The Marine Corps Years...1989 - 1995.  (This will likely be the longest entry under Professional Career, as there are a number of side stories that deserve commentary.)

Paying for the college that I never went to was what I had in mind when I joined in the Marine Corps back in 1988, just days before graduating high school.  Where I went instead was Operation Desert Storm, better known as the first Persian Gulf War.

To this day, the most traumatic experience I have ever endured is Marine Corps boot camp, Parris Island, SC.  Those three months of my life are mostly a blur, and what I do remember about it all, I do not care to recall.  I will forever be grateful for my military experience which started with basic training, but I would definitely not have done it, had I known then what I know now.

My six-year stint in the Marine Corps began in February 1989 at Parris Island, South Carolina.  In May 1989, I graduated from basic training and could not have been happier to be leaving.  I had no idea what the remaining five-plus years in the corps would be like, but I hoped that it wasn't quite as terrifying as boot camp.  Fortunately, this much was true.  My parents traveled to SC for my graduation, and my military leave of 10 days (to be stretched by a week to 17 days due to a misunderstanding courtesy of my wonderful recruiter) included a trip to Six Flags over Georgia, which included Mom, Dad, Adrienne, Bill, Lisa, and myself.  This is remembered much more clearly than the previous 13 weeks.

After leave, I reported to Camp Lejeune, NC for Marine Infantry Training, which at that time had just been created.  When I entered boot camp, there was no such thing.  When I graduated boot camp, there it was.  So, oh happy day, four more weeks of infantry training. 

It was the fourth of July when I reported to 29 Palms, California, for Field Communications Radio Operator School.  This was a direct trip from NC with no time off in between...well, two days, if I recall correctly.  I, along with three other fellow Marines that I went to infantry school with, that were also reporting to 29 Palms, decided to take our time making our way from Los Angeles, where we flew into, to the Mojave Desert, where the summer desert heat (but it's dry heat) awaited us for two wonderful months.  Without transportation, we walked all over the parts of LA that were close to our cheap hotel, and about the only thing I remember is that we all walked a couple of miles to a theatre to watch Batman, and I fell asleep during the movie.  I had to catch it again later in life to see it in its entirety.  I was just too tired to stay awake through it all.  It was only 134 degrees on the day that I arrived in 29 Palms, but there was a lovely breeze of what felt like was coming from a heat pump turned all the way up (I later learned that these were called the Santa Ana winds), which actually provided no relief whatsoever.  For two months, we trained in the desert heat, including physical training in thick desert sand that made the blacktops of Parris Island seem down-right desirable.  A little known fact is that I graduated #2 in the unit which I was a part of, but for whatever reason, the instructor was not a fan of the fellow from Alabama, and my high marks went completely unacknowledged.  (The person that graduated #1 got promoted...boo hiss.)

Upon graduation, the next stop was a 14-day trip home before making it to my permanent duty station, Camp Pendleton, California.  My memories are very selective at this point, as it has been nearly 20 years since I made this trip home, so this will be the extent of the details for this two-week stay back in Alabama.

I reported to Camp Pendleton, CA in September 1989, only to learn that I had been assigned to a unit that was four months from deploying overseas on what we called a WestPac tour.  This involved boarding a naval vessel (in my case the USS Cleveland) and sailing overseas for training and such over the course of a six-month tour.  I had joined Communications Platoon, H&S Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines right in the midst of their most intense training that precedes boarding ship and sailing out.  It started with an 8-mile hump (hike) with a 50-pound pack and radio on my back and progressed all the way up to a 25-mile MCCRES (Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation System) hump that spanned 8 hours, occurred from 9pm to 5am, and was conducted with no more than two hours of sleep.  I believe it is fair to say that I have never been in better shape than I was during the span of 1989 to 1995, but I was probably peak in my first two years in the Corps.  (Having drill instructors chase me at Parris Island definitely improved my run speed.)  These hikes were killer, but somehow I managed to endure.  In December, we proceeded to board the USS Cleveland and prepare for deployment.  This was done about 40 days prior to the actual deployment, so that a 30-day window for military leave could me made available for Marines to go back home and visit family and loved ones before setting off for six long months.  Unfortunately, my leave balance was -3 days, so Lance Corporal Pilgrim wasn't going anywhere until after this deployment was completed.

