Too Much Tequila, Too Little Sunscreen

Many of you will say “let sleeping dogs lie” or some other idiom for not bringing up an unpleasant event from the past. And you’ll caution or even threaten with something like: “Don’t even think about writing a single word about that sordid and embarrassing chapter from our recent history.” But I’m going to anyway. Why, you scream. Why, because I played an unwilling and an alarmingly serious role in the stupidity of the times. That’s why. And, I’ve wanted to tell this story for years, so quit grumbling and read on.

It’s been a little over six years since the patients ran, or thought they ran, the asylum that was the Country Club Estates Home Owners Association back then. You guessed it; I’m referring to that brief period in the fall of 2007 shortly after the home owners had voted to unseat their board of directors. But the ousted board refused to be ousted or stay ousted or even acknowledge that they had been ousted. They just continued fumbling along as if nothing had happened until a judge finally told them to pack up their playthings and go home. It was during this highly unusual time that my story takes place. It all came to light with a call from the Deming police.

Let me back up a bit and say that I was naïve (and probably still am) enough to believe that I could actually play some small part in quelling of the stupidity of the time by writing something. Something that might emphasize but poke fun at how dumb we all were. So, with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I wrote a piece I titled Angry Adult 55+ Community. In this short piece I pointed out how our board was spending their time on the wrong stuff, like making new rules and policing the neighborhood looking for infractions instead of positive things like making this a better place to live. I made a couple of mistakes and they turned out to be doozies. I used multi-syllable words that the board members couldn’t pronounce and sarcasm that they still don’t understand. I should have known that my one sarcastic comment would be misunderstood or taken literally by the room-temperature IQ folks on the ousted board. You all know who they are, so I don’t need to name them.

Yes, I screwed up; I used sarcasm and a few big words in my piece. I would have been much better off writing: See Dick. See Jane. See Spot run. Run Spot run. They might have actually read and understood that. Probably not. Remember sarcasm is defined as: A form of wit that is marked by the use of sarcastic language and is intended to make its victim the butt of contempt or ridicule. It’s like when you told your son that you would wring his neck if he ever did that again. You never intended to wring anything. You just said that to emphasize how angry you were. Got it?

Here’s my misunderstood text. You can read my complete article at Angry Adult Community. I wrote it in 2007 and posted it on my website in 2009. See if you can spot the one word that triggered all of this stupidity.

…Our other amenities are an unused bocce court and horseshoe pitch that lie dormant without any semblance of organized leagues, women’s groups, tournaments etc. Why? Let me tell you why. Because our HOA has been too busy arguing about process, trying to make more rules, and wandering the neighborhood trying to catch someone committing rules infractions. I’m going to shoot the next board member that cruises past my house thinking it’s his job to be a patrolling rules enforcer.

Shortly after I emailed my piece to a couple dozen friends, including one member of the ousted board, a Deming Police Sergeant came to my home. We were away and missed him, but we returned home to find his message on our answering machine. He said something along the lines of: “I want to discuss the serious threats you’ve made to your neighbors.” Little did I know that the police visit and subsequent telephone call were the first waves of the stupidity that was yet to come. A friend, in attempt to stem this nonsense, showed my story to the Deming Chief of Police. He laughed, apologized, and reassigned his officers before recalling his SWAT team (not really, I added the SWAT team to inject a bit of sarcasm into this story) from their positions around my house. Unlike the members of the ousted board, the chief actually read my piece and easily recognized and chuckled at my use of sarcasm. Did that deter those dimwits on the ousted board? No, they spent November discussing new ways to nail me. Me, the Lee Harvey Oswald on Bogie Court.

The following are excerpts from the official minutes of the November 2007 meeting of the unofficial, ousted board. I’ve not changed a word. Promise. You can read the actual minutes in their entirety at the CCEHA website.

Shortly after the meeting was called to order, the minutes read:

Special Visitor: President Ewert announced we were having a special visitor at our meeting this morning but he has not arrived yet.

A bit later in the meeting the minutes recorded:

At this point, the special visitor we had been waiting for arrived at the clubhouse. Deputy Sheriff Daniels introduced himself and his partner to the group. Donna Robbins explained to the assembled members that the reason we elected to have a Deputy at our meeting was because of the threat we received on October 27, 2007 about being shot.

