Spare Parts
SPARE PARTS
SPARE PARTS
A Marine Reservist’s Journey
from Campus to Combat
in 38 Days
BUZZ WILLIAMS
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
SPARE PARTS
Gotham Book / published by arrangement with the author All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2001 by The Gotham Books Publishing Group.
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Electronic edition:March 2004
F O R G I N A M A R I E ——
For signing every note, card, and letter with the words SEMPER FI, and more importantly for meaning it.
F O R T Y L E R A N D S O P H I A ——
So you may answer knowledgeably,
should the yellow footprints call.
GLOSSARY OF MARINE TERMS
AP Rounds . . . . . . . . . Armor Piercing Rounds ATD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Annual Training Duty (two-week reserve duty in the summer)
Butts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The belowground target area of the rifle range
CO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Commanding Officer Cover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marine Corps hat or cap.
Dog Target . . . . . . . . . A target shaped like a person’s head and shoulders from front
FO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forward Observer Guidon . . . . . . . . . . . . The pole that bears a unit flag Head . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Outhouse or bathroom HE Rounds . . . . . . . . . High Explosive Rounds H-harness . . . . . . . . . . Suspenders that hold combat gear I & I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inspector and Instructor (active-duty Marines of a reserve unit)
Ilum Rounds . . . . . . . . Illumination rounds LAI Bn. . . . . . . . . . . . . Light Armored Infantry Battalion LAV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Light Armored Vehicle LZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Landing Zone vii
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G L O S S A R Y O F M A R I N E T E R M S
MCI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marine Corps Institute (Marine self-study training)
MOPP . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mission Oriented Protective Posture (NBC
suit)
MOS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Military Occupational Specialty MPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Military Police MRE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meal, Ready-to-Eat NAP Pill . . . . . . . . . . . Nerve Agent Protection Pill NBC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nuclear, Biological, Chemical NCO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Noncommissioned Officer—corporal and sergeant
PMIs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Primary Marksmanship Instructors Rack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Military bunk bed Skivvies . . . . . . . . . . . . Underwear Snapping in . . . . . . . . Aiming rifles for practice SOI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . School of Infantry Staff NCO . . . . . . . . . . Staff Noncommissioned Officer—staff sergeant–sergeant major
TA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Training Area TOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tube-launched Optically-sighted Wire-guided (missile)
UA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unauthorized Absence VC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vehicle Commander Vision Blocks . . . . . . . Windows in the LAV
PROLOGUE
THE YELLOW FOOTPRINTS CALLED.
They first called as I read that initial letter from my older brother, Lenny, back in June of 1975. I was eight years old, and had lost my only brother, ten years my senior, to something he called “the Corps.” It was devastating, but the letters helped, and they came weekly. Each one was a transcript of boot camp life that carved itself deeply into the tablet of my young mind. The first letter described how scared he was, standing on the yellow footprints. I couldn’t believe that my invincible big brother Lenny could be scared of anything.
Much of what my brother wrote I didn’t understand, but that didn’t stop me from emulating it as best I could. I marched everywhere, because Lenny wrote that marching was the only way recruits were allowed to walk. Any adult who talked with me was bombarded with sirs or ma’ams, as one of the letters described how my brother had been poked with a rifle butt for forgetting to say
“sir.” After I read the letters describing Lenny’s rifle training, my mother never saw her broomstick again. I imagined shooting across the creek with it so I, too, could qualify “expert” as Lenny had.
After thirteen weeks and a dozen letters, I would finally be able to see Lenny on the parade deck for his boot camp graduation. Or so I had expected. But that day at Parris Island I saw someone new, someone capable of pushing his new wife away, robotically reciting a rehearsed phrase about not showing public affection. Everything ix
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was different—the way he walked, the way he talked, and especially the look in his eyes.
In the decade that followed, Lenny occasionally visited, but he would never be the same. He was now a stranger with a rank instead of a name. His visits were never more than a few days, and my curiosity about the man he had become remained with me long after he left.
Missing my big brother became a familiar feeling for me, and nostalgic recollections a favorite pastime. I missed him at dinner when I couldn’t reach the potatoes, and at night when the dark scared me to sleep. But I missed him most of all on the streets of West Inverness, the working-class suburb in Baltimore County, Maryland, where my family lived. Our neighborhood was a place where a chubby kid like me, without a protective older brother, was easy prey for bullies.
As I read and reread the letters he had written from boot camp, I tried to imagine transforming myself as he had.
In 1980 we moved to Harewood Park in rural Chase, Maryland. At the same time, Lenny transferred from his active-duty station at Cherry Point, North Carolina, to a new civilian position as an ordnance specialist at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland.
