A Place in the Electric Chair

So, I guess I just haven't been keeping up. I saw a movie the other evening for the first time in my life. I hadn't even heard of it, but I was sort of eavesdropping on the Turner Classic Movies station as the host - I think it was Robert Osborne - introduced the next feature saying that it was his favorite movie of all time. That got my interest up, so I paid some attention.

The movie was A Place in the Sun and I checked the description of the movie to see if it had a chance of being interesting to me, and it did.

I don’t want to ruin the movie for you, but the thing’s been out since 1951 so it’s not like you haven’t had a chance to see it already…

Anyway, Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman who is an uneducated directionless young guy who hitchhikes to his Uncle Charles’ place. Uncle Charles owns a swim suit factory (that turns out to be ironic) and puts George to work. The company has a “don’t date the other employees” policy, but George ends up secretly making time with one of his co-workers, Alice Tripp, played by Shelley Winters.


Now, I’ll tell you up front that I have a hard time listening to Shelley Winters speak. Her quivering, almost fussy voice is unnerving when it’s not just downright annoying, but it could be argued that it played into the plot.

So anyway, George made enough time with Alice that she somehow ended up becoming pregnant, but he was starting to move up in the company and ended up at a party at his uncle’s house on the lake where this beautiful debutante Angela Vickers, played by Elizabeth Taylor, was a guest.

Let me step aside again to say that Elizabeth Taylor was a very pretty woman back in the day. In this movie, she was 17-years old in real life and you could see that she was going to become the kind of woman that at least 7 guys would want to marry (8 if you count Richard Burton twice for the two times he married her).

She was a looker and George Eastman had no problem noticing that. George took a quick liking to Angela and over the ensuing 30 minutes or so he fell deeply in love with her while Alice became more and more pregnant (and impatient with George).

Finally, Alice saw a photograph in the paper of George living it up with Angela and the Eastmans on the lake, so she packed up her things and decided to go to George and claim her man.

She arrived and phoned George and shamed him into agreeing to marry her. Unfortunately for all concerned, the courthouse was closed and they couldn't get married that day. So, George figured that since the courthouse was closed and he really didn't want to marry Alice anyway – especially with lovely Angela waiting in the wings – that he would just take Alice out boating in the middle of the night and drown her. It must’ve made sense to him at the time.

It was to Alice’s discredit and ultimate misfortune that she had already told George she couldn’t swim. (A person should never make that kind of admission to someone without knowing them really well first.)

Once in the boat, however, George had second thoughts and crawled to the far end of the boat to get himself together (and probably to get away from that voice, too); he knew he wasn’t really a murderer. Then, Alice started going on and on, telling George how happy they were going to be together, just hours after threatening him with ruination. (A guy’s just got to spot that kind of inconsistency earlier in the relationship.) Then, she stood up to walk toward George while still yakking away. The boat started rocking badly, so George told her to sit down, but she didn’t and the boat capsized.

George swam to the shore safely, but remember, poor Alice couldn’t swim so she pretty much stayed out there and drowned. George had stashed a getaway car in the woods, so he made his way back to the house where Angela was. George was a bit of a brooder anyway, so no one could tell from his manner he had just left Alice out in the middle of the lake to drown. I guess they thought he was just being his strong, silent-type self.

Ultimately, George was arrested and tried. The fact that George and Alice had been seeing each other on the sly, that Alice was pregnant, that George rented the boat under an assumed name, that George had staged a getaway car, and that Angela was a really hot Plan B were powerful bits of circumstantial evidence against George in court. As much as all of that was stacking up against George, I knew he was in trouble the minute I saw that Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) was the district attorney. I’ve never seen him lose a case.

George was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death – because that’s what Perry Mason asked the jury for. The movie ended as George was about to meet his fate.

There are some important lessons in this movie that are worth remembering:

1. There was a company policy that forbade co-workers dating each other, but George and Alice did so anyway in secrecy. Alice became pregnant and, in the end, the implications of this very private affair became quite public.

