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Based only on my U.S. Army career and experiences during my years of service, there are a few military bases/locations that I favor as the best places to be stationed. My choices are on what assignments I wanted to do while in the military. My 1st choice is Fort Bragg, NC since that was my 1st choice when I started my career. I like this place because Bragg is one of the biggest Army bases in CONUS and offers everything to a service member as far as off duty/on duty post-off post facilities. This place allowed me to stay on jump ((Airborne) status, offered opportunities for various elite units ( 82nd Airborne, Special Operations, Delta, etc) to qualify/transfer into, provided many opportunities for training/travel, military schools, and it was a cheap place supported by a surrounding civilian community that was military friendly. In addition, Bragg is right next to Pope Air Force Base where I used their aircraft to fly free around the US and overseas when space was available to travel ( most of the time it was easy since Pope was/is a major airbase).Another place is Joint Base Lewis-McCord, WA ( formerly Ft. Lewis/McCord Air Force Base), This place has similar offerings like Bragg but in a more scenic area & close to Canada for travel. There are travel opportunities to the Asia/Pacific region since most units assigned there support that theater of operations ( 7th Infantry Divison, 1st Special Forces Group, & other units). This is a great place if you are an outdoors type and don’t mind the rain!Another place I enjoyed was Ft. Belvoir, VA since it was in the Washington D.C/Northern Virginia area. It too offered similar attractions like Bragg and Lewis mentioned earlier. I enjoyed various intelligence assignments/schooling and traveling in/out of there. I especially liked off duty activities in the area. The choices were endless. I found the Alexandria/Fairfax/Potomac areas desirable places to live/work.Another base is MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, FL. It’s an airbase but has the US Central Command, US Marine Central Command, US Special Operations Command, & various tenant units besides the Air Force there. Like other US Air Force bases, MacDill has almost everything to offer for those assigned there. Like the other bases mentioned, it offers different assignments to transfer into. I also like this Florida location since Disneyworld/Orlando, the Caribbean & Central/ South American countries are nearby for travel & adventure.Finally, the last place which is overseas, US Army Garrison USAG Vicenza, Caserma Ederle, Italy. This base has US Army Africa Hqs, the 173rd Airborne Brigade & US Army Installation Management Command. The biggest attraction here is it’s in Italy which means lots of potential off duty or official duty travel to Europe and Africa. It is a smaller base compared to the other ones mentioned but a place to enjoy either by yourself or with your family.Note: This is a shortlist. I can go on since there are many more bases out there worth mentioning. Just remember that each base has its positives/negatives since no place is perfect and each of us has our individual preferences. I think since my Army retirement there are some more that I would pick that consistently are suggested by USAA & MOAA ( Military Officers Association of America) that are more beneficial for military retirees such as Fort Houston, San Antonio, TX, Ft. Meade, MD & Ft. Eustis or Ft. Eustis, VA.

I can answer from the perspective of an Army warrant officer back in the late 60s and early 70s. I graduated high school in 1960 and was one of those individuals that wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do as far as a livelihood. I ended up working in construction in Florida; however, this was prior to the influx of all those people that wanted to live in Florida. The work was a bit sketchy; if I worked a full week the pay was adequate, but often times I only worked several days. I couldn’t make a satisfactory living at that rate.About 1964 or 1965 I started hearing on the news about a faraway place that I was not familiar with: Vietnam. Initially I paid it no mind, but as time went by and Vietnam became a regular staple of the nightly news, I started paying attention. I knew America had military advisors in-country, but they weren’t involved in combat operations at least according to the news accounts.I had enrolled in a local junior college and was granted a deferment as long as I was in school. I graduated junior college and had no desire or money to continue my education. The draft had cranked-up or it was getting ready to start inducting men. At about the same time I started seeing advertisement in magazines that indicated high school graduates could learn to fly helicopters in the Army. I was intrigued because I was interested in aviation and this could possibly be just the thing for me. I visited my local Army recruiter, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Ira Couey.We talked about the warrant officer program. He told me if I passed a flight aptitude test and a c;lass I flight physical, then I’d be given a warrant officer flight training class starting date that I would attend following basic training. That sounded good to me. I was administered the flight aptitude test in a room at the recruiting station. On the test was a section that had questions about a helicopter’s