Dartmouth Veterans: Vietnam Perspectives

Military Service

Military Service ---------------------------------------------------------tom seymour : u.s. marine corps I t was December 22, 1962, about one o’clock in the morning, when I alighted from the train that had taken me from Hartford, Connecticut , to Beaufort, South Carolina, to begin my Marine Corps basic training at Parris Island. Strangely, I had been given a private room for the long train ride, which took me through Washington, D.C., in the middle of a huge snowstorm, the cause of my late arrival at Beaufort. It was the last sense of luxury I was to feel for a long time. At the little receiving station for recruits there was no one to be seen inside. Calling out to indicate my presence, I had the first encounter with my new life when a very large Marine came bounding into the anteroom, screaming his displeasure at seeing me— ­ probably because I’d interrupted what he thought was going to be the rest of an uneventful evening just before Christmas, a time when virtually no new recruits had the poor sense to darken his doorstep. In fact, I was the only one who spent the night there before being taken by bus to Parris Island early the next morning, and I was the only one who got off that bus to be warmly welcomed by three drill instructors who must have enjoyed themselves immensely as they circled around me screaming like hyenas that I was just about the worst, lowliest, foulest, ugliest, and most disgusting piece of shit they had ever laid eyes on. Thus began a three-­ year experience that was to change my life forever, in ways that I never could have imagined. Boot camp training itself, once it began three weeks later, well after the holidays, consisted of ten grueling weeks of marching, hard exercise, learning how to fire a rifle, sliding down cables over muddy water to see if we would fall in (few of us did), learning the history of the Corps, and endless verbal and physical abuse by our drill instructors. The tone changed 4 : dartmouth veterans over time, though, and most of us became more confident that we could survive the ordeal and even, maybe, become real Marines. In retrospect, of course, the purpose of the training was clear— ­ to break us all down to the same level and then to build us back up in the mold of what the Marine Corps wanted us to become. On graduation day, when my family came down to see me, I was already a much different person— ­ both physically and mentally. I experienced an enormous satisfaction in having made it through Parris Island— ­even winning my PFC stripes before leaving. I had dropped out of Dartmouth after my sophomore year, demonstrating the only iota of good sense I still possessed— ­ a realization that I was wasting a wonderful opportunity at college and needed a good kick in the ass. My upbringing had been WASP middle class, private day school— ­ and then on to Dartmouth without any thought as to what a huge gift a liberal arts college education was. I decided that the Marine Corps was probably the best instrument to administer the boot to my posterior. Boot camp was followed by infantry training in North Carolina, which, in turn, was followed by a special communications school for six months in Florida. It was secretive work that we were being readied for, and, apparently deemed not to be a security risk, I was sent home for a month’s leave and then on to Japan, arriving at a small inland Naval Security Group base near Yokohama on January 9, 1964. During the next two years, the Marine Corps sent me to various places around the world and in various modes of transport for the purpose of doing what we had been trained to do. While never in ground combat, we were told our work was important, and it was often dangerous when on deployment. We were on the very front lines of the Cold War. Tom Seymour Tom Seymour : 5 The Japan experience was for me divided into two distinct parts. The first was the purely military one of doing my job as a Marine and being one of a group of people who became— ­ and remain— ­ some of my very closest and dearest friends. The other was my exposure to Japan as the first foreign country I...