The end

One of the last weapons we expe­ri­enced was the flame throw­er, a very nasty weapon, both for the recip­i­ent of its out­put and poten­tial­ly for the oper­a­tor as well.  Those oper­at­ing flame throw­ers in com­bat are known to have very short lives because an ene­my will always try to keep them from get­ting close enough to use it.

The flamethrow­er weighed near­ly 70 pounds when both of the two-gal­lon tanks were filled.  The flame was ignit­ed with a “match”, a spark induced by a small trig­ger and was pro­pelled up to 40 yards by nitro­gen from a third tank.  The pro­pel­lant, under pres­sure, exerts a sub­stan­tial force and the oper­a­tor, if not force­ful­ly lean­ing for­ward, can be thrown off bal­ance.  Such an event would nat­u­ral­ly result in the flame being pro­ject­ed is all direc­tions, not a good result.

As we had moved into AIT train­ing, we had also moved our liv­ing quar­ters and were now resid­ing in one-storey wood bar­racks, much more com­fort­able than the Quonset huts which we had inhab­it­ed earlier.

When March final­ly arrived our train­ing had come to an end, six months of boot camp and fur­ther train­ing, and our group which had remained togeth­er for the entire peri­od were now to be sep­a­rat­ed.  Don, J.T., and I would return home to serve our addi­tion­al five-and-a-half years with the 61^st Rifle Company in Lexington while most of the rest of our com­pa­ny would either return to oth­er reserve units or be assigned to var­i­ous units through­out the Marine Corps.

Those remain­ing years would con­sist of one week­end each month, usu­al­ly in some field exer­cise, and two weeks each sum­mer for addi­tion­al train­ing at some Marine post.  It was odd that, in July of 1959, my first sum­mer train­ing peri­od after com­plet­ing basic train­ing, we were post­ed back to Parris Island and our liai­son was Staff Sergeant R.P. Lacousiere, my old D.I.! We returned to Parris Island again a cou­ple of years lat­er for sum­mer train­ing and our liai­son was Sgt. Temple! I was actu­al­ly glad to reunite with them both, under more relaxed circumstances.

I must recount one very seri­ous and hair-rais­ing event that occurred dur­ing my time in the reserve unit.  For a cou­ple of years we were called on to per­form a mock assault on a for­ti­fied posi­tion at a loca­tion near the Bluegrass Airport. 

A makeshift, unmanned posi­tion was set up to sim­u­late a machine gun nest and our com­pa­ny was to attack it to demon­strate tac­tics.  We were using live ammu­ni­tion and live grenades.  I was part of a squad attack­ing from the right flank and had in my pos­ses­sion a white phos­pho­rus grenade.  These are extreme­ly nasty devices.  When they explode the give off a huge amount of white smoke and the phos­pho­rus is scat­tered wide­ly.  If it gets on a human, it burns through everything. 

Somewhere dur­ing the assault, I lost the grenade.  I was unable to let my com­mand­ing offi­cer know until we returned to the train­ing cen­ter.  He was obvi­ous­ly cha­grined, to say the least, and ordered a group of us back to the site to search for it. 

I was for­tu­nate that I was the one to find it, retrac­ing the route I had tak­en dur­ing the demon­stra­tion.  But when I bent to pick it up, I noticed that the safe­ty pin was bare­ly insert­ed, prob­a­bly no more than a quar­ter inch.  I was pre­pared to throw it and alert the oth­ers of a live grenade, but I placed my hand around the spoon (which has to fly off in order to arm the grenade), picked it up, and slid the safe­ty pin secure­ly back in place. 

Had I acci­den­tal­ly kicked it before pick­ing it up I would have been either dead or run­ning as fast as I ever did to put sev­en sec­onds between it and me.  I could nev­er get out of my mind the image of some kid find­ing that grenade and it going off!  I was damned lucky that I didn’t lose a stripe over that.

This is the last install­ment of this series.  Some have asked me how I have been able to remem­ber so many details of that peri­od.  I can only assume that there are some things in life that are so vivid we nev­er tru­ly lose the mem­o­ry of them. 

I think I can safe­ly say that my time in the Marine Corps, despite sim­ply being a reservist, had a good deal of influ­ence on all my sub­se­quent years, and it is grat­i­fy­ing that, when most peo­ple learn that I was a Marine, the response is always pos­i­tive.  Despite often being referred to as “jar­heads” and “leath­er­necks”, I sus­pect that most of us take the ref­er­ences as a real­iza­tion that we were – and are — some­what dif­fer­ent amongst America’s war­rior class.  We were indoc­tri­nat­ed to feel that way

In 1973, at my fif­teen-year high school reunion one of my for­mer class­mates – a fel­low with whom I nev­er got along, although our dif­fer­ences were nev­er phys­i­cal – com­ment­ed to me that when I returned from basic train­ing, I was changed.  Knowing him as I did, I’m sure the remark was not intend­ed as a com­pli­ment but I def­i­nite­ly took it that way.

I knew I had been changed.  I think it was all for the better.