She explained that this information was included in the letter that was sent to the membership this past week regarding the results of the 2007 budget vote. Donna informed the group that the person who made the threat is a member of the Country Club Estates community. The threat was that any member of the Board seen on this person’s street would be shot.

Wait, it gets better. That paragon of brilliance (you know who I mean) is going to try to get the FBI involved in what surely must be a federal case. Do you think they’ll put me on the Ten Most Wanted list? What for? Writing an article with too many big words? Serious, huh? Read on:

Deputy Daniels opened the meeting to questions from the assembly. Linda Drilling asked if e-mail threats were more grave that spoken ones. Deputy Daniels said that they are equally serious.

Sue Gomes asked if it made a difference if we contacted the Deming Police or the Sheriffs Department. Deputy Daniels answered that if you live outside the city limits in the county it should be the Sheriffs Department. If you live within the city limits you can call either entity.

With all of this concern and all of these questions you would have thought someone would have asked to see the actual “threatening” document. No, they just kept wallowing in their stupidity, worrying, fretting, and scheming. It amazes me that anyone got any sleep during all of this. Not with a “killer” on the loose in the neighborhood. Hold on, it gets better. They tried to get a search warrant to search my home. Search for what? Printer cartridges, floppy disks, flash drives, printer paper, you know, the usual writer’s stuff. Stop laughing and read on:

Steve Barish wanted to know if the City was responsible for protecting a group of individuals in the event of a threat by an individual. Deputy Daniels said that he could not say much about the incident since it was an ongoing investigation.

President Ewert added that he asked the police if a search warrant could be obtained and the answer was no. More evidence was needed. Marilyn further inquired if this person was going to be prosecuted since after all, he was talking about killing someone. Deputy Daniels answered that it would be up to the District Attorney to make that decision. Marilyn asked how we could protect ourselves. Deputy Daniels said to use 911.

Did you pick up on that “he was talking about killing someone” line? A little later in the meeting they continued this meaningful discussion with:

Marilyn Gottschling reiterated her concern about what we should do if we received any threats. President Ewert offered that right now this person was focused on the Board of Directors and she should not be too concerned since she was not on the Board. Bob Nelson offered that dispatch should be made aware of the situation so if anyone from the community called with a threat, they would know to act more quickly.

Steve Barish offered that in this state you are able to carry a gun and your car is considered an extension of your home so is his home and his car equivalent? What happens if you get near his car? Deputy Daniels said that since this person is not a convicted felon there is not much they can do.

And lastly we read a reference to the person who called the police and the sheriff’s office and most likely instigated and ramrodded this whole comedic affair.

Donna Robbins said that she has been in communication with both the Sheriffs Department and the Deming Polite. She has contacted Sheriff Cobos and the Under Sheriff and they are both very aware of our situation. They are concerned for our safety. The person who sent the threat has not been heard from since.

Hal Wheeler thanked both officers for coming to the meeting and they were given a round of applause.

There is no evidence that any member of the ousted board ever read my article, asked to see the article, tried to speak to me, or attempted to understand the context of my alleged threat. Many months later I gave a copy of my Angry Adult 55+ Community to a friend who was at that faux board meeting and who is cited in the minutes. She read my piece, turned red with embarrassment, and couldn’t have been more apologetic. She apologized for her own stupidity and for all of the other dunces involved in this sad but true, black comedy. She had been told that I had emailed a serious threat to shoot the members of the board.

There you have it. I finally get to show my tormentors for what they really were, and most likely still are, complete idiots. Tormentors is probably too kind a word—morons would be more like it.

Does anyone question why we ousted these nitwits?

©2013 by Bob Rockwell

Final Note – If you disagree with anything I’ve written herein or believe I’m mistaken or if you just want to piss and moan, don’t call the police—call me. Or better yet, email me at tumbleweeds@q.com. You can yell all you want, I can take it. And if I’m wrong I’ll fix it with a retraction or in a subsequent piece. So there!

My humble little web site Too Much Tequila, To Little Sunscreen had its ten thousandth pageview last month. 10,166 to be exact. I know pageviews are a goofy unit of measure but that’s what the folks that power my blog keep. If you go to my website and read two stories that counts as two pageviews even though each story may be ten pages long. So storyviews or postviews would be more accurate terms, but what do I know. Anyway, I want to thank all of you that read my stuff. That’s everyone except that damn Russian that keeps sending me ads for his porn site in Russian. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Russian porn per se, it’s just that I don’t trust anyone that says things like: большие красивые груди. Do you think it’s a hang-up left over from the Cold War.