LESSON: Rules are rules. Just because you break the rules in private doesn’t mean they aren’t broken.

COROLLARY: Just because you break the rules in private doesn’t mean that the implications will be private; in fact, if there are implications, they probably will not be private.

2. Alice had a way about her that seemed a bit pushy and insecure and she betrayed that sense with that voice that I've already described. The din of her tone was troublesome early on, but it really rose to a peak once she got around to delivering ultimatums to George, then rambling about their coming blissful future together while they were in the boat.

LESSON: In a relationship, things that bother you a little bit now will bother you a lot more later when times are tougher and patience grows thin.

3. George found himself with two girlfriends, one who represented where he had been and the other who represented where he was headed. Desperate, he decided to murder the first girl, even as a part of him tugged at him not to do it.

LESSON: Don’t get yourself into situations you can’t get out of if getting out of them means making matters worse.

COROLLARY: Realize that situations that make you queasy give you that feeling because even if your brain doesn’t know it’s a bad situation, your gut does.

4. George took Alice out in the boat intent on murdering her, but then he changed his mind. Unfortunately, the boat capsized anyway. George swam for the shore and left Alice behind where she drowned because, in part, George didn’t intervene to save her. In the end, he didn’t want her alive badly enough to try to save her life.

LESSON: When you change your mind on an issue of importance, change your heart too. If you find yourself in the middle of the lake (figuratively) when your conscience kicks in, row to the nearest shore as quickly as you can before something terrible happens.

5. Alice knew she couldn’t swim. Combined with a poor sense of balance in an environment where she should have had a natural fear of dying, she tried to walk from one end of the boat to the other, making it rock severely until it capsized.

LESSON: Don’t rush headlong into unfamiliar territory. When the unknowns far outweigh the knowns, you are left to rely on instincts and raw ability alone because familiarity and knowledge are no longer part of the equation. If you're in a boat in the middle of the lake at night, a swimming instinct or ability (or a life jacket) is useful.

COROLLARY: If you can’t swim, don’t rock the boat.

Science, Religion, and Politics

Only 400 years ago, Galileo turned the religious and scientific worlds on their ears when he publicly asserted the heliocentric theory – the theory that the Sun was at the center of the universe – as a scientific certainty.

Up to that point, the generally accepted view was that the Earth was at the center of the universe. The Church held that God would not have positioned His most important creation anywhere other than at the center of everything else He created.

The Church’s frame of reference was a group of Biblical passages that seemed to lend weight to geocentrism: Joshua 10:12 taught that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still (thus the belief that the Sun moved). Then, there were Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30, “…the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved,” Psalm 104:5 “…the Lord set the Earth on its foundations, it can never be moved,” and Ecclesiastes 1:5 “…the Sun rises and the Sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.”

Until Galileo came along, certainly before Copernicus, science wasn’t what it yearns to be today. Before them, hypotheses were considered legitimate if they were consistent with observations of reality – if they “saved the appearances” – rather than whether they actually equated to reality. Some would argue that environmental and climatic sciences have returned to the old “appearances” model, less interested in truth than in appearances.

The problem between Galileo and the Church wasn’t as it is often portrayed: that the Church interfered with science by taking on and ultimately excommunicating Galileo over his heliocentric theory. The fact is that Galileo started it. He took the Church on and insisted that it correct its Biblical teachings on the basis of his yet unproven theory that the Sun – not the Earth – was at the center of the universe. It wasn’t enough for him to establish new science or to redefine it. He wanted the Church to essentially admit the Bible was wrong; the Church would have nothing of it.

The fight that ensued stirred up a massive political hornet’s nest that thrust science into theology, a course of events that neither party could or would remove itself from once it gained steam.

Moving ahead to April of 1975, Newsweek magazine ran an article that, today, is absolutely fascinating. The article made a rather powerful emotional case for doing something urgently about the global cooling phenomenon. The concern was that if something wasn’t done, there would be famines, flooding, tornadoes, and more.