This meant he could return home on weekends, and it felt as if I had my big brother back at last. During our time together Lenny taught me the Marine way to do just about everything. I ran with him while he sang cadence, made my bed like a rack in a squad bay, and even cut my hair in Marine buzz-cut fashion. More than anything else, though, was the confidence I gained by learning how to fight.
He bought me boxing gloves for my twelfth birthday, and spent countless hours sparring with me.
I got the chance to test my new skills that winter when Butch, an eighth grade bully, threatened to kick my ass after school. During our bus ride home, I exited at his stop instead of mine, after which the entire bus emptied. Remembering what Lenny had taught me P R O L O G U E
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about the element of surprise, I drove my fist into Butch’s nose as he stepped off the bus, sending him under the back wheels, bloody and crying. That fight helped me to make a name for myself in the new neighborhood—literally. Walking away from the
bus stop, I overheard one of the kids say, “That kid with the buzz-cut can fight!”
I’ve been known as Buzz, or Buzz-Cut to a select few, ever since.
In 1982 Lenny divorced his wife, and soon relocated to an airbase outside Visalia, California. The next year he remarried. I wouldn’t see him again until the summer of 1984—I was a sophomore in high school. At sixteen my life centered around my new driver’s license and the motorcycle that gave me my independence. But normally it was parked by sunset, as my father considered night driving too dangerous. So when he allowed me to go out cruising on my motorcycle with Lenny at ten o’clock one humid Saturday night, when my brother was visiting us, it was a big deal.
We toured our old neighborhood, and the greater Dundalk area surrounding it, Lenny in front and me clutching on to him. As we rode, he yelled over the hum of the engine as he pointed out land-marks.
Our old house . . . the apartments where his first wife had lived . . . the woods he used to hide in when he hooked school . . .
We rolled to a stop at a red light in front of the North Point Business Park. Lenny pointed left to a lighted sign that read ARMED
FORCES RECRUITING.
“Is that where you joined the Marines?” I asked.
His helmet nodded in front of me. I was filled with questions about the recruiter and the Marines. That night I expected to be able to talk with Lenny, man-to-man for the first time, and have the chance to see the world through his eyes. But I wasn’t prepared for half of what I saw when we stopped at the Circle Bar-B-Q.
The Circle was a favorite weekend hangout, and the parking lot was packed. Lenny reunited with some of his old hippy buddies there, and showed me how his crowd partied. That night Lenny xii
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gave me my first beer, introduced me to Led Zeppelin, and if I had not chickened out, he would have gotten me stoned and laid.
When I woke Sunday morning I knew that was the good-bye day—the day my brother drove off to wherever his other home was.
After the night at the Circle, I felt as if I had just been introduced to my brother for the first time, and now he was already leaving. I cried as Lenny waved his last wave. It had always been that way on the good-bye day.
On Easter morning 1985 the phone rang and Dad answered, expecting Lenny’s voice; he always called during breakfast on holidays. But instead of Lenny, it was his new wife. She told my father that Lenny had fallen asleep at the wheel after a night of partying.
He was in shock trauma in critical condition and it didn’t look like he would make it.
When the second call came an hour later, I was in my room reading the letters Lenny had written to me from boot camp. For ten years they had been on the ledge of my headboard, ready to be read whenever I missed him.
My father came into my room to tell me the news I had been dreading.
My brother was dead.
As I sat beside the casket at the funeral, I searched for some way to connect with the memory of my brother. As the trumpet played
“Taps,” the Marines in the funeral detail began moving in unison with the precision of robots. As the solemn notes pierced the brisk morning air, echoing from the grassy hill in the distance, the flag was folded into a perfect triangle. It was amid the finality of the trumpet, and the folding of the flag, that I found my connection.
That day I silently promised Lenny that “Taps” would be something P R O L O G U E
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just between us. I vowed that I would never listen to it again as it played in honor of anyone else.
As our family made our final pass, my father, who had until then kept his cancer diagnosis from me, touched the coffin and whispered, “You won’t be lonely, son—I’ll be with you soon.”
Throughout the following summer I never admitted to myself that my father was speaking the truth when he had whispered to the coffin.
Even as he lay bedridden, with a gaping cancerous hole in his side, I convinced myself he was just in one of his surgery cycles, and that he’d be well again soon. During my senior year of high school, though, it became tougher to hide the truth from myself. Dad was losing touch with reality, and his memory was fading. I still hadn’t accepted the loss of my brother. Losing Dad was just too much. Vulnerable, and in the throes of depression, I found comfort within a new group of friends who taught me a new way to cope—with alcohol. The numbness of being drunk was welcome relief from the pain of reality, and the camaraderie among my beer buddies fed my hunger to belong.