Psst – don’t tell anyone that I told you—but that above Russian phrase translates to big beautiful breasts. Not so bad, huh?

I know I know cowboy hats and baseball caps are a big part of our American culture, but so are Saturday night specials and the Ku Klux Klan. So how can you rant about something as basic as an everyday, ever-so-common hat, you ask? Why, because we aren’t wearing the tilts, cloches, fedoras, or the pillboxes of an earlier generation. Watch a Bogie and Bacall movie to see some cool, proper hats, or better yet, you can watch footage of Kate the Duchess of Cambridge. She’s doing for hats what Mark Wahlberg did for men’s underwear and Bo Derek did for cornrows and beads. Here are the hats, or to be more precise, some of the hat-wearers that really drive me bonkers:

Country music artists who wear their hats 24/7 drive me up the damn wall. They see nothing wrong with dining at gala banquets with their hats on, wearing formal wear with their totally inappropriate cowboy hats, or appearing onstage, indoors, at night with their hats pulled down low over their eyes like its midday on the prairie.

I had difficulty mourning the loss of a true American hero, Pat Tillman, because the army released his official photo showing him in a misshaped tan beret pulled down low over his right eye like he was some sort of tough Veronica Lake look-alike. He looked a helluva lot better in his ASU and Cardinals football helmets.

We’ve got sports-team hats that show everyone what team you root for, the veterans hats that let everyone know you were in this war or that, and in what branch you served, and the promotion hats that advertise some something: a company, a product, an event, something.

The Jewish shtreimel is almost as outrageous a fur hat as the Brit’s bearskin. Okay, you’re right, it’s even more outrageous. Other unusual hats that I find interesting are Arabic fezes, Balmoral bonnets, the French kepi, and the conical hats of Asia, like the ones the Vietnamese call nón lá (leaf hats).

I can’t figure out whether it’s the Jesse Stone of Robert B. Parker’s novels or the Jesse Stone played so wonderfully by Tom Selleck in the made-for-TV movies that I like better. Both equally, I guess. Jesse was a minor league shortstop who injured his throwing arm and still regrets and misses the baseball career he never got to realize. Strike one. His second strike came when his beautiful wife dumped him for a career in TV, and his third strike was being fired from the LAPD because of a drinking problem. His career and his life are at rock bottom as he, the big city cop, deals with the small town issues of dinky, little Paradise, Massachusetts. Jesse brings a strong sense of right and wrong and a no-bullshit style to his position as Paradise’s chief of police. As you read or watch Jesse you’ll want to drop your book or pause the TV and see if you can reach out and somehow help this deeply troubled man.

I’ve read and watched everything ever written or filmed about Jesse Stone. Here’s the list so you can begin your adventure. Enjoy!

Books by Robert B. Parker
1997 Night Passage
1998 Trouble in Paradise
2001 Death in Paradise
2002 Stone Cold
2006 Sea Change
2007 High Profile
2008 Stranger in Paradise
2009 Night and Day
2010 Split Image

Movies with Tom Selleck
2006 Night Passage
2006 Death in Paradise
2005 Stone Cold
2007 Sea Change
2009 Thin Ice
2010 No Remorse
2011 Innocents Lost
2012 Benefit of the Doubt

Books by Michael Brandman
After Robert B. Parker’s death in 2010, his estate granted Michael Brandman, who had co-written and produced the Jesse Stone movies, the right to continue the series.

2011 Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues
2011 Robert B. Parker’s Fool Me Twice

Books by Reed Farrel Coleman
2916 Robert B. Parker’s Debt to Pay

I’ve been slaving away (putzing with would be far more accurate) on a collection of anecdotes that I’ve tentatively titled Wee Tales for years now. I’ve finally realized that I might never finish it. So before the paper yellows and crumbles away I’ll share a few with you. Here’s six of my wee tales.
Psst…they’re all true.

