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The Lynchpin Between Combat and Athletics

The more I read and write, I know that I am a good teacher but only in the areas that grab my interest. In my childhood, we only played two games Army (I didn’t know about Marines early on) and sports. If the other boys didn’t want to play the game of my choice, I bribed them with my toys. It is easy to see the lynch pin between war and athletics; it is the competition. After college and during the Vietnam War, I was enjoying coaching football and baseball at Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, but something was missing. Maybe it is the gladiator instinct in males that seeks greater risk, and combat was the other side of the lynch pin that I seemingly had to experience.

Seven or eight years after my father was killed in the South Pacific in WW II, my mother married a Marine SSgt. Shortly thereafter, he left for Korea where he was an infantryman for over a year. He was tough and rugged in some ways but a good substitute father until they split up (too much partying I was told). Nonetheless, his influence on me was ever present, and while coaching I knew the summer of !968 was my last chance before I would be too old to go to Marine OCS in Quantico, VA.

I loved the stories of the early Corps that included the drunks, reprobates, and so-called junkyard dog types who made up the early Corps, but nonetheless were molded and formed into units that not unlike my friend the late Coach Ray Bussard who referred to the AAA-0 (Anyone, Anyplace, Anytime, Bar None) lay down.

Of course, the Corps changed over the years, but when I joined in 1969, there was still a tinge of the old-Corps roguish demeanor. We talked about this on occasion in the jungles and rice paddies of SVN (no change of clothes in weeks, a bath was a canteen of non-potable water, and the c-rations fruit cocktail was the highlight of the all three meals) and concluded that we were still Ole Corps - surely not Ivy League material nor welcome in the company of debutantes.

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