08 November 2018

50 Years Ago Today: Marine Boot Camp

My official date of military service started 50 years ago on 8 November 1968.  I graduated from high school and then enlisted in the Marines on the Delayed Entry program so that I could have that summer free to hitchhike and do Dharma Bum rambling around the Northeast USA. 

It was a great summer.  Immediately after graduation, Gary and I hitched across Pennsylvania’s northern tier on Route 6 to NYC and went straight to Greenwich Village, a mecca where we drank beer in the Gerdy’s Folk City pub where Bob Dylan was discovered (remember “Positively Fourth Street”?).  We stood at the holy folk-music corner of Bleeker and McDougal streets.  Gary went back home, so I went alone up to Boston, and most importantly out to Lexington and Concord.  I hitched up New Hampshire through the mountains to the Canadian border and then down through the Maine coast.  Ramblin’ Boy.

Later I hitched with John to Newport, RI, and with others elsewhere, but most often alone.  I saw America and experienced stuff like the hostility, bigotry and hate of a cultural civil war, but also stuff like compassion, decency and good will. 

Just before the drive-in movie theaters closed for the 1968 season in the autumn, we had an epic party in the back row of a NY state drive-in for the original showing of “Night of the Living Dead”, the classic black and white zombie flick. 

That summer I had gotten out of several tight spots with cops because among my ID cards I had a card from my Marine Corps recruiter.  The cops always asked, “What’s this?”  I told them about my delayed entry enlistment, and it immediately changed their attitude toward this long-haired bearded freak.  The USMC had good currency among law enforcement. 

A week into November 1968, the recruiter pulled into my family’s driveway and picked me up for the trip to the Buffalo, NY airport.  With me were guys from Sheffield and Lance Corners.  We flew, via several connections, to Charleston, SC, arriving after midnight.  A Marine NCO picked us up and herded us on a bus to Parris Island.  We arrived at USMC Boot Camp around 02:00 and life would never be the same ever again.  My life would be a surreal chaotic Hell for all of the foreseeable future. 

-Zenwind. 
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