Wee Tale #1 – Semper Fi, Colonel
We took a much needed break from our tactical maneuvers (war games) deep in the Mojave Desert to gather around a jeep-mounted radio as John Glenn orbited the earth in Friendship 7. Lt. Col. John Glenn was one of our heroes, being the only Marine astronaut in the space program. There was reverent silence as we craned our necks to hear the voices through all the static. The silence was broken by our old Gunny (Gunnery Sergeant). “Last flight they sent up a monkey, this time a Marine. Looks to me like they’re workin’ their way up the evolutionary chain.”

Wee Tale #2 – What Color Was That?
I was transferred from California to a Navy base in Florida for schooling. I dropped Linda and our infant daughter, Deanna, off in Denver and went on ahead to find us an apartment.

Linda and Mabel Rivas, the wife of a Marine buddy, took the train from Denver to Jacksonville with a layover in Memphis. They arrived at the Memphis train station to find that the segregated south had separate white and colored waiting rooms. These two Hispanic girls didn’t see themselves as either, so they stood with their babies and luggage on the desegregated platform for hours until their train arrived.

Wee Tale #3 – We’re Above What?
I was killing time as field services engineer at this small computer company when my boss came to me with what I thought was an unusual assignment. He asked me to teach a course on a data acquisition and telemetry system our company had installed a few years earlier at the Nevada Test Site. I pored over a host of manuals, scratched my head a lot, put together a lesson plan, and headed for Las Vegas.

I spent the night on the strip in a big Las Vegas hotel. Early the next morning I drove to a parking lot in the center of town and boarded a bus bound for the test site some distance north of town.

My classroom was a trailer in a cluster of twenty or so far into the desert. The techs were eager to learn and I was happy to be there until one of my students explained where we were exactly.

We were 200 feet directly above a nuclear warhead being assembled below us. Our data acquisition equipment would measure the characteristics and intensity of the blast.

Wee Tale #4 – Oh, Lana
We moved into our first house, a cute Japanese modern bungalow two blocks from the ocean in Laguna Beach. It was built and owned by a big-time contractor up in LA. We had a sunken living room with a real fireplace, patios in the front and along the side, and an outdoor shower, but the most distinctive features were the crystal knobs on the built-in bedroom cabinets and the crystal chandelier in the master bedroom. Our builder salvaged these somewhat tacky knobs and this gaudy light fixture when he remodeled Lana Turner’s house.

Eat your heart out—we pulled the same knobs and made love under the same lamp as Lana Turner—so there!

Wee Tale #5 – Konnichiwa (goodbye) Mrs. Tanimoto
I was the guest of honor at a very formal reception in a factory
town way up in northern Japan. The beverage of choice was sake. Not hot sake
served in those cute little cups that we always have with dinner, but chilled
sake in wine glasses. The host, my friend, asked me, through a translator, what
I thought of the sake knowing that he and I had been in a wine cellar in California
a few months earlier. I said as tactfully as I’m capable, that I loved hot sake
with meals, but I preferred chilled white wines to sake served this way. He
said it was because I had never had any really good sake. He grabbed my arm and
along with our translator led us to the taxi stand and on to his home.

You have to remember, this is a small factory town. The town has
one factory, and this guy runs it. I didn’t know what to expect when we pulled
up to his modest two-story house on a street lined with many similar homes.
We took off our shoes in the foyer and went up a steep flight of
stairs into what must have been the living room or parlor. He made a big fuss
out of taking his prized sake out of his modest liquor cabinet and pouring us each
a glass. Just as we were toasting something or other, a woman in a kimono
entered the room bowing and carrying a dish of goodies. I expected to be
introduced but neither of my Japanese friends even acknowledged her presence.
She set the bowl down and backed out of the room bowing.

We drank a bunch of his private stock before deciding we should
get back to the party. While we were on the lower landing putting on our shoes,
I looked up and saw the woman of the house on her knees bowing to us like a
Moslem in prayer at the top of the stairs. We left her there without saying a
word.

Wee Tale #6 – Sir Robert?
And would you believe it, I actually held a press conference at Carlton House Terrace, the home of the Royal Society in London, and in the Michael Faraday room, of all places. This learned society was founded in 1660, and functions today as the UK’s Academy of Sciences. A plaque must hang somewhere in this historic place that reads: Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage, Michael Faraday, Bob Rockwell…

In the Jaws of the Beast is an engaging story of a troubled Confederate veteran overcoming his deep-seated hatreds and the prejudices of the times while dealing with the tragic death of his wife and the kidnapping of this son by the Apache in 1867 New Mexico Territory. His life is changed forever when he teams up with a colored Yankee soldier at Fort Cummings to find Cochise and his Chiricahua band, and retrieves his son. The friendship between these two radically different men, at a time in history when our nation was struggling to come together, will captivate you in In the Jaws of the Beast.