Then, 30 years later in 2007, a politician – former Vice President Al Gore – came along, establishing himself as an uncredentialed expert on global warming. The concern over global warming – just as it had been with global cooling 30 years earlier – was that if something wasn’t done, there would be famines, flooding, tornadoes, and more.

Today, the discussion has shifted again and we’re now talking about “global climate change.” I suppose the new position acknowledges that the climate is intermittently warming and cooling, but whatever it’s doing at a particular time, it’s wrong and humans are causing it.

Moving forward again, a Vatican scientific committee recently released a report parroting a widely discredited prediction on the likelihood that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. What’s noteworthy about the Vatican’s release of this report isn’t only that it supports a widely discredited theory, it’s that just 3 years ago, the Pope himself decried and discouraged the doomsday-theorizing that has characterized the climate discussion over the past 30 years.

The Pope said in 2007, “It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.”

It’s time for the scientific community to clean up the science on this climate change issue and not allow it to remain tainted by politics and religion. I know that’s difficult since science relies so heavily on government patronage, but there needs to be integrity in their work. We can’t keep swinging from one extreme position to another, each with “undeniable” evidence that supports its conclusions until the next “factual” position hits the scene. A fact in science is supposed to mean something.

There is no room for politics in determining sound science, so there is also no room for polls and consensus in determining the legitimacy of science either. The truth doesn’t depend on opinion for its substantiation.

There is little role for religion in arguing science either. The pulpit should be reserved for bringing people closer to God. If handled well, religion can teach the multiplicity and vastness of God’s creative plan and power, and science can help provide vivid examples of that plan and power. As St. Ambrose wrote about the Galileo affair, “To discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our hope of life to come.”

My greatest concern is that when the lines guarding the integrity of the scientific method are breached, we’re left without a faithful distinction between what constitutes social activism and dogma and what constitutes science and fact.

We are repeating the mistakes of the skirmish between Galileo and the Church. The lesson from that fiasco should have been that we cannot ask the whole of society to undergo radical cultural changes without the benefit of scientific proof to justify them, and rather than posturing, scientists should busy themselves with “proving.” Rhetoric and posturing helped delay by 150 years the good science that ultimately proved Galileo’s theory to be correct. We should not make that same mistake with our understanding of our climate.

Bad science on the climate change issue will leave us ill-prepared and ill-adapted for whatever future the climate does hold for us. The science is already in on one simple reality: if we fail to adapt to our changing environment, we will succumb to it. At this point, it could be fairly said that the human race cannot afford more politics and religion on the subject; instead, we need better and more complete science.

In Such Cunning Disguise

"History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done." —Sydney J. Harris

Inflation, the U.S. dollar’s volatility, unemployment, and an increase in the U.S. money supply...

In spite of the concerns we have when we watch the morning news, we Americans tend to believe that our long-term outlook is good because, as we interpret our relatively brief history, we're Americans and we always come out on top. But the history of the world has many examples of great empires and nations whose leaders felt the same way, but turned out to be wrong.

We can look, for instance, to the Roman Empire which enjoyed 200 years of prosperity until it collapsed over the course of the next 300 years. But the machinery of the collapse didn’t begin during the final 300 years of the Empire. It started long before with sometimes short-sighted economic and monetary policies and practices. Then, incrementally, their excesses, the border incursions, and the need to defend the Empire's vast territorial interests set the table for rougher times ahead.

The Roman Empire was born with Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The victory cleared the way for Octavian to become Rome’s first emperor (27 BC-14 AD) and for him to be awarded the title “Augustus” by the Senate and the People of Rome. It also heralded a period of financial stability after centuries of turmoil and a loss of confidence in the government and the economy under the Roman Republic. Money that had been hoarded returned to circulation, coinage molded from precious metals from conquered Egypt was minted and circulated, and property rights were restored and protected. With that prosperity came the liquidation of debt and a decrease in interest rates.[1] The early Roman Empire was also able to improve the roads throughout Italy, and build aqueducts, public buildings, and temples. It was the Pax Romana, Rome's golden age. 