flight controls and what they did/controlled. That kind of question had me sweating because I didn’t know anything about helicopters or what the various flight controls did….I thought that was the kind of thing I would learn at flight school. I completed the test and handed it to SFC Couey. I believe he graded it at the time, I don’t recall with certainty. But I learned that I had passed the test, which was exciting news to me.Next SFC Couey set me up with the class I flight physical at Homestead Air Force Base in South Florida. He gave me a bus tickets to use when the time came. It might have been a few days or a week or longer before I went for the physical. I got to Homestead, completed the physical, returned home and waited for the results. Some time later SFC Couey telephoned me and said that my physical had somehow been stapled to another flight physical when it went through channels, and the signing official failed to sign my physical. That was upsetting and frustrating. He told me that he had already sent it back through channels to be signed, so all I had to do was wait.Eventually things were completed and I received a start date for basic training with flight school to follow. I completed basic training at Fort Polk, LA, and after a short period of leave in which I married my girlfriend, I reported to Fort Wolters, TX, to begin flight school. Everything I was doing was new to me so I was excited to be learning things about the Army and beginning to learn to fly a helicopter. I completed primary flight training at Fort Wolters, then moved to Fort Rucker for the advanced phase of training.In the meantime Vietnam had become a very intense war with ever increasing number of American casualties and combat deaths. I completed training in April 1967 and was appointed as a Warrant Officer-1. I had two older brothers already in service and since my father had passed away while I was in flight school, I opted to submit a request to defer any assignment to Vietnam until my other brothers weren’t in Vietnam. The military allowed individuals to request this type of deferment. I didn’t want to put any additional stress on my mother by having two or three of her sons in Vietnam at the same time since there was no guarantee if we would complete our combat tours and not.The Army had to do something with me in the meantime so the sent me to the Aviation Maintenance Officers Course at Fort Eustis, VA. That course might have been six months long. I completed that course, went to Fort Hood, TX, to help form-up four aviation maintenance detachments. I inventoried a lot of equipment for the detachments and supervised it being loaded into shipping containers. In July 1968, I was flown to Vietnam not on a commercial airliner like most of the soldiers going to Vietnam, but on an Air Force C-141 cargo plane…..facing backwards the entire trip! I was starting to wonder if maintenance folks always got “special” treatment or if we were just “lucky” to travel via USAF aircraft, instead of a commercial airliner.Somewhere along the way I learned that previously most warrant officers had been enlisted personnel in a specific field, such as administration, wheeled vehicle maintenance, food service, band or some other field. They served in their respective field for years before applying to become a warrant officer. They were considered technical expert in their field and were highly regarded for their knowledge. Back then they were considered special. Then along comes aviation warrant officers, many of us were young and new to the Army and we didn’t have a extensive background in a technical field….many of us were just off the streets and within a year we could become a warrant officer. There were eighteen and nineteen year old aviation warrant officers and that didn’t set well with a lot of folks, particularly some older commissioned officers. I believe they felt we hadn’t “earned” the right to be a warrant officer in less than a year of Army service. I told them they could apply for flight school if they were interested. Many couldn’t qualify for physical reasons.Once in Vietnam I got my first “taste” of how some commissioned officers treated aviation warrant officers. I have recounted in an earlier post how one irate major had accosted me and a “real” warrant officer on a dusty road on the Vinh Long Army Airfield. We failed to salute him as he drove by us in a dust-covered jeep with the top on. At one point the angry major called us “boy” while he was chewing our ass. He was totally unprofessional, but there was nothing I could do, except take his ass-chewing and silently seethe at his conduct.For many years following the Vietnam War some commissioned officers treated us differently, and they would occasionally say things that indicated they didn’t appreciate aviation warrant officers. In the early 70s the Army was facing a problem due to lack of commissioned officers and interested warrant officers could apply for a commission. I did and I received a commission to first lieutenant. I was somewhat reluctant to become a commissioned officer because I felt that once the Army had to reduce its strength, the first to be eliminated would the former aviation warrant officers that had taken a commission. Turns out I was correct and a lot of men I knew as aviation warrant officers would either reverted back to previously held enlisted ranks, or discharged from the Army.Years later I would meet an individual that I had known as an aviation warrant officer. He had taken a commission and advanced to the rank of captain, but then he was part of the Army’s Reduction in Force (RIF) and reverted back to his warrant officer rank. Years later when I saw him at a meeting I was a major and he was a Chief Warrant Officer-2. He was shocked that I hadn’t been RIF’ed like he had. I guess he thought since he had been RIF’ed, I should have been too.,BOTTOM LINE: Back in the 60s/70s aviation warrant officers weren’t always respected or considered as legitimate officers by some senior commissioned officers. Hopefully things have changed now and aviation warrants are respected for their skills and knowledge.

