USMC: My Career, An Introduction

As I continue my journey through STEEMIT, trying to focus in on what it is I can add to the community, many things cross my mind. What is it that people would like to read, what is it that I have to offer to the community, in the form of posts, and how best can I both express myself and gain more followers and upvotes, among other factors. Naturally I think of the things we would have in common but often times I find it is the stories that we hear that are foreign in some eay that draw us in, that bring us into the life of another, and which makes you want to read more. Maybe that is just me. But in thinking about how best to blog here on STEEMIT I can't help but consider everything I am and what has made me the person I am and I am many things all at once as we all are. At once I am a Nurse five days a week, a Father seven days, Husband every minute and yet still a Marine through and through. This first post is dedicated to the man in the picture, my Combat Instructor, Staff Sergeant Anthony Goodwin, who was killed in action in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom as an Infantry Platoon Sergeant.

Most Marines after Boot Camp say it was one of their Drill Instructors (not Drill Sergeants, that's the Army) who made them into the Marine they became but for me this wasn't the case. For me it was this man who, to me, was everything that embodied the United States Marine Corps. He was a square-jawed Jarhead who smoked Marlboro "Reds" and who I stayed up with, along with a half-dozen other Marines, listening to stories of past deployments to the Persian Gulf duding the first Iraq War. We sat around wide-eyed and naive, soaking up stories of burning oil fields and Middle Eastern heat. After three months of boot camp on Parris Island, SC, and another month patrolling Camp Geiger, NC, I wanted to get a taste of the real Marine Corps, not the stuff we saw in movies and Sgt. Goodwin, at the time, was everything I wanted to be, he was in fact everything every Marine should want to be; rough, tough, foul-mouthed, squared away, able to sleep in a minute and ready to be awake in a second. It seemed like no one I ever came across was the Marine that Sgt. Goodwin was.

We all wore the uniform, we all had the same haircuts and spoke the same way but this was a man who inspired. I was not going into the Infantry but the Air Wing as a Helicopter Crew Chief/Door Gunner for the CH53E "Super Stallion", the largest helicopter in the US Military but he made me want to give up my future Flight Wings for a full combat load and an M16A2 service rifle. He made me want to jump in the mud and crawl under barbed wire as live rounds fired overhead. I looked up to him in a way I had not looked up to anyone else before and thought he was by far the best Marine I had ever come across, the type characters in movies are based on, and in fact, years after I was discharged he was immortalized through an episode on the History Channel dedicated to his memory. An episode where he led a platoon into a mission that would take his life.

While in Combat Training AKA MCT each Marine was trained to become a Rifleman, putting us ahead of all other branches, as anyone from a Grunt to a Cook was trained to kill, trained to know how to hit a target 500m away and shoot moving targets while wearing a gas mask. Trained to go through night infiltration courses where the light, or lack of light, of the moon was our only source of tangible visibility . Everything else was instinct, beaten into us through repetition during Boot Camp where daily, non-stop, Drill taught us to walk as one, to cover our bodies behind one another and align each other with the recruits at our side, marching with one single foot step indistinguishable from another. What we did not know then was we were being taught not to march in a tight formation but to learn how to not expose our bodies to enemy gunfire from the front and to be aware of any weakness at our flanks. It is this that leads civilians to think every Marine is the same and they wouldn't be wrong, but not all Marines are created equal.

We had recruits from New York like me, from the City and the Suburbs and from Georgia, West Virginia and the Carolinas. We were 18, we were 25, we were 32 and from all walks of life, each race being represented not as White, Black, Asian or Hispanic but Light Green, Dark Green and all shades of Green and in fact it was true. Any racism that people may have had at first turned into the purest form of brotherhood I have ever known and each of us would die for another, and this was just Boot Camp. By MCT we had built bonds that could never be broken and when not on base or when on leave we understood what that saying meant; "Semper Fi", Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful, we were. It did not matter if you were six months in or a Veteran from the Korean War, we were Marines and we were the same. It was and is really something special. A shared experience that no one, not unless you wore the Uniform, can ever understand or appreciate.

Sitting around a small fire during the heat and humidity of the North Carolina Summer we sat and listened to our Sergeant talk in that "Marine Voice" that inspired greatness in others. The grit that says "I have shot my service rifle and I have hit my target before he hit me"...Instant respect. I found that over the days and weeks the group of a dozen became eight, then five and then there was a night when it was just he and I as everyone else was asleep after a hard days training and he borrowed a cigarette as we talked. He borrowed all my cigarettes in fact because, well, Sergeants don't buy things in the field when commanding platoons and squads of Privates, PFC's and LCpl's, which is what I was after getting a promotion for having been in college and another for receiving a Meritorious Promotion during Boot Camp. We just sat on logs across from each other "shooting the shit" and as the number of Marines dwindled down to just he and I we began a bond that would never die. He told me about his wife and kids, about his business that he operated when he wasn't a hard-charging Marine Corps Sergeant and about the Bachelor degree he earned in American History while serving. I told him about my college experience, at that point a single semester before 9/11 when I gave up my Athletic and Academic Scholarship to Enlist. I was 18 and we both knew what was coming down the pipe, a foreign war where we knew we would lose friends and maybe our lives. We also agreed that if it wasn't for us Marines 9/11 would be 24/7. We had immense pride in our jobs and you will not meet another Marine who is not proud to have earned the title.

As this is an introduction there will be many more stories to come but I wanted to start this one off In Memorium to the finest Marine I ever knew and a Man I still admire and respect and sometimes cry thinking about. He was and is an American Hero, the type you only dream of becoming but are too scared to, for fear of the effects of war. That stereotypical shell shocked Marine that comes back a paranoid drunk destroyed by the horrors of death by his own hands and the struggle to maintain your morality and continue living. But Staff Sergeant was no weak man and trained me to fight in a fire team, to throw grenades, to fire a breach loaded M203 and fire the heavy machine gun M240G. He taught me how much pain I could take as my feet burned and back killed me during those humps and, watching the strength in his face as he did what I did, made me suck up the pain and swallow it into pride. Esprit de Corps. The Pride of Belonging. I can't replace the experiences I had that month with anything comparable and wouldn't want to, even as knowing he is dead hurts me so badly, because he taught me what it was I wanted to truly be, not a Marine, but THAT type of Marine. I have met and gotten to know closely many great Marines in my time and he was one of the best. So to start off this set of stories, of my experiences in the USMC, I would like to start it off with the man who motivated me in the beginning to be the routhest and toughest DevilDog I could be, Staff Sergeant Anthony L. Goodwin. Lived in Hell so may he always Rest in Peace. God Bless you Sir, you will never be forgotten and will always be a part of THIS Marine.