However, even during that period of good feeling, after Augustus died and his stepson Tiberius became emperor (14-37 AD), Augustus’ public works program was reduced which stalled the circulation of cash in the Roman economy, leading to a financial crisis and a severe shortage of money in 33 AD. The financial crisis persisted until the government issued large loans at zero percent interest in order to get money flowing through the economy again.[2]

Then under Nero (54-68 AD), the economy slowed while the cost of maintaining the army and the government increased, so rather than increase the amount of money in the economy by raising taxes, he debased the denarius instead.[3] Debasing the currency by reducing the silver content in the coinage enabled the government to use the same amount of silver to introduce more currency into the economy.

The result brings to mind Gresham’s Law, an economic principle that says that “bad money drives out good.” For the sake of this discussion, it means that money that has high "real" value—for instance, coinage that hasn’t been debased by reducing its valuable content—will be hoarded and disappear from circulation while debased coinage of the same face value is traded in the economy.[4]

With the purging of the high-value currency from the marketplace, it was the debased currency that made its way back into the treasury when taxes were collected. People would pay their taxes with the currency that contained the lower silver content[5] which meant that the government’s “real” tax revenues were lower than the value of the currency it received.

Still, there are many economists who believe that the purity of the denarius was largely irrelevant in and of itself as long as people still traded the debased coin as "the real thing."[6] The essential issue with debasement arose in the decision to increase the money supply as a result of debasement. That contributed to inflation which is what did the real harm to the Roman economy.

Today, we essentially accomplish debasement by printing more money than the marketplace warrants, which has many of the same effects on our economy as traditional debasement. The increase in currency drives up demand for goods and services and when the availability of the goods and services and the availability of labor to deliver them is limited, prices go up. As the Romans saw, the result is that although there is more currency in circulation, consumer purchasing power decreases, resulting in inflation.

Real pressure on the Roman economy increased with the end of Trajan’s reign (98-117 AD) which also marked the end of Rome’s territorial expansion.[7] For Rome’s economy, that meant that it could no longer depend on increasing revenue from new territorial acquisitions for its stimulation. The Empire would have to begin paying its own way without the benefit of new revenue from the outside.

Various Roman emperors tried different strategies to get money back into the economy and into the treasury without raising taxes on most citizens. Meanwhile, they continued to further debase the coinage to increase the amount of currency in circulation. By Marcus Aurelius’ reign (161-180 AD), the silver content in Roman coinage was reduced to 75 percent. Then, by the turn of the third century AD, the silver content was down to 50 percent. By the middle of the third century, the silver content in the denarius was just 5 percent.[8]

The government also tried to generate revenue by raising taxes on the wealthy and expanding citizenship to create more taxpayers. However, as more and more private wealth within the Roman Empire was confiscated through taxation of the wealthy, economic expansion suffered even more.[9] Then, when the wealthy couldn’t pay enough taxes to fund the government, the tax burden shifted to the lower classes.[10]

Thin on options, the government began accepting in-kind tax payments: cattle, grain, and other goods from farmers, for example. The government needed people to produce so they were often required to work and remain in their occupations, and farmers were tied to their land so they could continue to produce agricultural goods.[11] Not surprisingly, the wealthy did what they could to conceal their wealth from the Empire and appear to be as poor as they could so the government wouldn’t confiscate what they had.[12]

As the government failed to effectively control the economy through its manipulation of the currency, markets, and citizen rights, government revenue shrank further, tax rates increased, tax revenues fell, and inflation took its toll as growth slowed further while the treasury couldn’t adequately pay and equip the army.[13]