The Marine Corps took a long time to evolve into what it is today, but what it is today is downright elegant.I never served in the Marine Corps but I’ve seen it up close and personal for the first 20 or so years of my life: I grew up about eight miles outside the main gate of Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, N. C.. During a gap year when I was in college, I lived in Jacksonville and dealt with a lot of Camp Lejeune Marines (the grunts, not the airwingers that I’d grown up around).I was a military brat for several years, although my dad was Army, not Marines, and lived a few hundred miles away. I attended two high schools, one of which was about 95% Marine brats. My best friend’s father was a bird colonel, and his mom took a liking to me and tried to fix me up with the general’s daughter for the prom.Another of the kids with whom I attended Havelock High School (we were friendly, but not all that close, and he may not even remember me) just this past year retired as a three-star general, after a tour as Commanding General, Marine Corps Installations East. As large as the big Cherry Point base across the road from the high school loomed in the lives of all of us, it never occurred to anyone that one of our own would one day own the darn place, as well as several others that were part of his command, including bigger ones like Camp Lejeune (also within commuting distance of where I grew up, although it was like an hour away) and Quantico.My mother remarried after my dad passed away, and my stepfather was a retired Marine mustang major.I tried to get in the Navy, and aced the ASVABs, but couldn’t pass the physical. (Indeed my dream growing up was to be a naval or Marine officer but I knew, even then, that that physical might be a problem. I remember in fifth grade telling my teacher I wanted to attend the Naval Academy. She said that a kid as smart as I should think about going to college, instead. Well, as unaware as she was — she was right.) Meanwhile, even into adulthood I read everything I could about it.So, I have some familiarity with the Corps, even if from somewhat of a unique perspective.On the one hand, I don’t buy completely into a whole lot of the macho-bullshit, tough guy mythos about Marines (although I do like many elements of it), because I’ve seen the guy in the booth, turning the levers, projecting the holographic image, and doing the “I . . . am . . . OZ!!!” thing. While, give them credit, some of them over the years have done larger than life things, it’s not that common and you get a little tired of hearing about it, and that ‘larger than life’ reputation they try to cultivate for themselves and constantly flaunt in your face gets a little old sometimes. Some of these guys really do think that the average Joe Schmoe on the street should find them so awesome just for being Marines. Me? I grew up around those jarheads, I know better, don’t try to kid me with it.(One of my friends from back in those days was a fellow theatre manager, who’d grown up a Marine brat — one of the people I could count on one hand that I’ve ever known in my life who could claim Jacksonville, North Carolina as his hometown, even though there’s always been about 60,000 people living there, nearly everyone who lives there moved there because of some connection to the Marines or the Camp Lejeune base, and almost nobody’s ‘from’ J-ville — and who I saw in action one night confronting a group of young Marines who were getting a little too loud and rowdy in his theatre. The group began getting an attitude and behaving menacingly, and one of them got in his face and seemed like he was about to get belligerent. And here, we’re talking about a small, skinny guy wearing big Coke-bottle glasses who weighed 120 pounds soaking wet; but he got right back into this young boot Marine’s face and, just as cool as you please, in the cold, quiet voice of a man I wouldn’t mess with even though I’m twice my friend’s size, looked him right in the eyes, and said to him “Hey, asshole . . . Your D. I. had you for eleven weeks . . . mine had me for eighteen years. Now, what do you think’s going to happen here?” The group quickly got the read on the situation and decided that they’d better back off, and calm it down.)On the other, long before “doing more with less” became a buzzword in the business world, the Marine Corps invented it.The positivesTake a battalion from Camp Lejeune (about 800 guys), put a tank and artillery unit with it, mate it up with a logistics unit from French Creek (also on the Camp Lejeune base), part of a helicopter squadron from New River air station (on the other side of Jacksonville), and a composite squadron — different types of aircraft from