Far On The Ringing Plains

3. Basic Training 1942

3

Basic Training 1942

The Corpsman

I am a Hambo. At least that’s what the rest of the boots at Camp Elliot call me. That’s because I’m a CO, a conscientious objector. I joined the Marines because I have a responsibility to help defend the country that keeps me free to believe what I want. But my faith tells me it is wrong to kill other men. So I told them that when I signed up.

They tried everything they could to shake me—stood me up in front of the boots and called me a coward, a sissy and a homo. One noncom even bloodied my nose when he tried to get me to fight.

Every time the DI pushes me, I quote the Marine regs back at him at the top of my voice. “The person seeking conscientious objector status bears the initial responsibility of presenting evidence which shows a sincere opposition to war in any form based upon religious training and belief, Sir! Once an objector meets this responsibility, the U.S. Marine Corps will grant conscientious objector status unless the Government can establish a rational basis in fact for denying the application, Sir!”

My DI, Sergeant Orval Butterworth, doesn’t like that too much. He’s a fourth generation Marine from Providence, Rhode Island. I hear when he’s ashore he is a quiet guy, but you couldn’t prove it by me. When he gets in my face because I’m a CO, he puts his nose about an inch from my nose and screams, “Well you little candyass, are you going to pick up your rifle and kill j**s when we go ashore?”

I always say, “Sir, no Sir.”

He doesn’t like that either, so I always get a reward. “Okay pogey bait, drop and give me one hundred and fifty of your finest.”

“Sir, yes Sir.”

I never fight with Butterworth, I never get mad. I do what he says. When I joined up, I told them I would learn how to use my M1, take it apart, put it back together, and load it. I learned it fast and I’m the best fieldstripper in my squad. But that doesn’t help much. Most of the guys avoid me or try to rile me.

There are two guys, though, that I get along with okay. That’s because they are both Mennonite kids from the Pacific Northwest. I’m a Mennonite, too, and I’m also from the great PNW. That’s why we hit it off. I grew up in a little town in Washington called Ritzville. Ritzville is one of those thin places you pass through when you’re driving from Seattle to Spokane—nothing there but horizon. Dry wheat, dry heat and no girls. Well, some girls, but they all look like the country around town—dry, brown, angular, gritty. The large empty sky above Ritzville is a good place for a guy to learn astronomy, though, which got me into studying Greek mythology, so I guess good came out of something in Ritzville.

I’m a CO by birth. We didn’t do a lot of things in our church, but the main thing we didn't do was get in a fight. When I was growing up, I wondered about that when the bullies in school picked on me, and my dad told me to just ignore them. It’s kind of hard to ignore some big jerk that is giving you a wedgie and slapping you around. But when I got bigger than most, I found out that a quiet demeanor puts bullies on guard. If you’re a big guy but you’re not strutting around and bragging about it, most guys wise up and leave you alone because they don’t know if you’re crazy, and you are too big for them to want to chance it.

Oh, I guess I’ll tell you my name. Philo Parmalee. How’s that for a chancre of a name? My dad was one of those guys who subscribed to Popular Mechanics magazine. We had stacks of them around our house. That’s where he found out about Philo Farnsworth, the guy who invented television. Dad used to tell me that television was the greatest invention in the history of the world. He read everything he could about it, and one time he even went to Seattle just to see a television set in a*****e there. He was so struck by it he named me Philo. My mom didn’t like it much, but I guess Dad thought it would give me brainpower or something. He would say, “One day, Philo, there will be a television set in every home. Wouldn’t it be great if you could invent something like that?”

Well, I thought my dad was a little crazy, wanting me to be an inventor and all, but who was I to piss on his fire? Sadly, things just didn’t go that way for me. By the time I was twelve he and I both knew I would never invent anything—I bet that’s when he wished he had called me Joe or Pete. Anyway, I carried that Philo moniker around and took a lot of crap because of it. You can’t guess how grateful I was when one of my Junior High friends started calling me Bud. He’d seen me go red in the face when some jerk of a teacher stretched it out and called me “File-Ohhh,” or when the girls would giggle and say, “Hey Philo, wadda ya know? Just get back from a Broadway show?” So I was Bud from then on, and things got a little easier. Now I’m in the Marines and we are going into battle; I imagine the only thing they will call me once we get to wrestling with the Imperial Japanese army is Corpsman. And they won’t be saying it to themselves—they will scream it.

Anyway, the two guys I was telling you about: One is Billy Martens. He’s from Montana. He’s a hunter and a fisherman, and he’s a crack shot. I’ve never seen a guy who can handle a rifle better. They issued him a 1903 Garand Rifle, and he worked on it until he zeroed it in. He's got 20/20 vision and on Record Day he walked away with an expert rifleman qualification. Besides being an incredible rifleman, Billy’s a real nice guy, but he struggles with the thought of killing someone. He shared that with me when we were on watch one night. He’s been in the Mennonite church for so long that “Thou shalt not kill” is part of his makeup. So, I think he wonders if he will measure up when we are in battle.