Citizens eventually began to move into the countryside and engage in simple subsistence farming so they could provide for their own needs and stay out of the marketplace altogether.[14]

Finally, many small landowners collapsed under their tax burden and went to work for large landowners as tenant farmers or as slaves since slaves paid no taxes. The practice of resigning oneself to slavery became so harmful to the Empire’s treasury that Emperor Valens declared it illegal to renounce one’s freedom to enter into slavery.[15]

The rest of the story is what most of us know of the fall of the Roman Empire: The barbarians invaded and toppled the once mighty empire while complacent and slovenly Romans were fanned and fed grapes by slaves. It's a caricature of the history, of course, probably because the true root causes of the fall of the Roman Empire are complex and difficult to pin down.[16]

Nonetheless, there’s no ignoring the fact that the Empire reached a point where, in spite of its past glory, its economy could no longer produce and maintain a treasury that was capable of sustaining its prosperity, invigorating and incentivizing a productive workforce, maintaining it’s infrastructure, and defending itself at its borders. We shouldn't ignore that history.

-----

End Notes:

[1] Homer, S. and Sylla, R. (2005) A History of Interest Rates, 4th ed. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 48.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Bartlett, B. How Excessive Government Killed Ancient Rome, Cato Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Fall 1994), 294.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Innes, A. What is Money?, The Banking Law Journal, May 1913.

[7] Rast, B. (2020) Expansion of the Roman Empire, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/af8bb12a6dfb4dcfb1cf75adfb6d13ac.

[8] Desjardins, J. (2016) Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire, The Money Project, https://money.visualcapitalist.com/currency-and-the-collapse-of-the-roman-empire/.

[9] Bartlett, 295.

[10] Rostovtzeff, M. (1957) The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed., 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 430.

[11] Ibid., 449.

[12] Bartlett, 296.

[13] Ibid., 301.

[14] Ibid., 297.

[15] Ibid., 300-301.

[16] Innes.

Yellow Footprints: An Anniversary Reflection

Hurry Up and Wait...

I grew up in a small community in southern Illinois–Newton, Illinois–where people generally knew each other or at least knew of each other. It was–and still is–a nice town. It’s the kind of town that still holds a fall parade where tractors and marching bands own the streets. People sit along the curb in their chairs while the kids play along the street. The people there cherish the tempo and lifestyle, quietly aware that if everyone lived that way, it would be a much better world.

I wasn’t exactly setting any academic records in high school, so I needed a change of pace and some way to transition to a successful track somewhere, somehow. I had thought about the military, but I hesitated to follow through. I wasn’t sure I would be cut out for the military life, and I didn’t know which branch of the service to enter. I was very certain that if I did join the military service, it wouldn’t be the Marines because I was pretty sure I couldn’t make it there.

However, when the Marine recruiter called and asked if he could come over for a visit, I said yes. Almost as soon as he stepped through the door, I was in awe. I was still pretty sure I couldn’t get there from where I was in my life, but I was willing to listen. After some kind of black magic and other maneuvers, he had me thinking I could make it and I decided right then that I wanted to become a Marine. I was caught up in all of it and had apparently separated myself from my sense that there was no way I could make it through Marine Corps boot camp. I wasn’t a very big or fit guy at the time. I didn’t run, I wasn’t strong, and I wasn’t very focused. All of that was going to change soon enough though.

I signed the papers in September of 1974, just after my seventeenth birthday and finished my high school work in January. The following month, on Monday, February 24, 1975, my family took me to the Greyhound bus station in the nearby town of Effingham where I boarded a bus headed for the recruiting center in St. Louis.

I boarded that bus 48 years ago on February 24, 1975, with the love, support, and confidence of my loved ones and friends; it turned out that not wanting to disappoint any of them was a powerful motivator.

I spent the night in a so-so hotel in a not-so-good part of town. I didn’t get a lot of sleep because I was afraid of missing my wake-up time. It turns out I couldn’t have missed it because the hotel invested in a wake-up ringer that could have awakened the dead. They obviously housed a lot of recruits because it wasn’t quite a gentle wake-up call. That was okay. I didn’t have another gentle wake-up for three months.