several different squadrons — from Cherry Point, and you have an MEU, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, that can put guys on the beach in any place on the Atlantic Ocean and in the Mediterranean — whether the country within which that beach is located wants them there or not. (Similar capabilities and facilities exist on the West Coast, and in Hawaii, and Okinawa, to hit a beach in the Pacific Rim, Indian Ocean, or the Middle East if necessary.) We always have two or three MEUs deployed on ships. They cruise around, deployed “on float” for about eight months, ready to go if something comes up, then return and another is sent out; and they rotate it that way every two years.The MEU, the smallest version of a Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF), is scalable. For a bigger job, a Marine regiment (three battalions), a tank battalion and and an artillery battalion, a larger logistics element, and an entire Marine Air Group (my best friend’s dad commanded one of those) from Cherry Point could land, and take control of, and hold, until the Army came in to relieve them, and in the meanwhile supply all utilities and services for, an area the size of West Virginia. (That’s a Marine Expeditionary Brigade.)Or, if our elected leaders get really ticked off at someone, or it looks really bad, and we want to roll it all out, the entire 2nd Marine Division goes, and takes along the 2nd Logistics Group, and the entire 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. (That’s a Marine Expeditionary Force.)It’s pretty impressive how they have it organized. The Marine Corps has only three active divisions (by contrast, the Army has ten active divisions, and they just eliminated a few more over the last few years, for reasons you’ll see), three logistics groups (ten of the Army equivalent, sustainment brigades, are active), and three air wings (the Air Force has sixteen active Numbered Air Forces, the equivalent of a Marine Aircraft Wing) — and with nothing more than that, they can package pieces of them into a single force, keep several MEUs deployed ongoingly, and “bring democracy to your country” anywhere in the world on a few days’ notice, not much more.It works so well, with so little, that the Army is moving over to the same structure, the Brigade Combat Team. (That’s how the Army was able to reduce the number of its divisions. The Marine Corps showed them how they could do it, and still maintain their readiness, and still do any job we asked of them.)Indeed, the Marine Corps invented, or has so innovated that they could nearly take credit for ‘inventing’, lots of things that they’ve done so well that — like the Army with its Brigade Combat Teams modeled on the Marines’ MAGTFs — even larger forces have taken on doing it their way.Amphibious assault. Taking a piece of ground from boats or ships pulled up to an enemy-held shore is awkward. You have to get your own guys ashore without having them blown away with rifle or machine gun fire as soon as they jump off the boat, they have to secure a ‘beachhead’ and move on from that to get control of the area they’re trying to take and accomplish their mission, and you have to do it without getting your boat blown out of the water under you by shore batteries or aerial bombardment — and you’re up against an enemy who could see you were coming some time before you got close enough in to land, and had time to get all his rifles, machine guns, artillery and aircraft moved to that stretch of beach and be ready for you. In World War I, the British had to do it in a place called Gallipoli, and it was a disaster. They took heavy casualties and got their butts kicked in a bad defeat, even though their invading force outnumbered the Ottoman defenders, and the defenders weren’t operating at anywhere near full effectiveness because Ottoman Empire and its army was being defeated in the overall war and beginning to break down badly.Prior to that, the Marine Corps was limited in size to that needed for security on Navy ships, and a raid force that could be put ashore for an occasional quick-and-dirty in-and-out mission, not much more. But they looked at this situation and thought, hey, we do this stuff on a small scale all the time anyway, how can we get really good at it so that if America is ever in a similar position, we can do it right, and the same thing never happens to us?In the Pacific, in World War II, the wisdom to prepare and train for such operations was vindicated. The war in the Pacific was about little other than taking south Pacific islands — and the Marines’ reputation as an amphibious force that carries on to this day was sealed.They can’t be everywhere, of course: the largest amphibious assault in American military history occurred on D-Day, in France, in that same war but on the other side of the world — and no Marines were involved in that one.