Memorial Day: We know the faces

 Whenever I see a photo of a U.S. Marine, my mind is transported back to 40 years ago.

I know the face. It is mine.

It was back in 1982, when a formerly lumpy 26-year-old three-and-a-half-year college student clawed and crawled and pushed himself through boot camp by the ragged edge of tentative tenacity.

I know about the morning wake-up calls — drill instructors slammed trash can lids on the spotless floor, barracks overhead lights blazing in sleepy eyes like stinging sparks, the split-second scramble to spring up from bed, or fall off the upper bed like a bowling ball and standing at attention, in my underwear, in front of your rack.

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I have heard the growling, rasping voices of DIs ripping through my ears like a school of piranhas.

I know about the bedtime ritual, every recruit lying at attention in his bed, staring upward and reciting or singing in unison the Marine Corps Hymn.

I know about all the nuances, the humiliations, the hardships, the pain, the exhaustion, the merciless pressure to perform well, the discombobulating discomfort and the constant grappling with self-doubt that goes into making a Marine. I know these things because I lived them.

I also know about the feelings of small personal victories of spurts of achievement, the joy of NOT being singled out by a DI. Someone had advised me before boot camp to try to keep the DIs from knowing your name as long as possible. They learned mine in the first 15 minutes.

I also know the pleasant itch of growing maturity and strength, and the feeling I could do something I never thought possible before — whether climbing a wooden tower 40-feet high and rolling over the top log without any safety harness. I know these things because I lived them.

There were no secrets in our training platoon. Everyone’s character stood out as naked as a newborn guinea pig. We knew, or at least felt pretty sure, about how our fellow travelers in misery would respond when the only options were to stand head-on against the hurricane of unbearable challenge or to wilt. I learned most of the young men in my platoon were capable of great individual courage when the going got tough. It was a pleasure to observe this human dynamic from such an intimate viewpoint. I was proud to share this experience with them, even if I was one of the least.

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Whenever I hear about a Marine that dies, I feel I have lost a brother of shared experience. I weep when I see his face — because I know it is my face. I know it is the face of every recruit who I battled through hell and emerged triumphant with on boot camp graduation day.

How did I end up there — a former full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a four-year college student saddled with arthritis after two previous major knee surgeries?

I was a child of the 1960s. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, my second-grade teacher announced it to the class; I think the school might have even turned the clock back to the time of the shooting as a tribute. For the next couple of days, nonstop coverage of the tragedy dominated every television station. I remember feeling a bit miffed they pre-empted my cartoon shows.

But, that kind of innocence faded in the tumultuous discontent of the mid-to-latter 1960s.

Wave after wave of Vietnam War protests — which never lacked for media attention — spurred violence on college campuses and elsewhere and created a national debate — both on a public level and in the fleshy tablets of each individual’s heart — about what the United States stood for; what it meant to be an American.

This breeding ground of introspection produced conflicting answers, but also a new search for common ground in the harvest field of ideas.