My instructions were to get up early at a time they gave me and report to the recruiting center for processing. I had the sense that it would be a pretty quick evolution since I already had a physical and had signed a bunch of papers. After all, this was the military, known for its rapid efficiency. But I was wrong. I got there early and waited and waited. Then, we did a little something and waited and waited some more. That happened all day long until suddenly near the end of the day everyone flew into action to process us out of there and get us to the airport for a flight to San Diego. What appeared to be wasteful inefficiency turned out to be a well-conceived plan. Very clever.

The staff at the recruiting center in St. Louis gave me all of the paperwork for the group in a large yellow envelope because my last name came first in the alphabet among those headed from St. Louis to San Diego. There was probably a dozen of us. It turns out where my last name fell in the alphabet dictated a good bit of my vantage point over the next three months since we did almost everything in alphabetical order. We lined up for shots in alphabetical order and we even slept in alphabetical order. I got a good look at the back of Private Dibble’s head over that period.

We took off out of the airport in St. Louis en route to San Diego. I wasn’t nervous, mostly because I was too clueless to be nervous. However, as we made our approach into the airport in San Diego, the flight attendant got on the intercom and pointed out the Marine Corps Recruit Depot and the Naval Training Center which bordered the airport. As I looked down on the base which looked eerily serene and darkened except for the street lights, I suddenly felt a little bit of anxiety. As we filed off the airplane, the flight attendant told us recruits, “good luck,” and she seemed to mean it, almost as if she was in on some secret that we were about to learn for ourselves. Those were the last kind, warm words I heard for three months, except for the letters I received from friends and loved ones at home.

To the Wolves...

We got out into the airport and went looking for the Marine Corps liaison. It was after 10 PM and there weren’t very many people in the airport, so the Marine wasn't hard to find. We found him standing behind a podium near some exit doors. I took my large envelope of documents to the podium to let the liaison know we had arrived.

As I walked up, the Marine was looking down at some papers he was working on. I rested my elbow on the podium and told him the group from St. Louis was there. The Marine barely lifted his head as he looked at my elbow. Then, without raising his voice he told me to get my @#$% elbow off of his @#$% podium. As quietly and calmly as he said that, he nonetheless left no doubt in my mind about my need to get my @#$% elbow off of his @#$% podium. I got my elbow off of his podium. I suddenly wished I had heeded my dad’s words to stand up straight and “don’t lean on that.”

He told us to wait outside, and the bus would be along shortly. Groups of recruits from other parts of the country arrived and waited with us. Almost on cue once we had a busload, a white school bus with, “U. S. Marine Corps” stenciled in small letters on the side pulled up. 

When a sergeant came flying out of the bus yelling and screaming at us, I thought, “What am I doing here?!” Years later when I watched the movie Shawshank Redemption and saw the guy who, on arriving at prison, cries out, “I don’t belong here…”, I understood his anguish. I didn’t cry like he did, though. In fact, I didn’t say a word. I was all ears, and my eyes were wide open.

The sergeant yelled at us to fill the bus from back to front, from left to right. He said it so fast, you really had to be listening to get it all.

One of the guys from St. Louis was a red-headed kid who must have been somebody important in his high school JROTC unit because he couldn’t stop talking at St. Louis, on the plane, and at curbside while we were waiting for the bus about how he was going to breeze through boot camp. Well, his fantasy quickly eroded when he jumped on that bus and promptly sat in a seat in the middle of the bus. That’s not what the sergeant told us to do, so the sergeant went tearing through the cluster of recruits, boarded the bus and lit into the red-headed kid. All you could hear was the sound of that sergeant barking in this guy’s ear, then the red-head quickly shuffling to the back of the bus. Welcome to boot camp.