(An 84-man group of Marines on board the USS Texas were ordered to stay on the ship, for reasons that are in dispute to this day. Some say these were fresh, green boot recruits and it was too risky to use them, others say that some senior Army commanders feared being upstaged in some embarrassing way by the Marines — which actually happened a few times during World War I, when the Marines were tossed in with regular Army troops, resulting in some of those larger-than-life stories that are still told about them . . . )But if the Marine Corps is known for no other unique capability, for one thing that no other force in the world can do as well as the Marine Corps can do it, it’s for storming a beach. The “911-force-in-readiness”. The first guys you send in. The kick-in-the-door capability — taking a large piece of ground, perhaps even an entire coastal city, from an awkward position, such as a fleet of ships. It’s not so easy when you can’t just march up on the city you’re trying to seize from adjacent territory.Cold weather combat: General Al Gray had the Corps taking on the task of picking this up as a unique specialty when he was Commandant in the 1980’s. No one else was putting a whole lot into developing the necessary skills and technology for this, and General Gray’s tenure as Commandant followed a rough time in the ‘70’s, when there was actually talk of disbanding the Marine Corps. So, he made it part of his program that these guys need to prove their value, they can’t coast forever on accomplishments of the past, or legend and mythos. Better then to ferret out some needs that might come up for the American military at some point in the future, and develop some more niche capabilities that would make the Marines the ‘go-to’ organization to respond to them, the same as the Marines have been our ‘go-to’ organization for the last hundred years with amphibious warfare, when it becomes time to wage war onto land from the sea.Maneuver warfare. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest pioneered this during the Civil War, but it certainly worked better than set-piece battles of attrition between large, massed forces. Or trench warfare.Because of its small size, the Marine Corps took to it naturally, and ran with it.They didn’t even mind sharing: I found this book (The Marine Corps Way: Using Maneuver Warfare to Lead a Winning Organization by Jason A. Santamaria, Vincent Martino, Eric K. Clemons 1st edition (2003) Hardcover: Vincent Martino, Eric K. Clemons Jason A. Santamaria: Amazon.com: Books) on how to adapt it for business particularly enjoyable, and useful.To oversimplify, you divide up your force into a base and maneuver element. Your base element confronts and attacks your enemy with a frontal attack, and keeps him busy. Your maneuver element swings around to one, comparatively weaker (since you’re shooting at him from the front and his rear and flanks are now relatively undefended) side of him, and from that direction, does the job of doing really serious damage.The four-man fire team. This was pioneered by General Smedley D. Butler, an enigmatic character who remains today an iconic Marine despite his later fame as a critic of American foreign policy and its use of the military — motivated excessively, he felt, by an often inappropriate desire on the part of some in government to protect the interests of American multinational corporations with business interests in the Caribbean and Central America.Today’s Occupy movement would have loved this guy. He felt, very strongly, that the Marine Corps was frequently misused in such ventures, and didn’t mind saying so. If he were around today, he and Anthony Zinni would have a lot to talk about.And this is before we go there about how he perhaps singlehandedly saved the entire nation, from the closest we ever came to having a military coup.Here again, the Marines’ small numbers and limited number of guys they could deploy on a single ship, made it a natural that someone would come up with the smallest imaginable unit — just four guys — have each one of those four guys trained to do a specific job as one of a four-man unit, and build an entire set of tactics around that, and have that four-man unit be nearly as effective as a traditional Army squad.Coordinated air-ground combat: No military organization in the world, military experts agree, does ‘air-ground’ like the Marines. Pretend you’re a bad guy commanding an enemy unit. I’m coming after you along with my three buddies, advancing on your position, but hold up — we see a much larger force ahead, an even larger number of the bad guys under your command waiting for us, or some of your tanks, or something else that’s in the way. So . . . we call in air, and they fly over in a few minutes and drop a few bombs or some napalm a thousand or so yards ahead of us (without hitting us), thus removing whatever’s in the way, and my three buddies and I continue on coming after you and show up on your doorstep for an unpleasant visit . . . That’s an oversimplification, but that’s basically the way it works.It’s why the Marines have their own planes and pilots rather than just using those of the Navy or Air Force: Marine Air does nothing but air-ground. The Air Force or even Navy Air is capable (indeed, the A-10 Thunderbolt is argued to be the best CAS — ‘close air support’ — aircraft out there, and only the Air Force has it: the Marines don’t fly it), but Marines plan for it, train for it (together, the same grunts and airwingers working with each other, at each step of the way), and do it all the time, and are just plain used to doing it.When you’re sending people up against an enemy force that may be numerically superior, and you don’t want to take a chance and it has to be done right the first time, you’re much better off to have the Marines who brought their own air support do it, rather than an Army unit thrown together with an Air Force flight at the last minute.Likewise, the Army is quite