart,” he said. “I believe you would make a good Marine.”

Dropped jaw. “Guadalcanal March.” “Select few.” “Marine’s Marine saying that??”

“Think about it, Midshipman. I won’t be here next fall but check in with my replacement and let him know what you have decided.”

“Aye aye, Sir,”  I responded, dumbfounded.

In Little Creek, the Major, by then promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, turned up at an amphibious landing we conducted in training. He found us Rochester midshipmen, said hello, and as he left looked at me and Midshipmen Dick Hulslander, Tom King, and Bob Rivers, and said, “See you in the Corps.”

I dutifully checked in the next fall with the new MOI, Major CB Webster. I explained my conversation with Major Ohanesian and said I was ready to take the Marine Option. He pulled out the paperwork for my acceptance, completed in every detail except for my signature.  Major Ohanesian had me pegged. Truly.

Hulslander, King, Rivers, and I all went into the Corps, but we didn’t see him again. Colonel Ohanesian was killed in battle in Vietnam in March 1967.  I was in-country at the time and was crushed by the news. (I would again be crushed by news in July that Tom King was killed in an ambush.)

And so, all of the above is prompted by the ceremony that took place on 17 October at the University of Rochester’s NROTC unit to commemorate a plaque installed in Major Ohanesian’s honor in the Midshipmen Training Room—an effort made by the Marine Option Midshipmen of the class of 1964, men Major Ohanesian swore in as Second Lieutenants in the Corps.  The Major would not swear us in, an event for two years later, but he gave us birth as Marines. (A shadow box in the same room honors Tom–and an award given each year in his name to an exemplary midshipman.)

Images following: the plaque, the NROTC training room, and the two Marines of the class of 1966, Bob Rivers (left) and the poster, Andy Vaart (right). Neither of whom today are sculpted in the form of the MOI they admired so much way back then.