The 30 days that nearly everyone spent at home in December 1989 and January 1990 deserve their own paragraph.  It is during this time that a fellow Marine, Mike Meade, convinced me to become his designated driver.  After all, we had seen just about every movie that one would have any desire to see, and sitting on the ship playing cards was losing its luster.  Mike was a frequent visitor of Tijuana, Mexico, only 20 minutes from the naval station in San Diego, so reluctantly I agreed to drive him back after a night on Revolucion.  I made it two nights before his persistence at me trying a margarita paid off.  It was on the third night that I drank enough to not be fit to drive myself.  We probably hit TJ (as we called it) close to 20 times during those 30 days.  This was first exposure to alcohol.  (I somehow managed to make it through middle and high school without ever taking a drink, in spite of all the alcohol being consumed around me.)  Enough said about that, except guess where Mike and I were looking forward to going after this six-month deployment.  (No, not rehab.)

 

Somewhere around January 12, 1990, the USS Cleveland set sail for a six-month overseas deployment that included nothing but places I had never been, and, as someone who grew up in the small town of Elberta, Alabama, thought I would never go.  For the first four days, I was as seasick as could be.  Although I never threw up, I felt like I was on the verge for 96 straight hours.  After that, I settled down, and seasickness did not strike me again...well, maybe with exception to the serious storms we encountered here and there.  Our stops along the way included Hawaii, Iwo Jima, Philippine Islands, South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the experiences were all amazing in different ways.  Iwo Jima gave me an appreciation that wouldn't fully mature until years later, seeing where the famous battles took place, climbing Mount Suribachi and looking down on the tiny island out in the middle of nowhere.  The exotic ports of call exposed me to other parts of the world, including other cultures, and gave me an appreciation for this great country of ours that I would not trade for anything.  The training that we conducted in the Philippines, but especially Thailand, took training to an all-new level.  That 25-mile MCCRES hike would have been a stroll in the park compared to the 55-mile hike through the jungles and terrain of Thailand, where it rained all the time and the temperature never dropped below 90 degrees.  I lost 12 pounds in 5 days and was never thinner in my Marine Corps post-boot-camp career.  (I started boot camp weighing 132 pounds and graduated at 168 pounds.  I went from 169 pounds to 157 after 5 days in Thailand.)  I could go on and on about what I witnessed "off the clock" in the Philippines and Thailand, but I will keep this PG-rated and move forward without any detail.  (I can't give everything away on a website, now can I?) 

 

We returned home to the United States in July of 1990.  Because my leave balance had only reached 14 days, I waited until late summer/early fall to return home.  After boot camp and occupational training, you can only take as many days as you have accrued, and 14 wasn't what I had in mind.  It was during this time that a friend to my sister became a girlfriend, to just about everyone's chagrin.  I was warned of someone's promiscuity, but I did not listen so well.  Oh well, live and learn.  I will spare the details of the relationship, but this is where is started.  It ended in small claim's court a year or so later.  During my first month back, I spent most of my free time at the movie theatre.  I have always been a big movie fan, so there was much to catch up on after being out of the country for six months.  I don't remember the number of days that it spanned, but I do remember that I watched 21 movies over the course of the first few weeks following my return.  I was not yet 21, and most of those I associated myself with at that time were 21 and older, and they were out partying hard (and not in Tijuana).  So it was at the movies where you would find me, except when everyone decided a trip to Mexico was in order, which wasn't terribly often because of the two hour drive from Camp Pendleton.

 

Upon returning to Camp Pendleton from leave, it wasn't long after that the escalations in the Middle East had led to the declaration that our unit would be going, and so began our desert training.  We spent most of our time back training for desert combat right up until it was time to pack up and head to combat.  We had just gotten back from WestPac, and units went on WestPac every two years for six months at the time.  Having gotten back from WestPac, we were of the belief that we would be stateside for another 18 months before heading back overseas in any capacity.  That is where we would be wrong.  It was around Christmastime that we were informed that our departure was within days, and it would be New Year's Eve and Day that we would find ourselves flying from Camp Pendleton to Saudi Arabia (via NYC, Newfoundland, and Spain). 