capable of amphibious assault (and even has its own fleet of landing craft for it based at Fort Eustis, Virginia: operating, maintaining and training guys to crew those was my father’s job in the Army), but Marines have it as a specialty: they’ve forgotten more than the Army will ever know about how to do amphibious warfare in any conceivable situation and then some. If you want to hit a beach from the sea, and you have a choice (on D-Day, they didn’t and had to go with what they had), you always use Marines because while the Army might be called to do it once in a while and can do it if they have to, Marines have many times over the experience, training, and subject matter expertise within that specialty.It’s not just air-ground: the Marine Corps has invested a lot, over a hundred years, with various technologies (often leftover from the Army or Navy) into the skill of doing more with less, being able to take out superior-sized units with the one Marine unit of whatever size that’s operating in the area.One of those ‘larger than life’ stories that I referenced earlier, that I like (it actually happened), was that a group of Marines back in World War I got separated from their company, and ran into a German battalion. They were captured and asked what unit they were with, and where was its location, and they made up a bullshit story about how their regiment was about four clicks that way . . . So the German battalion commander thought this one over for a few minutes . . . and surrendered his battalion to them. (Hmmm . . . maybe we should have let those guys on the USS Texas land, and seen what they could do . . . )But air-ground capability elevates ‘doing more with less’ to an art form.The negatives:When I was younger, I had my differences with Marine Corps and the military in general. They do tend to completely overwhelm and dominate, both culturally and economically, the local community in many places where they have a base and when I was younger, that frequently provoked some resentment by myself and my friends, even sometimes those from military families.They had both an individual and collective sense of entitlement that can be a bit much, especially when discussing it around civilians who don’t have access to jobs offering nearly the range of benefits. Their sense of brotherhood and community (which also embraces their dependents) is supposed to be one of the greatest things about them — unless you’re outside that community, then you could sometimes feel like an outcast, someone they consider ‘not good enough’ to be one of them. They were part of a community that we were unfit and unworthy to be a part of — right down to the right to live in a secure gated community (the base, where we didn’t have free access), and use facilities there (the PX and the commissary where they could buy things really cheap, the recreation facilities and health care facilities) that we couldn’t use — but demanded to be accepted as fully a part of our community, and respected as the most important part of it.Oh — and they ‘sacrificed’ soo—oo—oo much to be part of the Marine Corps and ‘serve their country’. Don’t get me wrong: I’d never deny or denigrate the contribution of a guy who’s done a couple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, especially a Wounded Warrior, but back in the day, these were guys who were in nice stateside billets at Cherry Point or Lejeune; and the closest any of them ever came to being in harm’s way was a brawl on Court Street in Jacksonville, or the Circle at Atlantic Beach, usually with other Marines. Back in their hometown, they’d whine, they had it so good: they could wear their hair long, party every night, and had a really nice souped up car, and played in a band, and didn’t have to put up with all the Mickey Mouse crap, etc., etc. — and then one night their recruiter got them drunk and they ended up signing a bunch of papers, and leaving it all behind . . .(Well, what were you doing hanging out and drinking with people like that? To this day, I still ain’t believing the number of “my recruiter got me drunk” stories I heard over those years, from so many different guys . . . If you go out drinking with a Marine recruiter that you barely know, guess what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to wake up on a bus somewhere in the swamps of South Carolina at three a.m., and stagger off with a bad headache while a bunch of guys in uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats are screaming at you and shoving you toward a set of yellow footprints on the pavement, and your troubles are only beginning for the next three years at least. Right now, your big problem is making it through the next eleven weeks . . . You’d think it was something that was really happening back then, something that it would have taken a major scandal in the Recruiting Command to clean up that would have been on the news — if there’d been any truth to it at all.)If they weren’t in the service now, they could be working for some aerospace company or government contractor making ten times the money they’re making in the service . . .