Then there's Johnny Strange. He's a real quiet type, but if you get him going, he’ll tell you he came to the Marines to learn to kill. He’s a real handsome guy, and one day when we were on latrine duty, this guy put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder and called him “Pretty Boy.” Big mistake. Johnny took that guy up against the wall and was looking to kill him before we got him off. When the guy said he meant nothing by it, Johnny tells him that if he ever did it again, he’d kill him. There is something twisting Johnny Strange up inside, but he doesn’t talk about it.

When I grew up, I was a picky eater, but I have to tell you that since I’ve been in Boot Camp, I eat everything that’s put in front of me. Some of it is more than foul; the guys call it SOS, s**t-on-a-shingle, but after you’ve been out doing marching drills, two-hour exercise drills and such, you can build up an appetite, so I just hold my nose and eat it. Here at Elliot, we run everywhere, we get called ‘maggot’ a lot, and I found out there’s three ways to do everything: the right way, the wrong way and the Marine way.

Now about my status—I don’t consider myself one of those religious nuts, but I have a grip on the fact that God is real, and I believe the Bible from front to back. If you ask me, I'll tell you Jesus is coming back to this world to straighten everything out…someday. I’m a short-shot prayer guy because I used to watch these evangelists that would come to our church, ranting and raving and putting out long-winded prayers that just were a lot of hooey. After a while you figured out the guy just liked to hear himself talk. One time one of those evangelists came to our house for dinner after church. You know the type. Longish hair swept back like the wind’s blowing all the time, green safari suit and saddle shoes. When he said the word God, he put an “uh” on the end so it sounds like “God-uh.” My dad asked him to pray over the meal, and he takes off praying for all the missionaries in the world and all the churches in the world and he’s going on and on “in His Name” and “for His sake,” and I got in big trouble when I interrupted him and asked him if we could eat “for Christ’s sake.” Ooh-whee—that was very dumb. No supper that day, and for dessert I got a hiding out in the shed.

When I pray, I try to make it to the point. I figure God has enough incoming he doesn’t want to wade through all the pontifications, so he’s happy when somebody makes it short and sweet. I figure to pray a lot when we hit the islands. That’s the scuttlebutt, anyway, that we’re headed for the Pacific, and we will take back every island that the j**s have conquered.

So here I am at Camp Elliot training to be a corpsman. I think it’s a great solution to my problem with the Marines. When I first signed up, I told them I would go anywhere the riflemen go and I would help any guy that gets shot I can, and I won’t let them down, and after a while they believed me and so, I’m in good standing with the brass. I don’t mind risking my neck with the other guys because I know there’s a better life waiting anyway—lots of guys haven’t figured that out yet. Besides that, I’m a tough guy as far as keeping up with everything they throw at me. I run fast, I can do lots of pushups, I don’t complain when I pull head duty, so even though the other boots aren't friendly, they still respect me—I can tell.

What I know is a lot of these boots don't want to die in battle, and they cover it up with macho talk, but I see through it. They are tinhorns, and most of them are scared stiff. It’s easy to tell when somebody’s got faith for the next life—they rest easy in the saddle. Billy Martens, he’s like that. He brought enough of his faith with him from Montana to keep him through the bad stuff. He’s got a real faith he doesn’t shove down your throat. But Johnny, he lost his faith a long time ago. He doesn’t talk about it, but I think when he left Idaho, he left everything. Well, not everything, because there’s a girl he talks about a little—a gal named Marjean. He writes to her and I think he got one letter back so far. I don’t know if it was a good one or a bad one because he didn’t talk about her for a week after he got it.

Anyway, when I was on the train coming down to California, I prayed a lot. I asked God to make me faithful, to give me courage in battle, and to let me be a good comrade to my buddies. By the time I got to Camp Elliot, he had given me a settled assurance he would be with me through all this. I knew his promise already, but sometimes you have to wrestle things out with God, just to make sure.

I don’t get a lot of free time, but when I do, I pray for all the guys, but more for Billy and Johnny. Johnny needs a lot of prayer because he's got something inside that eats at him. He tries to prove himself a man at everything he does here, and he doesn't take guff from anyone, so he gets in fights and he’s been on report three times. But he does a lot of things well. We were on the Crucible, our toughest training test; we’re out in the field, and the General’s jeep breaks down as he’s headed by. Johnny jumps out smart and in an instant he’s got the hood open and his head inside. In a minute he tells the General exactly how to fix it and how long it will take. Well, the general thinks he’s just a smartass, so he tells him to be at the motor pool at 0700 to fix that jeep or wash out. It’s midnight, and we still got a 20-mile hike to get home. Well, Johnny does it. The general was pretty impressed, and the next thing I know Johnny’s running the motor pool.

I’m pretty sure that praying helped get Johnny over the hump, so I will keep praying for both of them and hoping we all make it through what’s coming because I’d hate to make good friends and then lose them. I ask God to help me on that score a lot.