 

It was on January 1, 1991 that our plane landed in Saudi Arabia (Al Jubayl) to begin our time spent doing our part for Operations Desert Shield and Storm.  It was that very night that the temperature dropped into the teens, and when we awoke the next morning, it was to frozen sleeping bags with icicles stuck to them.  I still remember how cold I was inside of that bag.  Covering it with a poncho did little good in contributing to a good night's sleep (which I do not have).  It didn't take long for the desert to start warming up, so fortunately there were not many nights like this one.  But it wasn't too terribly long, either, before the blazing desert heat was upon us, with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.  At night, the temperatures would be manageable, though, dropping down into the 50s and 60s, so sleeping in a drenching sweat was never really a problem.  I remember landing in Saudi Arabia and wondering what we were in for, not knowing at that time that Iraqis would eventually surrender by the tens of thousands, not knowing how long this could on, and not knowing whether Marines I had become friends with in my first two years of service would be coming back home in body bags.  There was really no way to know what to expect, but I do remember not possessing the same level of anxiety that I experienced during boot camp.  It was probably at this time that I realized that the drill instructors had done their jobs, and now it all made a lot more sense.  (I still hated my drill instructors nonetheless.)  From what I recall, we first planted ourselves about 30 miles south of the Kuwaiti border on the Saudi Arabian side, and over the course of 7 weeks, we would eventually find ourselves no more than 8 miles from Kuwait.  We would be in one spot for a few days, then move.  Wash, rinse, repeat; we did it all over again.  I was one of many radio operators in the command center, where all the officers would strategize and receive orders from further up the chain of command.  Shifts were four hours in duration, and there were a couple dozen of us that rotated through on shifts of two at a time.  I had my share of 12 to 4am shifts in the middle of the night, and I remember listening to the Super Bowl (Giants vs Bills) on one of those graveyard shifts.  Scott Norwood, wide right, at the very end.  I was pulling for the Bills, but it was not meant to be.  On another shift of mine that took place in the middle of the night, one of the master sergeants was trying to make some soup with his little propane burner tipped over and nearly burned the command post down.  Imagine the enemy looking for a target, only to see a nice bright flaming one burning off in the distance.  Fortunately, the fire was contained before this happened, and this master sergeant got to carry the "idiot" label for quite some time afterward. 

 

It was January 16 that the air attacks began, and I remember hearing the planes flying overhead when it began.  It was at night, and it was then that it all became so very real.  Until then, it was digging holes, setting up camp, and nothing more.  There was no gun fire off in the distance; there were no signs of war.  It was just an extension of the desert training that we had been conducting all along, back in the miserable Mojave.  Except it wasn't the Mojave, it was the Middle East.  When the planes were flying over, one after another, for hours on end, it was no longer training.  It was real.  And one could guess that our time was coming.  It was on the night when the air attacks began that our battalion commander, a full-bird colonel, was making the rounds, taking the pulse of his men, when Mike Scott and I were standing in our sleeping hole taking in the enormity of the situation.  The colonel approached us and asked us how things were going.  For the only time in my military career that I vividly recall, a USMC colonel spoke to a non-rate (what we called E-3s and below, which means you have not yet earned the rank of a non-commissioned officer) as if he were just another human being; there was no rank (or as close as one can get) in play, just men talking.  It was quite comforting at a time when comfort was not in great abundance.

 

It would not be until February 24 of 1991 that we, the ground troops, would be called into harms way.  That is when the ground war began...all five days of it.  There had been talk of potential chemical attacks, roadside bombs, and all the things we are very familiar with today that weren't so familiar (at least not to me) back in 1991.  It was quite terrifying.  Nobody could have anticipated that in five days, it would be all over.  Iraqis would surrender like surrendering was the cool thing to do, and considering that Saddam was starving his soldiers, the word got around quickly that we feed our POWs, and that in itself seemed to have been enough for most.  Another interesting tidbit discovered through interrogation of POWs was that the Iraqi soldiers had been told that a man's passage into the US Marines required killing both parents, so I guess they found that to be just a little intimidating when coming to a gunfight.  If I had no problem killing good ol' Mom and Dad, surely there would be no trouble shooting a complete stranger right between the eyes.  This is not to say that there was no resistance along the way.  A day or two into the ground war, as we made our way into Kuwait from Saudi Arabia in an effort to take back the Kuwait International Airport, there were a number of rogue attacks, many of which appeared to be civilian.  We encountered civilians with machine guns mounted on their personal cars, driving toward us from the left and right flanks, firing away with reckless abandon.  Against the US military, they stood no chance of survival.  I watched from a HMMWV (pronounced HUMVEE) a couple hundred yards back as we engaged these rogue warriors via wire-guided weaponry.  The cars burst into flames as we squashed the attacks with a minimum amount of effort.  It would be just a few hours later, if I recall correctly, that it would become a bit more real for me personally.

