Archive for the 'Marine Legends' Category

Surviving a year in Vietnam with nothing more to show for it than nightmares and a bad skin condition, I was able to quickly settle in to a two year stint at Camp Pendleton where the Marines threw me another curve and decided to make me an Admin Chief (civilian equilevent of office manager).

I ended up shuffling papers like a civilian pogue with a nine to five billet that was pretty much like a regular job. I lived off -base with my new wife in a fine apartment and played ball on the 7th Engineer Battalion Softball team. My first sergeant was a heck of a ping-pong player and taught me all he knew until all of a sudden my four year enlistment was over. I enjoyed the Corps and was tempted to re-up but my wife had this crazy idea that she wanted to raise our kids in one place!

Before heading off to Vietnam in 1969, right after our astronauts landed on the Moon, the Marines played another little trick on me and decided they needed more Combat Engineers than they did journalists. They sent me to Engineer School to learn how to blow things up and I enjoyed it so much I made the mistake of graduating first in my class. What an idiot! All of a sudden I became much more valuable to the Corps as an engineer than a journalist. Seems as though they had enough writers after all and when I got to Nam they threw me a bloody flak vest and sent me north – way north.

I had finally gotten my wish, I wasn't reporting the war, I was fighting it! I spent most of the first half of my tour building bridges, blowing up tunnels, sweeping roads for mines and generally leaving a smoking trail of destruction wherever I went. The only good thing about it was I made a lot of grunt friends who appreciated my skills at both spotting and spotting booby traps. I spent most of the rest of that year humping around between Dong Ha and Quang Tri, later to be transferred south to Da Nang where I finished my tour assigned to the Marine Air Wing, I have fond memories of how well the pilots of the "Wild Weasels, Gunfighter Squadron" took care of "their" Marines.

He is a harsh critic of the way this country has let itself be pushed around by terrorists and illegal immigrants, people who organize and demonstate with funding provided by our enemies. Enemies who know that with enough hard cash for attorneys the American legal system will open it's legs like a two-dollar crack whore! I'm speaking about Joe Ligotti, of course, Ohooo, The Guy From Boston, Baby! 

Most marines are like me, from middle class backgrounds (the guys who know the real skinny) who join the Marine Corps, each with his own reasons but high among them is the opportunity to show their patriotism by serving their country in the United States Marine Corps. What's going to happen to us when serving our country goes out of style? – When does it dawn on us as a nation  that our economy is one gi-normous Ponzi scheme orchestrated by our family of senators and congressmen – all members of the same family, the Hands Family; Hands OUT, Hands UP, Hands OFF and Hand it OVER.

Speaking for myself, as a former marine, and also as a supporter of our men and women in uniform, the way I look at it is this, I actually fought in a war to protect the rights of ballsy guys like Joe Ligotti, The Guy From Boston. I encourage Joe to keep on sayin what we're thinkin because someday this country might wake up. And don't tell me people don't think that way anymore, they just don't have the balls to say it!

If folks have a problem with his language or presentation that's understandable as long as the message gets through. Joe doesn't really care what you think of him but only an emotional guy like Joe can get to the real heart of an issue using the kind of language and emotion we all understand. He puts his heart into every rant he does and somebody has to keep reminding us we are all mad as hell and we aint takin it anymore! 

My uncle, Jack Rice, a talented writer and former Marine had a life-long love affair with the Marine Corps and over the years produced a number of feature stories about various aspects of it for his weekly column in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He often would write about what a marine might do when confronted with a civilian problem. In his own humorous style he would then speculate on how a Marine would settle the problem, often with hilarious results. His articles always ended up sounding like something Dave Berry might have written – if he had been a Marine!

One of my favorites was a two-part series about Marines that appeared in the March 12th and 13th, 1977 issues of that newspaper where he first penned an article titled; Marines Use Polished Approach followed up by; Boot Camp Leaves It's Mark, the following day. This was the first article of a two-piece series written about the Marine Corps by my uncle, Jack Rice (SSgt, USMC, deceased) for the St. Louis Post Dispatch Newspaper in March of 1977. He was a staff writer there until his retirement in 1980.

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