The rest of us got on the bus. If there were any doubts about how we were supposed to do that, the red-headed guy’s experience clarified it for us nicely. The bus started rolling and we made our way over to MCRD on what was probably the loneliest bus ride of my short life. I had never felt more like I was being led to the wolves. "Wolves" was an understatement. 

We arrived at MCRD, and just as there were instructions about how to get on the bus, there were instructions about how to get off the bus. This time, we were to stand on a column of yellow footprints. These yellow footprints were painted with feet at the position of attention–heels on line and touching, toes pointed at a 45-degree angle–because although we didn’t know what the position of attention was, we needed to be at it.

We got on the yellow footprints and the place was swarming with DIs, or at least it seemed to be. The time was around midnight, and they told us to drop everything we had in our hands. I had that envelope with those papers, but I dropped it and never saw it again. One poor soul brought a beach ball. He must have had a recruiter with a sense of humor who gave him the idea that since he was coming to San Diego, he was going to get some beach time. That got him some unwanted attention right away.

The yellow footprints were located in the heart of the recruit reception activity. Just to our right was the barbershop and it was open for business. The very first thing we did after getting on the yellow footprints was file into the barbershop for a haircut that couldn’t have lasted longer than 15 seconds. There were half a dozen barbers, and they took no time at all to cut all of those heads of hair. Everyone in that column had their own look, their own appearance, but that was about to change. I was standing behind a guy who had long hair and a beard. While I was pretty fixated on not being the next red-headed guy, I couldn’t help thinking that his haircut was going to leave him with an interesting look.

Just before the guy in front of me was supposed to head to the barber, he suddenly fainted right there on his yellow footprints. As the DIs and a medical corpsman attended to him, I moved quickly around him and went in for my haircut. When I came back, he was gone, and an empty set of yellow footprints remained.

A short while later, though, he returned with his hair cut off. He still had his beard. He received the same express haircut I got, but as he stood in front of me, I could see he had these remnants of his long hair here and there that the barber missed. He looked like one of those old dolls that most of the hair had fallen out of (with a beard). He was very pale and not looking good at all. I remember thinking this guy’s not going to make it. It turns out he graduated from boot camp in my platoon as a squad leader with a meritorious promotion. Shows you what I knew.

So, whatever you looked like on the bus was not what you looked like back on those yellow footprints after that haircut. The red-headed guy from St. Louis was an exception.

The red-headed guy was still the red-headed guy and he was proving to be quite a DI magnet. He wasn’t doing anything right and they absolutely were on him the entire evening. Our next stop was an issue line where we were given our toiletries. Somehow, he messed that up too and the DIs hauled him outside where we could hear them giving him the business. I couldn’t understand what they were yelling, but I thought they were going to send that guy out of there that night the way things were going. I, on the other hand, suddenly found the focus that had eluded me all of my seventeen years.

My Marine Corps Everything...

We finally made it to bed. I have no idea what time it was, but I was ready for a good night of sleep. I didn’t sleep much the night before and a long day capped off with the hyper-adrenalin always-on environment where DIs who apparently had no idea of what an “indoor voice” was, made me ready for a good night of sleep. We were bunked in an open squad bay, which means it was a very large room with rows of double bunks with aisles between the rows.

I got to sleep immediately, but it seemed that almost as soon as my eyelids hit my cheekbones, the lights came back on, and someone was throwing a 20-gallon galvanized steel trash can down the aisle. There’s nothing quite like that sound, and it sure gave the impression they really wanted us out of bed and standing at attention at the foot of our bunks right away. They counted us to make sure we were all still there then they gave some instructions for us to go to the head (restroom) to shave. We did it in shifts. Half went to the head while the other half stripped bunks of the sheets and blankets. As soon as the beds were stripped, it was time to rotate: the guys in the head came shuffling out (but not fast enough) and the other half went shuffling in (also not fast enough).