 

As we continued on, making our way towards the Kuwait International Airport, it was three other Marines--Corporal Anthony, Lance Corporals Moreland and Taylor--and myself (if my memory serves me correctly here) who were in that HMMWV (MedEvac Team) when we started receiving incoming fire in the dark of night.  While many were protected by the tanks they were being transported in, the four of us were in a vehicle with doors that a butter knife could slash through.  Some of the rounds being fired were tracer rounds, meaning that you see them coming towards you.  As we scrambled from the vehicle, we used what little nighttime illumination there was to see what our surroundings were.  We saw to our immediate right, and the direction in which the fire was coming, a sandy berm that we, along with other infantry, would make our way towards (or attempt to).  It was at about this time that a tracer round went over my right shoulder, no more than 18 inches above my right shoulder, and close enough to where I could hear the air being displaced around it.  It was no more than a couple of seconds after this that I found myself in the desert sand, low crawling my way towards the wall of sand that would provide protection from the incoming fire.  As I found myself in a position where I could see what was going on, it was determined that the incoming fire was coming from Iraqi troops well out of the line of site.  Whenever flares would be shot up to illuminate the area, there was nothing but clear desert in that direction for at least 100 yards, so there would be little that I would be able to do with my 9mm Beretta.  Apparently someone didn't like me when they decided I would go to combat with a handgun instead of an M16A2 service rifle.  Oh lucky day.  The firefight was over within minutes, but it seems much longer when I think back to what happened.  Thank goodness I wasn't standing one foot further to the right and was 7 ft. 10 inches.  Otherwise, I would be one tall dead son of a biscuit eater (keeping it PG-rated for the kiddies).  We would make it to the Kuwait International Airport the next day and play our role in securing it for friendly aircraft.  We would spend our days in the burning oil fields that many played witness to via CNN, breathing the black-smoked air into our lungs that occupied the space around us for as far as the eyes could see.  I would spend the next six years coughing up phlegm; I thought I would spend the rest of my life hacking up that stuff, but fortunately 2000 days is all it took for it to subside.  Years later, I would reach articles about Desert Storm veterans who were having deformed babies and wondered if my children would suffer the same fate of these other children of those who served in the Gulf War.  It was a huge relief to see arms and legs in the ultrasound photos of soon-to-be-born son in 1997.

It was in April of 1991 that we would return to the United States.  We served exactly 100 days in the Persian Gulf, and I was grateful that we had one of the shorter stays, compared to other units that arrived four months before and stayed for many months more after we left.  Upon returning, I took leave and made my way back home.  It was a hero's welcome as the local news station was at the airport to greet me, along with the family.  I visited my old elementary and high schools, and before we made our way back to Camp Pendleton, three of my Marine buddies--Mike Meade, Derrick Webb, and Marvin Stout--came down and spent a week in the condo that my mother's boss, Toby Glisson, would provide us at no expense for five days.  Marvin would meet his future wife, Melanie Lee, who was a couple of grades behind me at Foley High School, but became pen pals with me while I was in the Persian Gulf.  They would marry within a couple of years right after Marvin finished his time in service.  Mike Scott was supposed to join us, but he drew the short straw and stayed in the Persian Gulf for an extra month on the leave-behind detail.  The four of us had a blast, and it all ended way too soon.  Nonetheless, when it all ended, we drove back to California on the 2036 mile drive.  I had been saving my money while overseas, so a couple of days after returning home, my dad, mom, and I went and found me my first personally owned vehicle, a 1989 Ford Tempo with 10000 miles on it.  It would get broken in a couple of weeks later with what was the first of seven cross-country drives.  I have no idea how I made that trip once, much less seven times, but I surely did it.

One of the reasons that we were only on the Middle East for 100 days was because of our WestPac obligations every 24 months.  In order to go through the training and MCCRES certification, we had to get back to the U.S. soon.  Once the war concluded so abruptly, I guess somebody put two and two together, so there was a lucky break for us.  However, as soon as we returned from leave after the war, we were right back at it again getting ready for the next overseas deployment that would begin the following January in 1992. 

