“This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island. From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me.”
― Woody Guthrie
My father came home one night in the middle of eighth grade just as we were sitting down to dinner. He was still wearing his uniform—along with one of the largest smiles I’d ever seen.
“What?” my mother asked.
I looked up expectantly.
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| Our dogs, Molly and Samantha. |
For a long moment, no one said anything. I looked at my mother, wondering what this unlooked-for news might mean. Her lip quivered, and then she burst into tears. “Oh thank God!” she cried. She threw her arms around my father and cried tears of joy right onto his uniform blouse. “Oh, Tom that’s the best news I’ve ever heard. Oh, that’s wonderful! Thank God!”
I watched this scene unfold in silence, unsure what to think or say.
My folks had spent more than a year telling themselves—and me—that we were in New Bern to stay, that Coastal Carolina was where we belonged. We were going to stay there six years, all the way through my high school graduation. Then my father got an unlooked-for call from his “monitor,” the officer in charge of his professional assignments within the Marine Corps, and all of that changed in an instant. Dad’s monitor offered him the chance to return to the First Marine Division and to eventually command a rifle battalion. It was early days yet, but my father was informally slated to command either the 2nd or the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. Dad knew what he wanted and accepted immediately, without discussing the matter with anyone. My mother had every right to be furious. Instead, I’d never seen her happier.
Though the move seemed to come out of nowhere, but it made sense in the larger context of my father’s career. Dad joined the Marines in 1969, shortly after college. He went to Officer Candidate School, did well, was commissioned as a logistics officer, and received orders to Vietnam. In Vietnam, he somehow switched career tracks, becoming an infantry officer after leading a rifle platoon in combat. He did very well for himself. He was decorated, promoted, and re-commissioned as a Regular Marine officer7, sent to U.S. Army Ranger School, and then brought back to Camp Pendleton where, for lack of a better term, he became a “made man”8. He commanded a rifle company in the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, and was then hand-selected to command a second company in 2-5’s newly formed sister battalion 3-5 as the regiment expanded. From there, he did a two-year stint as the Marine Detachment Commander aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz out of Norfolk, Virginia, before rotating back to San Diego to command a basic training company at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD), San Diego. Six months at the Armed Forces Staff College came next, followed by three years at Headquarters Marine Corps, Washington, DC, as the aide de camp to a three-star general, and finally two years in purgatory at the Marine Corps Air Station, Cherry Point, North Carolina.
“I’m a West Coast Marine,” my father said that night. “I’m going home.”
My father had been born just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, but his words were true in every sense that mattered. Dad had commanded a whopping four company-sized elements, three at Camp Pendleton, and he’d been one of the founding company commanders of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. When Dad’s monitor asked him if he wanted to go back to Camp Pendleton and take command of one of his former battalions, he was inviting my father to fulfill a lifelong dream while returning our family to the place where we’d collectively gotten our start.
The kids at H.J. MacDonald Middle School were stunned by the news that I would be leaving after a mere two years in town. Almost everyone I told responded by saying, “But you just got here!” A few added, “But you’re still new!”
“It’s been eighteen months!” I replied with inevitable frustration. Sometimes I followed this up with, “If you don’t know me by now, then I guess you never will.”
Those final months flew by. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the den at my grandparents’ house in Tennessee, wondering what it would take to make the varsity swim team in sunny San Diego. That it would take more than it had with the Devilfish was understood by everyone.
7. As opposed to a Reserve officer. Essentially, the Marine Corps offered him the chance to make a career in the service.
8. As Dad told it, “So few guys really knew how to lead men in the field. Once the Colonel realized what I could do in combat, I became a ‘made man’.”
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