(Cut the crap: you signed up for the same reason anyone else signs up, the same reason I tried to get into the Navy, and even the Army — you couldn’t afford, or didn’t have the grades, to go to college; and you couldn’t get a freakin’ decent job in your hometown. And you’d heard something about some job training in it for you: that’s where you got what you know that has you thinking you could be making a zillion bucks a year working for some government contractor. No one’s telling you you gotta re-enlist: you can get out when your time’s up and THEN you can go to work for Dynacorp . . . Even without my having known guys over the years who explained how it all works and called it out for me, common sense would tell you that yes, the military will invest a great deal of valuable training in you, but when they commit to that, they’re going to make sure you’re contractually obliged to stay in the service long enough afterward so that they get what they feel is a fair return on the investment. If they send you to a school for a year to train you to do a certain job, you’re going to have to stay in for at least another year or two afterward doing that job for them: if you don’t have that much time left on your enlistment, you’re either going to have to re-enlist or extend, or they’re not going to send you to that school . . .)My view of them also came from a low point in their history: the late seventies, when I was a teenager. The late sixties, I’m told, were even worse, with a lot of guys in the Corps to avoid the draft: they kicked a bunch of the shitbirds out after the Vietnam War ended, but my experience of it in the seventies was that they missed quite a few. They still had a lot of guys that shouldn’t have been there; the kind of guys who some judge back in their hometown gave them the choice of going into the military or going to prison (some of them even made good use of the opportunity, and over time got themselves straight). The kind of guys who, for all their being part of a thing that rated all of this ooh-ahh respect that they demanded, weren’t so respectable. There were some decent people in the Corps, but it certainly wasn’t something you could count on with all of them.I remember one Marine who worked part time in my dad’s bike shop telling me, back in the day, you could leave your wallet laying on your bunk in the barracks and no one would touch it: nowadays, you’d better lock it in your locker and sleep with the key on a cord around your neck. I saw quite a few of the ones who could get two weeks’ pay on Friday, and have nothing to show for it Saturday morning except a hangover. Drug use was rampant. Their contribution to the local crime rate was quite significant.The Marine Corps itself, as an institution, was lacking in sense of mission: there was even talk in the early seventies about maybe even disbanding it; of reallocating its air assets to the Navy or Air Force, and folding the rest of it into the Army.Give the Marine Corps credit: it’s changed quite a bit. All of this was before General Al Gray (who at the time I lived in Jacksonville, became commander of the 2nd Marine Division at Lejeune) became Commandant, cleaned it up, ran out the undesirables, and began redefining the Corps’ mission. You still see the occasional problem children, but a lot of work has gone into keeping everyone, from senior officers all the way to the lowest ranks, in tune with the culture, giving “honor, courage and commitment” a meaning and guidance on how it’s supposed to apply in every situation. Before Al Gray, UA’s — unauthorized absences, losers who would just leave for several days (‘AWOL’ is the Army term) — averaged two per company (100 or so guys) at any given moment: since Al Gray, UA’s average two per division (20,000 or so guys). If I could give one guy credit for turning the whole thing around . . . Well, anyway, it’s a very different Corps now.I began to see and appreciate the other side of it one night in Havelock, N. C., in October, 1983. I was standing on the side of the highway, waiting for a ride, near the turnoff to the main gate of Cherry Point. A few days before, the Marine barracks in Beirut, where the 22nd MEU was maintaining a presence, was blown up by a truck bomb: you know about that one from your history books. Suddenly, the cops showed up, shut off the stoplights at that intersection and blocked traffic, and about three dozen ambulances rolled off the base in a convoy, headed apparently to the larger Naval Regional Medical Center in Camp Lejeune (no way the hospital at Cherry Point can handle that many coming in at once). These were carrying the guys that weren’t among the 305 killed in that attack. You could glimpse through the windows of the passing ambulances and see some of them, bandaged up, as they passed, and get some idea of the extent, if not precisely the sort, of injuries that were dished out to them. I remember thinking as they passed, most of these guys aren’t bad guys. Some of them can be a bit much in some ways, a few of them are just plain assholes through and through. But nobody deserves this . . . Shoot, it’s just fine with me if we send a few more guys, and a lot more hardware, and maybe a nuke or two, over there and do something about it!The only reason I could imagine wanting to live in Havelock, or Jacksonville, at this point in my life, if I didn’t have other fish to fry, is that you could make a fortune down there just buying houses, fixing them up, and flipping them. For all the Marines are taught about how the military pay system works, and money management, during boot camp and other training; many of them seem to be quite lacking in money management skills. They’re young, they’re suddenly making all this money, car