There are no Tijuana tales to tell this time around.  I was 21 this time around, so Tijuana was more of an occasional jaunt than it was a place I made as a second home.  As a matter of fact, I had leave accrued, so I made one more trip back home before deploying overseas for another six months.

My second WestPac consisted of revisiting some places we had frequented the last time around, such as the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Hawaii.  But this WestPac also took us to some new destinations like Guam (more of a pit stop really), Kenya, and Australia.  We went back to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for some additional desert training, as well.   The most memorable part of this overseas deployment was our five-day stay in Australia.  Along the way I met a woman named Laura that I have kept in touch with (on and off) ever since.  To reflect on military career, most of it is quite blurry.  As I write this, I wonder how much of it I'm putting on the wrong timeline or leaving out altogether.  As I sit here trying to remember what other memories I specifically have that I can definitively say took place on this deployment, I can only think of negotiating with the Kenyan street vendors for African souvenirs, revisiting the Middle East for the desert training, the things I saw in Thailand that are too X-rated for this website, and Australia.  Oh, and one other thing.  Being the world's worst tourist, I spent a good bit of our two or three days there at the local movie theatres catching up on the summer blockbusters that had come out.  I remember seeing Batman Returns, and I very distinctly remember seeing the trailer for Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven before the movie began.  I remember the people in the theatre clapping and cheering over a Clint Eastwood western.  It's funny how some of the most insignificant things that happen over the course of six months are the ones that stick. 

I did not return home immediately following this deployment.  Shortly after returning, our unit was put on standby to go to Somalia, and what this meant was that leave was canceled for our unit until we knew one way or the other whether or not we were going to be involved.  We immediately began training again for what was believed would be a trip to Somalia to help fight the battles that needed to be fought over there.  We would be in this state of uncertainty from about a month after returning (August 1992) until right around Christmas Day.  It had started being rumored that we would be taken off of standby back in November, and when the Alabama football team had managed to go undefeated, then win the SEC's first SEC Championship game, they were going to be matched against the #1 Miami Hurricanes in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day 1993.  I had talked my dad into acquiring tickets to this game, and the plan was for me to come home for Christmas and New Year's.  We would make the trip to New Orleans to watch the game in person and hopefully watch Alabama upset Miami for the national championship during the team's 100th anniversary season.  As the date drew nearer and the standby never got lifted, we talked about holding the tickets as long as possible before selling them.  Dad was going there alone, so he was looking to sell the tickets if it looked like we weren't going.  Finally, within a week of the game, we were taken off of standby and allowed to go on leave, but it was no more than 48 hours too late.  Dad had a buyer, and the deal had been made, so my Plan C of driving frantically cross-country to meet Dad in New Orleans was no longer an option.  Instead, I ended up watching the game in Stigler, Oklahoma, with the family of Kevin Sewell.  He didn't have airfare home, and I agreed to take the long way home in exchange for a TV to watch the game on New Year's night.  I can only imagine what it would have been like to be there in person and watch Alabama, huge underdogs to a team that 62 out of 63 AP poll writers ranked #1, dismantle Miami, shut down their Heisman quarterback Gino Torretta, and witness what some consider to be the greatest non-play of all time.  Well, I will never know, but I will always remember where I was when it all happened...good old Stigler, Oklahoma, 50 miles east of nowhere.

It was the end January when I had to make my way back to Camp Pendleton by car...2000+ miles.  I made it back the morning of Super Bowl XXVII, the first of two Super Bowls pitting the Dallas Cowboys against the Buffalo Bills.  With the Cowboys having been my life-long favorite NFL team, there was no way I was going to miss it.  It was 4am in the morning and I was 20 miles from Camp Pendleton when I was pulled over for speeding.  99% of the cross-country drive was behind me, and I got pulled over that close to home.  I was struggling to stay awake, to be quite honest about it, and I am sure my speed was fluctuating all over the place.  I had the windows down and radio blasting, but that wasn't enough to keep me from getting pulled over.  I was also tested for DUI because of my bloodshot eyes, but since I had not been drinking, I managed to pass the sobriety test.  Later that night, the Cowboys stomped the Bills, and that was worth the price of the fine to me.

