Semper Terrent Matrem

Do you recall the thrill derived from scaring your parents?

I used to reap great pleasure from it. In high school, whether it was driving a Triumph TR-6 sportscar or aligning myself with the Sandinistas, I cherished the reaction. 

But no other act elicited more delicious concern than when I expressed my intent in college to join the Marines.

For me, the Marine Corp was a fraternal cult of patriotic destruction, and I wanted in. I certainly was an unlikely candidate. Raised in liberal Marin County, CA – Home of the Hot Tubbers, I had never even been in an actual fight before. The closest I had come to hand-to-hand combat was when my brother chased me around the kitchen table with a knife after I ripped up his baseball cards. Only once had someone struck me in anger, and that was when our neighbor Kris Kahn had had enough of me writing “KK loves KS” on our telephone pole, and so, quite rightly, he slapped me. 

But I was reassured that if ever I had to fight, my Scottish roots would make me see red and rouse me into an instrument of death. Plus, another thing I had in my favor as I pursued this path: I could outrun every jarhead wannabe in my ROTC squad.

When was 20, I could run three miles in less than 17 minutes. This maintained my otherwise questionable bona fides in the eyes of our Gunny. I wasn’t much good at ironing my clothes, and military history just never took hold. My eyes got heavy with talk of Old Ironsides, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and the Killer Angels in my Military Science classes.

I was sent to the Naval Science Institute in Rhode Island the summer before my Junior year so that I could catch up to the rest of my ROTC unit on all this “science”. When I got off the bus with my other officer candidate recruits, a Drill Instructor greeted us with the old cliché, “The first and last word out of your mouth when you address me is “Sir”. 

Upon exiting the bus, the DI barked at me, “Where do you go to school?” 

“The University of Pennsylvania”, I replied without the “Sirs”. Pushups ensued.

One day, I was ordered into my Drill Instructor’s duty hut after NSI received a loaf of banana bread sent to me by my mum. I was forced to eat a small piece of it in front of the DI’s who watched me intently. When they were convinced the cake had not been poisoned, they kicked me out of the duty hut and ate it up themselves.

There was a timed leadership exercise competition that involved directing a small team to attach a 25-pound weight onto a metal hook hanging from a 15-foot high wooden structure. Our company broke up into small groups of three. I was given the weight and two Navy officer recruits to accomplish the task. The problem was that one recruit was 50 pounds overweight, and the other recruit had a cast on. Seeing the other groups quickly jumping on shoulders and giving a leg up, etc. to hook the weight, I saw the futility of what I had to work with. So I shimmied up the diagonal wood plank myself somehow with the weight, and the second time flung it onto the hook. (The first time I hit myself in the head with it.) I jumped down off the structure exultant that I had beaten all the other groups. “Pushups, Wallace. You didn’t use any of your team.”

But I still ran like blazes, and each week at our Physical Fitness Tests I always got the top score in Charlie Company. In fact, the closest I’ve ever had to a religious experience was the day I cranked out 20 pullups. I heard angels sing on that last rep. The officer candidate with the cast only managed to perform the PFT once on the very last week after she got it removed. Because she had hitherto scored zeros on the PFT up until that last week, she was ranked #1 in physical fitness in our company at the conclusion of our program due to her relative improvement! 

I, on the other hand, ranked last! Even though I destroyed my fellow officer candidates in running, pullups and sit ups every week, my scores over time actually decreased slightly by the end of the summer out of sheer physical exhaustion. Thus was the logic behind NSI’s metrics. As I noted before, I never grasped military science.

On the train ride back to college from NSI, I finally came to the obvious conclusion: the military was not for me. Our national security is probably better off as a result. To all Marines, I salute you. 

But now I had to come up with a new way to frighten my parents…

How about if I moved to the Middle East?