During my senior year they had become my surrogate brothers, and we partied nonstop. My drinking intensified throughout the summer and into the fall, when I entered my freshman year at the University of Maryland. Being away from home and leaving my mother with the responsibilities of running the house and nursing my father seemed wrong. But going to college had always been expected of me, and during my father’s last days of cogent thought he made two final requests of me: Take care of Mom, and graduate from college.
Being at college and being in college were two different things.
While I resided on campus and was enrolled for twelve credits, I was hardly a student. On the rare day when I attended class, and even rarer occasion when I remained awake during class, my mind was elsewhere. By October my father had been moved to a hospice suite, where he lay helpless and emaciated.
Back at the dorm there was a red phone on the wall just outside xiv
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my room. Every time that phone rang I feared that it was the call.
There were many false alarms that month: a panicked call from Mom—a ninety-minute drive to the hospital—then waiting, and waiting—and the long drive back to campus to carry on with the college-student charade. My beer buddies never let me down during those dark days. It only took one phone call to rally them, and before long I would once again be comfortably numb.
Dad passed away on November 1, 1987. Although I completed that fall semester successfully, I began to believe that fulfilling his wish for me to graduate from college was out of reach. The only thing I lacked more than motivation was money. My father had never been healthy enough to secure any significant life insurance, and my mother’s pay didn’t cover the monthly expenses we had.
Our modest savings couldn’t sustain us through the next year. College would need to wait.
Mom and I grieved differently. She turned toward God. I turned away. That summer I moved to Ocean City, Maryland, with my beer buddies. While I had convinced my mom that it was healthy for me to get away, there was nothing therapeutic about drunken teenagers sharing a beach house for the summer. Most of that summer remains blurry for me, the memories locked away in an un-reachable corner of my mind.
When summer ended, my return home shocked me back into reality. Nearly a year had passed since my father had died, and I had honored neither of his wishes: I was neither in college nor taking care of my mother.
As September approached, I managed to pull myself together and enroll at Essex Community College as a physical education major. Being a gym teacher and coach had always appealed to me.
While in high school I had looked up to my own gym teachers and coaches as mentors, and I liked the idea of being considered a role model for students.
To complement my studies I worked as a health club trainer, P R O L O G U E
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which also paid my tuition. Although I still drank heavily on the weekends, partying didn’t fit the weekday schedule. I attended classes all day and worked in the health club until ten o’clock at night, Monday through Friday. During the week, studying replaced drinking as my escape from reality. Being lost in the books kept my mind too busy to allow my thoughts to drift back to Lenny or Dad, and it had the secondary effect of producing A grades.
Big Ray was a legend at the health club where I worked. He was a hulk of a man whose shaved head made him resemble Mr. Clean.
He seldom spoke, but when he did speak he usually had something
important to say, and people listened. Occasionally the room would fill with his voice, as he offered some political commentary or philo-sophical position on the discussion of the day.
Big Ray was interesting to me; he had been a Marine. Although I made it my business to talk with all the former Marines in the gym, telegraphing my obsession with the Corps, I had never talked with Big Ray. It was generally understood that Big Ray was to be left alone. The reason I knew he was a Marine was the faded eagle-globe-anchor tattoo on his right shoulder. I watched him from afar sometimes as he meditated between sets, always appearing to be in deep thought. While others looked at their reflections in the mirrors, Big Ray seemed to look through them, as if there was something on the other side of the glass.
After working at the health club for a year I had never talked with him, and probably never would have if it weren’t for my compulsion to keep the dumbbells on the rack in numerical order. One day I had reached down to replace a one-hundred-pound dumbbell, but hadn’t noticed that it was one of a set that Big Ray was using.
Pushing my hand from the dumbbell, he wrapped his thick fingers around my wrist and jerked me into his face.
“Do you have a death wish, son?” he yelled.
The room fell silent. Petrified, all I could manage to do was shake my head.
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“You’d better have a good excuse for fucking up my routine!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I got carried away with straightening up and didn’t realize . . .”
Big Ray started laughing.
He looked up at the other lifters still staring, “Oh, c’mon, people.
I’m jerking his chain!”
Relieved, everyone joined Big Ray in a laugh at my expense.
Helping me to save face, Big Ray called to me.
“Hey, Buzz.”
I was shocked that he knew my name.
“I could use a spot here.”
Big Ray had always worked out alone. Bracing for another joke, I stepped up cautiously.