Semper Fi

[Stepmac]

My Co, at Pensacola, FLA when I checked in to start flight training was Colonel Don Conroy. He was a giant, maybe 6'4" and pretty thick. He was very blond with a crew cut and had a voice that could be heard all over the base. When he got mad, which was all of the time, his neck turned bright read and the veins stuck out. When he spoke the building trembled. We were all scared spitless of him.

His son Pat, wrote a book about the colonel entitled "The Great Santini". It was mostly true. Then man was bigger than life. Google Pat Conroy's funeral oration of his dad.

Years ago I found an old "Life" magazine, dated 1946. Inside was an article about Pappy Boyington's return to Pensacola after he was released from a Japanese prison camp. He was in uniform. They met at the San Carlos hotel in P-cola to have a few. There was a Life photographer assigned to photograph the event. In one picture Pappy is sitting on the shoulders of a huge marine, all singing and shooting their watches (making 'handies' their hands being airplanes). The man holding up Pappy was none other than the Great Santini himself. He was one hell of a Marine. Pappy wasn't bad either.

I flew in the Marines for nine years and it almost ruined by life. Nothing seemed worth while after that. Nothing nearly as exciting. If someone wasn't shooting at you, well; who cares? There is a sound that you hear in the early morning in the Marine Corps that you will hear no where else. It is the cadance call of the sergeants as they march their platoons to morning chow. To an old Marine it is the sweetest and most sturring music on earth and I'd give anything to do it all over again.