If you only had a short time to live where would you spend your final few days? I might spend my waning moments sipping a glass of 1986 vintage Occhio di Pernice ($1,030 a bottle) while being serenaded by violins on the Piazza San Marko in Venice. Nah, I’d rather be having an ice-cold beer served by a geisha in the elegant lobby bar of the Hotel Okura in Tokyo. Or maybe I’d be sipping a cappuccino in a waterfront café while thumbing through the International Herald Tribune in Portofino on the Italian Riviera. Or I’d more likely be traipsing among the redwoods along some fern-covered trail in the Muir Woods, sipping warm, metallic-tasting water from my canteen. I can’t decide which.

Nobody would spend their last days on earth hiking, you yell. I might. I’ve got wonderful memories of hiking the Rockies, the Sierras, the Cascades, the Juras, the Alps, the Appalachians, the White, and the Blue Mountains. And who could forget all of those backbreaking hills at Camp Pendleton. Hills with names like Old Smokey, Mt. Mutha and my favorite Mt. MF’er.

I’ve even hiked a few holes—Crater Lake, the Columbia River Gorge, and the Grand Canyon, but it was my trek through the Black Forrest in southern Germany that sticks with me. We hiked all day on their very organized and extremely well marked trails, (what else would you expect) greeting everyone we passed with Grüße (greetings) or guten Tag (good day), and had lunch in a small, picturesque inn in the middle of nowhere. I had a slice of Black Forest cake (Schwarzwälderkirschtorte), what else.

I’ve done most of my hiking with family, various friends, or fellow Marines, but two solo hikes made lasting impressions on me. I had a day to kill before catching my flight home from Sydney, Australia, and I had drunk all of the Fosters I could handle, for the moment anyway, so I spent the day hiking the trails of the Royal National Park south of Sydney. The trail over the steep cliffs and the pounding sea is an image I’ll have forever, but it was a four-day solo backpacking trip that cast the longest shadows. I hiked the 42 mile trail through the narrow Paria Canyon from southern Utah into Arizona to where the Paria empties into the Colorado River. The red-rock walls of this narrow canyon extend to over 1500 feet above you. The canyon narrows to 10 or so feet in some places making it the longest continually narrow canyon hike in the world. I learned an important lesson alone in this awe inspiring canyon. An adventure is only an adventure when you share it with someone, alone, its just boring exercise. I took a book, a sketch pad, and my camera and thought I would cherish my time alone—nope, not at all.

I’ll take mountains over beaches anytime, but I’ve had some good times on the beaches of the world. My absolute favorite, only because I sorta grew up there, is the beach at Diver’s Cove in Laguna Beach, California. We were so poor while I was in the Marines that the only thing we could afford was a trip to the beach. We went year round, in our sweats in the winter, and with our Coppertone the rest of the year.

Another favorite is the beach made famous by Brigitte Bardot, Tahiti Beach in San Tropez on the Côte d’Azur. I like it a lot, but not for its sand or surf, but for the beautiful women tanning their boobs in their mono-kinis, or their buns on the nude beach next door.

Most of the beaches in Hawaii are memorable but it’s the black sand at Honokalani Beach on Maui that made a lasting impression. Now, if we could only get those nude, French girls onto the black sand in Hawaii, we’d really have something.

Yogi Berra is known for a number of things, two of which are, being one of the best catchers of all-time and his unique yogiisms. Some grammarian said that yogiisms often take the form of either an apparently obvious tautology, or a paradoxical contradiction. Tautology and paradoxical aren’t words that Yogi would have ever used. Read below, and you’ll see why.

A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.
You can observe a lot by just watching.
If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.
I never said most of the things I said.
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
It gets late early out there.
If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.
The future ain’t what it used to be.
90% of the putts that are short don’t go in.
I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
I think Little League is wonderful. It keeps the kids out of the house.
I wish I had an answer to that because I’m tired of answering that question.
I just want to thank everyone who made this day necessary.
Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.
It’s like deja-vu, all over again.
It ain’t the heat; it’s the humility.
Never answer an anonymous letter.
I usually take a two hour nap from one to four.