We had found out that we would not be going on a third WestPac come January 1994, when we were due to go overseas again.  This time, we were going to fly over and spend the majority of our six months in Okinawa, Japan.  There was a month-long period in late April and most of May that we would train exclusively in the desert, back at good old 29 Palms, California.  It was slightly before this that I had met a wonderful young woman who would eventually become my girlfriend and ultimately fiancee, although we would never marry due to my cold feet.  Just weeks prior to heading to 29 Palms, I was at a country-western dance hall with some Marine buddies of mine.  Rebecca approached our table and sent an open invitation to any of the three of us (Don Spurr, Paul Brantley, and I) to join her for a two-step.  I was still two-step-challenged, but it was I who ended up dancing with her that evening.  We danced a few times over the course of the night, and we mixed in some conversation to go with it.  It was on another visit a couple of weeks later and just days before our training in 29 Palms that we found one another again.  This time, there were six to eight of us there from base, and I was told that I was going to get my butt kicked if I didn't ask her out.  At the end of evening, she asked me to walk her to her car, which was in a poorly lit section of the parking lot, and I manage to deliver one of the clunkiest invitations for a date conceived to man.  She said she was with someone, although there were issues, but at that time she had to decline.  She did give me her phone number and asked that I check in from time to time.  While in 29 Palms, I did call her once (everything was done via pay phone back then, so it took lots of quarters and making the haul to the pay phones), but I got her answering machine.  I left a message, telling her when I would be back at Camp Pendleton and how she could reach me.  The next time I would speak to her would be just days before my 23rd birthday in July 1993.  I took line dancing lessons at a Black Angus restaurant in Fountain Valley, CA every Tuesday night, and I had disclosed to Rebecca that this is where I learned to line dance and two-step.  So it was on the Tuesday preceding my birthday that Rebecca showed up, walked up to me mid-lesson on the dance floor, and asked what a girl has to do to get a date.  I thought I would not hear from her again after three months of non-contact, but there she was.  She discovered that my birthday was that coming weekend, that I had no plans for said birthday, so she stated that she wasn't having any of that.  It was that weekend that she made me a cake, cooked dinner, and had me over to her apartment to acknowledge my 23rd.  It was decided on that night that we would date another exclusively, and we were together right up until around Christmas 1994/New Year's 1995.  I had proposed to her in the airport, in front of her mother, when she flew in from Nashville to visit a few months before.  She had taken an internship in Nashville because she knew I wanted to move to Birmingham when I got out of the military in 1995.  That woman was so committed to the relationship, and I would end it after she made all those sacrifices for us.  I find it troubling to write this and revisit all the hurt I surely put her through.  It would bother me for years, and we would have a brief conversation in either 2000 or 2001, when Rebecca would forgive me for doing what I did.  Rebecca was an incredible person and I imagine that she still is today, and I hope that she is happy with life that she has found.  The last I checked, she was still in Nashville, I imagine doing well in the profession of psychotherapy.  But let's rewind a bit and get back to my military career, since this is what this whole thing is really about.

Our flyover to Okinawa would take place from November 1993 to May 1994, two months ahead of our usual WestPac deployments.  I have very few memories of training and exercises that took place while on this six-month tour.  Most of memories have to do with how free time was spent.  While there were a few field exercises, it really seemed no different being over there than it would having spent those six months at Camp Pendleton, maybe with exception to the face that when you left base, you were surrounded my Asians, rather than Americans.  Leaving base was very rare, though.  There's not a lot to do in Okinawa, if you ask me, so with the exception of going off base to get some good fried rice, that was about it for me.  I remember seeing movies at the base theatre, movies that had typically been released three months before in the U.S., but at least I didn't have to go the entire six months without seeing anything.  I played quite a bit of racquetball while over there, and I spent a fair amount of time at base game room playing NBA Jam.  That game was something else back in the day.  I would always be the Phoenix Suns and use Charles Barkley as my key player.  Fun stuff.  The base enlisted club had a country night, so those of us who had taken up line dancing while back in US would go on country night and keep our steps fresh.  The instructor at the Black Angus even mailed us with new dances and instructions, and I would teach the rest what the steps were.  I'm embarrassed to write this nearly 15 years later, but it was fun at the time.  The only time that I was ever written up in the military was while I was over in Okinawa.  Cooking was not allowed in the barracks, although this was unknown at the time, and I bought some pots and pans and a little burner.  One night, I fried chicken and made some sides with it.  The smell engulfed the entire 4th floor of the barracks.  And the next day it was discovered/announced that there is no cooking the barracks.  It wasn't for this that I was written up; it was when I decided to boil some water a couple of weeks later that I was reported.  I was written up, but was nothing more than that, and even the first sergeant laughed as he had me sign my acknowledgment of wrong-doing.  One of the things that always amazed me was that an 18 year old Marine that is old enough to defend our country and take a bullet in the head is not responsible enough to be trusted boiling water.  I always struggled with this type of logic, but I guess that's why I'm not still in today.

