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Major
Flashback!
Last Friday I accompanied the General of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Rear on a tour of two of our Marine Corps Air Stations. One is in Miramar in the San Diego area. The other is in Yuma, Arizona. So the General, the Command Sergeant Major, the General’s Aide and I were chauffeured to Miramar where we spent the morning following in the General’s wake as he was escorted from command to command. It’s good to be a general! At each location the general would make a speech to motivate and thank the service members for their hard work and dedication toward the war effort. Basically, the Marines in Iraq couldn’t have done what they did if we here back in the States weren’t doing what we do. The General was speaking to the pilots of one of our F-18 Hornet squadrons in the Ready Room. Since I’d heard the speech several times already, my eyes began to wander around the room. There on the wall, something caught my eye. Yes! It was the coffee mugs every squadron has! What makes this so much fun — and why I took great delight in this discovery — will soon be evident to you. Pilots, for some odd reason, like to assign nicknames to each other, only these names are called “handles,” or “call-signs.” One never assigns a name to oneself. Bad form! Usually there is something about you that brings about a name. It could be something you did. Or failed to do. Or the way you look. Or your last name just begs for the handle, as in having the last name Dillon: you might expect to be given the handle Matt, or Marshall from the old Gunsmoke TV series. Allow me to share some of the more humorous ones that are fit for publication in a family newspaper. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to why these individuals were assigned these handles. There was Possum, Pyro, Meat, The Gimp, Fonzi, Abe, Happy, Tonto, Pig, Caveman, Flake, Axel, CarpLips, Mumbles, Pizza, Smelikat and Slick. Makes you wonder. The trip to Yuma was on a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter, which took just about an hour. The weather was rainy and cold, so I was glad I had brought my field jacket. Before we left Camp Pendleton, my traveling companions thought it was funny that I would bring so warm and heavy a jacket. They weren’t laughing at 8,000 feet! In Yuma we visited a number of commands, but more importantly we attended a memorial service for another of our fallen Marines — too young, leaving a wife and two small children. But the highlight of the trip for me was the visit we made to one of the hangars at Miramar. This was an Air Force command, the 452nd Aero Staging Facility out of March Air Force Base. This medical unit had portable beds set up in the hangar in the event that we received mass casualties. After the General spoke, I was just chit-chatting with several of the Airmen when the General walked over, put his arm around my shoulders and said to the group, “This is my chaplain. But he’s not just a chaplain, he’s a former Marine Staff-Sergeant serving with the 1st Marine Air Wing in Danang, Vietnam.” It was a nice gesture, but I figured these folks could care less. Then this Air Force Major spoke up. He said, “I was with VMCJ-1, Detachment “Bravo.” My ears pricked up because that’s the squadron I had been with in 1972! I said to him, “Were you a Marine then?” He said he was. To which I replied, “So was I!” Well, what I did next no doubt surprised him. I reached out to shake his hand, which I grasped tightly, pulled him into a bear hug and just hugged him. I have never run into another Marine I served with in the 31 years since I left Nam. We exchanged information, promising to keep in touch. That’s just like God, to allow you to experience something only he could have pulled off. Here we were, decades later, each long-in-the-tooth, well past retirement for most in the military, yet we are in different branches of the service and meet during another war on a Marine base that is not the base either of us serves on normally. Go figure! I still can’t get over how old this guy looked! |