Our lives are filled with missed opportunities, things we wish we could do over again, and very rarely, a few seconds of excitement in our otherwise hum-drum existence. These little speed bumps in the road of life are what memories are made of. Here’s one of mine:

How about a romantic weekend in a quaint old Bed and Breakfast Inn on Martha’s Vineyard? How about one with a small intimate gourmet restaurant on the premises? Does it get any better than that? Maybe not, but let me tell you about a weekend a whole lot better than ours.

We ferried over from the mainland browsed around Edgartown and did all of the things tourists are supposed to. We even stopped by The Black Dog, the tavern where President Clinton later bought a souvenir tee shirt for Monica Lewinski.

We were well into our candlelit dinner when the waitress stopped by to chat. You could tell that she was anxious to tell us something when she said, “You should have been here last Saturday.”

“Why,” we asked.

“Because Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley were her last weekend,” she blurted out.

“Normally celebrities disrupt the order of things, and their presence distracts from the enjoyment of a place,” I said as if I’ve been around lots of celebrities.

“Yeah but, about 10:30 Billy asked if we’d lock the door and hang up our closed sign. I flipped our sign as he moved over to that piano over there,” she said as pointing to an upright in the corner. “We locked up and the kitchen staff came out front and joined the guests to hear Billy. The owner opened the bar for everyone and we all enjoyed an intimate, up close and personal two-hour concert by Billy Joel.”

Sadly, Joe passed away not long after he dictated this story to me. We were planning to do a series of stories starting with this and continuing through his training in Hawaii, his landing on Iwo Jima, his wounding, and his long convalescence. Those often told stories died with him. Semper Fi, Joe.

The March weather in San Diego is pretty easy to take for a guy from Illinois. My older brother, Chuck, a former DI and sergeant in the recruit depot’s guard detachment, pulled some strings so that I’ll be staying in San Diego for a little while longer to attend radio communication school. I joined the Marines last December to be a warrior and not a radioman, but Chuck must know what he’s doing, and the Corps really needs radiomen in this the second year of buildup, 1943. I’m so happy to be out of boot camp I’m willing to try anything to get into the fight, even learning Morse code and lugging a radio on my back.

I soon realize that radio communications is not my thing. All of this dit, dot, dit shit is driving me crazy and I’m not sure I’ll ever learn this stuff. What was Chuck thinking when he got me into this? Anyway, I earn my first liberty after one week of Comm. School and get to see a little of California with Chuck and his wife for the first time.

At Monday morning formation beginning my second week I learn that I’ll have to attend night classes with other “slow learners” until I catch up with the rest of the class. I’ve only been here one week and I’m already behind. I make a decision right then and there; I’m outta here as fast as my sorry ass will take me. How, I don’t know yet but it can’t be that hard. I’ve got to get out of here, this dit, dot, dit nonsense is not for me.

My mind is racing as we march across the grinder (parade ground) to our night school classroom. It doesn’t seem like you can flunk out of this school; they’ll just keep pounding this stuff into you until you finally get it. I could spend the entire war here trying to key in a three word message. The only way I can see to end this agony is to get kicked out for some disciplinary reason. Yeah, if I could get tossed in the brig for some petty offense they’ll boot me out of Comm. School, transfer me to an infantry unit and I can say goodbye to all of this dit, dot, dit bullshit.

Early in my first night class I take a break from memorizing Morse code long enough to start a letter to a friend back home. I just begin my letter when this piss-ant, little corporal looks over my shoulder and sees my letter. He reaches for my letter but I fight back yelling “You’ve got no business looking at this, this is private.” This asshole corporal won’t let up so I give him a little shove in the face with the palm of my hand. He staggers backwards outraged that I, a boot PFC, have laid a hand on him, an NCO. He storms out of the classroom and I never see him again. I just sit there for another hour or so until the class is over wondering what will happen next. Is this my ticket out of here?

