Hoo-Ah

C and I saw Jarhead last night. This is a miracle in two ways. First, we see a movie about every six months so the fact that we chose to go is special enough. Second, C doesn’t agree with the Marine Corps so the fact that I got her to sit through two hours of nothing but the Marine Corps is another act of God. We both enjoyed the movie but what I really enjoyed was the tiny glimpse I got into my father’s past.

My father enlisted in Vietnam. He felt it was his duty and that is why he enlisted in the Marine Corps. This morning when I spoke to him (you should stop now if you haven’t seen the movie) I was telling him about the main character saying “I may have made a big mistake” his first day at boot camp. My father said not one man didn’t lie down on his bunk that first night thinking “What have I done? It can’t get any worse.” Unfortunately for every one of them it did.

Like the Marines in the movie my father was at Camp Pendleton before being shipped overseas. This was the staging area before he was sent to Vietnam. He also took a commercial airliner to war. Traveling from California to Hawaii and then on to Vietnam. Strange the contrast between stewardesses in prim uniforms, familiar with serving tourists and business men, serving soldiers going off to war. I wonder if it was hard to look at so many young faces and know that very few of them would return uninjured and many of them would never return at all.

The movie was predictable in some ways. There was the Marine who is mentally slow but committed, the Marine who wants nothing more than to be a soldier and sees it as his job to instill honor among fellow Marines, the Marine that is a sociopath who wants nothing more than to smell the blood of his enemies and the main character who mixes a bit off all of them. I relayed this formulaic cast to my father who said “That is what all of these movies about the Marines get wrong. Ninety percent of them are the sociopaths who are barely literate while only ten percent are normal.” Yes, he is in the ten percent.

Ending my call with my father I wished him Happy Birthday to the Marines. The Marine Corps celebrate 230 years today. My father got off the phone to go hang his Marine Corps flag in front of his house. I am proud of my father and his service. I didn’t walk away from Jarhead with any life changing revelations but I did get the a small look into a world so unfamiliar that at times you feel no one on the outside can ever fully understand.