We ran back out to our bunks and put our civilian clothes back on and ran outside. We assembled in sort of a military formation and walked–because we didn’t know how to march–in that formation. It was still dark outside, but as we made our way over to the mess hall–now called a dining facility in the military, unfortunately–we could see other recruit platoons who had obviously been there a while. When they marched, it sounded like one heel: thump, thump, thump, thump. That was something. That might have been the only time the DIs let us gawk. Everything they did was as though they were one, in perfect unison. Everything we did was evidence that we had a long way to go. The DIs had a colorful way of telling us how far we had to go yet and whether they thought we had any chance of getting there.

We filed into the mess hall, and it was all business in there too. Once we got to the serving line and grabbed a tray, the mess men behind the serving line kept saying, “keep the chow line moving, privates, keep the chow line moving.” If the chow line stopped moving, there was trouble because the DIs saw that too. Of course, the yelling of “not fast enough,” “what are you looking at,” and “no talking” were echoing throughout the mess hall. I was near the end of the chow line, so I was one of the last to get my breakfast. That didn’t work out so well.

Thinking I should get a decent meal that morning so I would have enough battery juice to make it through the day, I grabbed some scrambled eggs, some hash browns, and a pastry. I should have stopped at the scrambled eggs and hash browns. I shoved that stuff in my mouth as fast as I could because almost as soon as I sat down, we were getting a countdown for when we needed to be finished. By the time we were told to get out of the mess hall, I still had that pastry sitting there. I started to get up, but one of those all-seeing DIs spotted that pastry on my tray.

He told me I wasn’t going to waste his Marine Corps chow. Everything seemed to belong to these DIs, and they seemingly took everything personally–my Marine Corps chow, my Marine Corps barracks, my Marine Corps dirt, my Marine Corps formation–and we seemed to always be messing up their Marine Corps things. In fact, they seemed to be convinced that we were there to destroy their Marine Corps and it was their mission to keep that from happening.

So, I was not going to waste his Marine Corps chow because doing so would lead to the demise of his Marine Corps. I dropped back down in my seat and my new shadow, the DI, was right on me yelling at me to get this thing eaten. I stuffed as much of that pastry in my mouth that I could–the proverbial ten pounds in the five-pound bag–and tried to chew, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It just seemed to get larger and mushier and more impossible to do anything with. I finally got the whole thing in my mouth and was still trying to chew it when he yelled at me (with his outside voice) to get out of there. I must have chewed that ball of grease and dough for an hour, but I finally got it down. That was the last pastry I ate in boot camp.

We got back to the barracks and cleaned the place up then went to get our uniforms. Once again, we became someone different (except for that red-headed guy). We looked nothing like Marines in those green uniforms though. It was pretty clear that we were just civilians dressed up–poorly, I should say–in Marine Corps uniforms. The uniforms smelled like mothballs and were dark green because they’d not yet been laundered. We looked terrible, but at least, in our eyes, we were starting to look like we belonged there.

A little while later, we went to a place where we boxed up all of our personal belongings and shipped them home. The Marine Corps would issue to us anything we would need from that time on. 

Then, we went over to the phone center where we were allowed to make a quick phone call home. There was a script taped next to the telephone that went something like this: “This is Recruit Doss. I have arrived safely at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Please do not send me any food or bulky items in the mail. I will contact you in 3 to 5 days by postcard with my new address. Thank you for your support. Goodbye for now.”

That’s when it really settled on me that I now belonged to the United States Marine Corps. What happened from that time forward was entirely in the hands of a few drill instructors and what I was able to make of it. Every day presented a new challenge and produced more growth. It's interesting that as uncertain as I was about whether I could make it through boot camp before I arrived, once I got there, it never occurred to me again that I couldn't handle it. As much as I missed all that I left behind when I went to boot camp, it turned out that boot camp was what I needed to get on track.

Somehow, in three short months, they took us from raw recruits who needed yellow footprints painted on the ground to show us where to stand and turned us into Marines.