Kevin the Marine Corps Veteran

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I met a man while I was waiting for the Staten Island Ferry today.  I had my guitar with me and he was attracted to it having been a guitarist in his youth.  He looked to be in his mid-fifties and had wild, untamed ice blue eyes.  A wiry fellow with a worn smile and silver hair.  He proudly proclaimed that he was from Texas and flashed his gaudy belt buckle like an ID card.  He sat down to talk to me about the musical pursuits of his youth - he'd played in a country band back when the music was starting to become popular and had to put his guitar down when he enlisted in the military at 17.  He comes from a long line of servicemen - over 130 years of successive military service in his family.  We began talking about his time in Vietnam.  He was sexually vivid in setting up the framework for his story, telling me about the ways that his drill sargent  prepared him to leave thoughts of his family and friends and most specifically his 'Susie Crochrot' (a military term used to condition the young men to detach) behind.  "The warm body, the soft lips, the sparking blue eyes," (as he looked into my own - and I could sense a tension in him as he said this), "imagine having that torn away from you and waking up every  day next to a stranger on the cold hard ground."  He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for 2 years, 8 months, and 34 days.  With Kevin as their sergeant-in-charge, his regiment was out trying to assist an Army unit in moving out of a particular area after successfully springing out a different Marine unit from a similar situation.  'Charlie' opened fire on his group of 30 men, leaving 15 men standing.  The Vietnamese soldiers yelled to him (and he used the language in his story, but the vowels and consonants escape me now) to drop his weapon.  As was his training, he took the magazine out of each gun and threw the ammunition and weapons in separate directions.  After being captured, they slept on the ground outside in the rain without ponchos for weeks before being brought inside.  They attempted to force him to sign a war crimes confession and broke his right pinky and ring fingers, but he did not cave.  They fed the prisoners "wet sloppy rice, an occasional piece of fish, and sometimes meat that looked like it'd been sitting out for months."  He'd had to kill many times.  "if you had someone, whether it be a man, woman, or child, pointing a gun at you or your men, you'd shoot without thinking of the male-female thing or the beauty of her face.  It's kill or be killed.  That's just the way it was."  Coming home was difficult.  His sister whom he'd left in pig-tails and overalls back in Texas had grown into womanhood.  She approached him with a hug and he pushed her away, not recognizing her at first.  His wife became increasingly more frightened of him - he would have terrible violent nightmares and fall into catatonic states in mid-conversation.  He explained how an officer had warned her, "don't touch him when he gets like that.  Just leave him be.  Have a shot of whiskey, and a beer, and something to eat ready and don't you touch him until he recognizes your voice and touches you first.  Or he might kill you."  He continued in the military after Vietnam going on to serve in the Gulf War.  While on active duty overseas, he finally decided to resign two years before retirement because he could no longer see the point in continuing.  He came to New York City three years ago.  He didn't say why, didn't say what had happened to his wife or family or if he still was in contact with them.  He was homeless for a year, living in Central Park.  A kind police officer confiscated his tent, but allowed him to sleep in the park.  Then he found the Veteran's Quality of Life Outreach Program - whom he currently volunteers for - and moved to Staten Island to his own apartment.  He continues to reach out to fellow veterans living in homeless shelters - sometimes with drug or alcohol problems, sometimes too depressed to help themselves, sometimes too defiant to accept help from anyone else.  He asked that I come to the center, to come to a meeting, so he can sit me down between himself and the supervising officer and introduce me to everyone.  "You'll never have more protection than sitting between two Marines."  At that, we shook hands, shared a cursory hug, and parted company.

*The most realistic cinematic portrayal of the Vietnam War that Kevin has ever seen is the extra footage from the Director's Cut of ''Full Metal Jacket'.