To be truthful, there are other more impactful reasons that I did not reenlist.  After my second WestPac and before the trip to Okinawa, I was eligible for change of station, meaning I could be stationed at another military installation for my remaining two years.  There were two things that I tried to accomplish during this timeframe.  One was getting a change of station, and that almost happened.  The other was making a change of MOS (military occupational specialty or job description), and that almost happened as well.  I had been informed that there was a radio operator vacancy at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and that I had been approved to fill that void.  A date had been established and everything when, all of a sudden, the position mysteriously vanished.  Some sorry son-of-a-biscuit Chief Warrant Officer from the Administrative Platoon had the audacity, in typical Marine Corps fashion, to break the news in front of the entire platoon, as if it was funny.  "Ha ha" was not my response.  Shortly thereafter, in my next effort to at least get a change of occupation, I took an exam that tests ones ability and/or potential to be an effective computer programmer.  According to the career planner involved in setting this up, I had scored one of the highest scores that he had personally seen, for which I was proud.  However, I was told that the Marine Corps would prefer to give the seat to someone that was to EAS (end of active service), so that they could get a two-year minimum reenlistment out of it.  At the time, I had nearly 2.5 years left on my enlistment.  Again, super high score, but it was all about quota.  It was at this point that I decided was done; reenlistment was no longer a consideration.

Back to Okinawa.  We did spend a couple of weeks on ship while in Okinawa.  We sailed over to Hong Kong and did some training exercises coming and going.  It would be the last time I would be on a naval vessel.  This was done near the end of our six-month stay.  We would return to Camp Pendleton that May, where for the first time ever, someone was there waiting for me. 

Rebecca was at the base when our buses arrived.  We had written lots of letters and even talked by phone a couple of times while I was gone, but it was a wonderful feeling to be among those who came home to somebody for once.  It would be shortly after returning that she and I would drive from California to Nashville to get her moved for her internship.  While out there, we would make a trip down to Elberta, where she would meet my family for the first (and only) time.  It would be a few months later that I would propose to her, but it felt like the natural progression that this was where things were heading.  After this trip, I flew back to Camp Pendleton to finish out my enlistment.

My job responsibilities changed while I was in Okinawa.  I had been recruited by Staff Sergeant Pat McLaughlin to assist him in the CMS (Communications Security Material Systems) vault.  I would be responsible for maintaining all equipment and documents within the battalion that carried a CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, or TOP SECRET classification.  This would mean that I would work inside of a safe.  It was a room, really, but it was as secure as a safe.  I would be in this position upon my return to Camp Pendleton and for the duration of my shortening military career.  It was because of this position that I didn't have to participate in field exercises.  There was no point since I would not be going on the next deployment, so this was the ideal position.  Starting in September 1994, I took a part-time at a local off-base movie theatre in the evenings to bring in additional money, as I was starting to save up for the next phase of my life, whatever that would be.  (More on that in the next section of my professional career, the movie theatre years.)

I was originally supposed to be discharged from the USMC in February 1995, but because I had just called off my engagement to Rebecca, everything had changed.  I decided I wanted to stay in California for a while; I really had grown to love it.  So I started pursuing going into the civil service, so that my six years of government service did not go unrecognized.  In pursuing this, I extended myself by four additional months to get things squared away.  In the end, the civil service had a hiring freeze, and that meant that I wasn't going into the civil service anytime soon.  So as my military career came to an end of 21 June 1995, I had no idea what I would be doing on 22 June 1995.  Little did I know that 7 months later I would be back in Alabama, and 14 months later, I would be married.