The next morning shortly after reveille two MPs show up looking for Meyer. I yell, “Over here,” and they immediately arrest me and we march over “to see the man.” A couple of minutes later I’m standing at attention in front of the desk of this old, hawk-nosed, full-bird colonel. Remember now, I’m a 17 year old PFC with a total of three months in the Corps and I’ve never even spoken to an officer, let alone a bird colonel.

The colonel reads the complaint aloud and says, “Tough guy, huh?”

I respond with a feeble, “He had no business reading my letter.”

“You laid a hand on an NCO, five days bread and water. Take him away.”

The MPs march me over to the sick-bay (base hospital) where I’m given a quick going-over to see if I’ll survive five days on a protein-free diet. The doc gives me a thumbs-up as I’m sure he does every 17 year old Marine fresh out of boot camp. We leave sick-bay and head for the San Diego brig. The guys at the brig aren’t fun guys; they’re tough and cold and not the least bit friendly. Not at all like the MPs that have been marching me around.

They stuff me into a tiny dark cell with a bunk built into the wall and no where else to sit. I’m thinking I can put up with damn near anything for a measly five days. The thing that really sets military brigs (Marine brigs anyway) apart from civilian jails is all of the lines they’ve painted on the floors. Every time I come to a painted line I have to request permission to cross it from a chaser (prison guard) by screaming “Sir PFC Meyer requests permission to cross the yellow line.” The chaser will normally respond with “Go ahead shit-head” or some other more colorful response. So this is my drill for every minute I’m not in my dank little cell, yelling permission to cross their damn lines and being called obscene names.

I soon learn that bread and water means luke-warm water and all of the bread you can eat. It’s obvious they don’t want to starve me or break down all of the conditioning they’ve just put me through; they just want to punish me a little.

I whisper to the guy in the next cell over. If the chasers hear us they’ll be all over our asses. This guy must have connections to the outside because he smokes constantly and his cigarette smoke drifts annoyingly into my cell. One night he reaches through the bars and hands me an olive. Damn this little olive is good and it’s the only food I’ll have for five days besides bread and piss-warm water.

At the end of my five days two MPs pick me up at the brig and march me back to sick-bay where I’m surprised to find that I’ve gained a couple of pounds during my stay in the brig. It must have been that olive. As soon as I’m released I race to the mess hall afraid they may have quit serving breakfast. I’m in luck. I pile three pancakes on my tray but end up only eating a half of one. What did all of that bread and water do to my system?

The next morning when we’re getting ready to fall out for school a sergeant shows up looking for Meyer. I yell, “Sarge, what do I have to do to get out of here?”

“Get your gear together, there’s a bus leaving for Pendleton later today.”

I throw my gear into my sea bag as fast as I can. I’m not going to miss this bus. I don’t have any official orders, only the word of this sergeant, whoever he is, but I don’t care, I’m outta her!

The bus drops us off at Pendleton’s Camp San Onofre the home of the 26th Marine Regiment. I don’t have any orders and I’m clueless as what to do next. The bus driver points me to a company office at location 16B6. I tell the duty NCO that I’m fresh out of Comm. School, don’t have any orders and was just sent here by some bus driver. He doesn’t know what to do with me either so he points me to an empty bunk upstairs in the corner of the squad-bay.

The next morning I wake up in this unfamiliar place with a bunch of strange Marines wondering what the hell the Corps has in store for me today. Before long a lieutenant tracks me down and escorts me down to the company office. I soon learn that I’m bunking with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division. They tell me not to worry about my orders, the paperwork will catch up with me and I’ll be officially assigned soon, in the meantime, “Welcome aboard Marine.”

My new platoon sergeant tells me that machine gun training will start this afternoon in the barracks. He assigns me to Cpl. Joe Wilkinson’s machine gun squad as an assistant gunner. Joe is the squad leader and the gunner, the guy that gets to pull the trigger. Only one guy in a four-man squad gets to pull the trigger, the gunner. The other three lug ammo cans and tripods and feed the gun with ammo-belts. I decide right then that I’m going to be a gunner and not some ammo-belt feeding assistant.

After a few days out in the field I am promoted to gunner, a position I enjoy until the Japs silence my gun on Iwo Jima, but that’s a story for another day.

Often our lives are shaped and our destiny’s determined by some event that seemed petty or insignificant at the time. In my case the single event that transformed me from a suffering, incompetent radioman into a gung-ho, crack machine gunner … was my five days on bread and water.