I was one wild West Virginia kid who trained circa November 1956 at Parris Island, S.C. Some stories are sad in the happening, but humorous in retrospect: The mob of Marine recruits had backed me against the wash rack. I knew I was in for it. It had to do with a situation adored and hated by all recruits called "the smoking lamp." In the middle of the 20th century, almost everyone smoked tobacco. The smoking lamp lit almost never, and we recruits adored it; unlit, almost always, we hated it. Eight weeks of almost never-lit grumbled under my belt, and facing five more weeks of the same denial gave me an even bigger knot in the stomach.
Earlier that Sunday afternoon when the recruits were happily shining shoes, polishing brass and cleaning rifles, I handled the smoking lamp in a more agreeable way and slipped away to the head—where, at earlier times, we stood five deep to shave before a few mirrors and queued up to do our business on bare toilets in three allowable minutes—wherein I turned on all the hot showers, found a dry corner and lit an unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarette and sung a stanza of my favorite song, a Doris Day hit, "Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)."
So wonderful was the experience that I lit a second cigarette and sang a louder "Que Sera Sera." Surreptitious, but not smart, I did not consider the recruits’ head was connected to the drill instructors' head by a high cinder-block wall open at the top; behind it a lanky, squinty-eyed, snarling drill instructor had been sitting on one of the sparkling toilets, perhaps with a seat—I will never know. Intrigued by my off key "Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?" and captivated by the cigarette smoke he smelled, his explosive face appeared between hands clutching the wall—chin pressed against the cement blocks—under the flat brim campaign hat some called a Smokey Bear Hat. I could almost see the smoke shooting from his ears. I recognized him as the same drill instructor head who ordered me to carry my M-1 rifle around with my finger in a closed bolt and, on another occasion, to execute 100 push-ups before chow.
"You must be a mirage because no half-witted, numb-nuts recruit could be so stupid as to smoke within 5 feet from me?" he shouted. "You belong to me, you miserable screw up."
He nabbed me.
Risk-taker that I was, I had expected some consequence if nabbed, such as being screamed at until my ears seemed likely to burst and then shaken like a rag doll, pushed about in a drill instructor circle and told I would spend the remainder of my enlistment on Parris Island in unending laps around the Parade Ground at Port Arms until my arms fell off. My previous antics had given me this knowledge, and I was not disappointed this time.
This shrill-voiced drill instructor, who remembered that I could not march straight, dragged me by my ear (for I had no hair to grab), to our little street between Quonset huts where he ordered the entire platoon — some 80 heavily testosterone-dosed young men — to fall into formation. Keeping them standing at attention, he displayed me by the neck like a rat with cheese in his mouth. He told them that because of me smoking in the head when no one else was allowed to smoke cigarettes, "the smoking lamp was out indefinitely for the platoon."
To make his point, he took my half-burnt cigarette and crumbled it before them. I then ate the crumblings. I was 6 feet tall and 175 pounds and in the fourth squad, which meant there were 24 recruits bigger than I was, and standing as they were at attention, they were not happy. Before the drill instructor clamped his hand across my mouth and dragged me off for endless duty guarding the clothes racks, I managed to ask if "the smoking lamp was never lit how could 'out indefinitely' be such a big deal?" My fellow recruits—whose countenances turned blacker than a South Atlantic Sea storm—did not see it that way.
Back at the wash rack, angry hands stretched my T-shirt every which way, while more hands than I could count pushed and pulled me in a direction I did not want to go; other hands held scrub brushes and lye soap as this recruit mob intended to give me a GI shower. I had no trouble imagining their hands stripping me and then holding scrub brushes to rub the skin raw and use harsh soaps that left a burning sting on assaulted skin. Steam from the showers seeped from the head's windows; the Marine Corp believed in hot water for its trainees. I managed to jerk my right arm free, and cock it to smack the main instigator, my nemesis since enlistment, directly in his big mouth as he screamed “screw up! Screw up!"
It appeared I was doomed, so I figured to go down swinging.
The biggest, strongest, most forthright recruit of us all stepped between me and those clutching hands. (We trainees remembered that one day—when all 250 pounds, massed on a 6-foot-6-inch frame—he carried under his arm, as if it were a duffle bag, one of those 15-foot logs it took eight Marines to carry overhead.) They did not forget that he not only possessed size and strength, but also authority.
"If you want him, you will have to go through me," he said.
Why?
I never spoke to him before that time or afterward.
The recruits, having met their match, screamed obscenities into my face and then all returned to their Sunday afternoon duties. Recruit training being so rigorous, my fellow recruits soon forgot the incident and accepted me as one of them. Parris Island training took a lot of the wild boy out of me, and I'm grateful to the Marine Corps for sending me in the right direction.

Wheeling, W.Va.