dealers and electronics store owners and real estate brokers literally trip all over each other to extend credit to them (yes, if you’re paid by the government, you’re contractually obliged to remain in the military for a fixed number of years, and you sign an ‘allotment’ allowing the government to deduct the payments from your pay every month and send them directly to them, then your credit is golden — at least until you find a way to screw it up, and even then, you can fix it back within a few years if you stay in); they think they can do anything with it, so they try to do just that, and they overextend themselves. They get easy VA financing for 100% of the cost of the home, somehow can’t manage the debt, something goes wrong, a deployment, a permanent change of station, a divorce, whatever — and they lose the house. I was quite impressed — and at the same time, somewhat saddened — with the number of foreclosed homes that you could buy in those areas for fifty grand or under, fix them up (the more irresponsible ones do tend to let them run down quite badly between time of purchase and time of foreclosure), and re-sell them for twice what you’d pay for them. And then they come back from deployment, or another permanent change of station, or whatever, and get another VA loan, and do it all again. Buying houses around Havelock, or Jacksonville, and flipping them might be the next best thing to being a government contractor.And this is in spite of the fact that any surrounding acreage seems to be bought up as fast as it comes available, as soon as either of those towns expands to a point close to it, and gets subdivided for residential use — developers hoping to get a piece of that VA financing money.It’s very shortsighted and the local civilian zoning boards need to cut it out. It’s costing them every year that it continues — and the cost to the area is in the form of permanent damage to its economy.One of the things that I remember hearing a lot of emphasis upon in that part of the country back in the day, is the Marine Corps’ ‘contributions’ to the economy. If they weren’t there — obviously — there wouldn’t be an economy.Well, yes . . . the economy is there. And the people who benefit from it, benefit nicely from it. While it lasts.And forgive me if I sound a bit seditious, and heretical, and unpatriotic . . . but the economy in Havelock, and Jacksonville, is actually one of the most unhealthy local economies in the country.It’s big. Too big. And it’s through and through, a company town. There’s no diversity in it at all. That’s never good.If the entire 2nd Marine Air Wing were to deploy at once, Havelock becomes a ghost town overnight. The same goes for Jacksonville if the entire 2nd Marine Division ships out. (During Desert Storm in 1990, it actually happened.) And when that happens (and you know it’s going to happen sooner or later: otherwise, why do we have a Marine Corps?), your economy is gone, and you don’t know when it’s coming back.There goes your jobs. There goes your ability to make your mortgage payments, or even pay your credit cards. Any dependents that are left behind are having to live on a government allotment. Unless you’re one of the fortunate few employed on the base, you’re screwed. Not even McDonald’s is hiring if there’s no one in line to buy Big Macs.If a really bad war happens and they stay gone for a few years, you’ve got your Detroit starter kit, right there in place. Failed businesses. Limited employment opportunities, lots of empty buildings, and financial and even security problems for the families that remain behind.I don’t resent the Corps, or even the local economic dependence on the government. I just think it would be better for all involved if the local economy were diversified a bit, if the area wasn’t so completely dependent upon the government, and the Marine Corps. You really need other industry there, some activity in the area other than the Marine Corps and the government, that brings in money from outside the area and provides decent jobs that will enable and incentivize people to live there on a permanent basis, put down roots in the community, and offer it continuing stability.Even the Marines and their families should be able to understand that, and respect that, and even see some benefits to themselves and their own community in it. (Do you guys want to live next to a town where it seems that all that the local inhabitants study is how to milk money out of the guys off the base and their families, like yourselves? Wouldn’t you like being able to come off the base and have something in your surroundings besides cheap crappy rental housing, marginal struggling retail, and typical-military-town beer joints and trailer parks?)How does one start a tech incubator? Something like that would seem a natural for Havelock given the skill sets available in the area, but the answers I got back when I asked the question indicate that there are still a few very important pieces missing, and putting those in place might be a bit of a challenge, if it’s possible at all . . .Let’s give these Marine towns something: the housing sector is disproportionately large (which was the recipe for Vegas and Phoenix and many parts of Florida, circa 2008 — ‘Foreclosure City’ in each spot . . . banks actually foreclosing entire subdivisions whose homes had not yet sold from the developers who built them, then bulldozing over the brand new houses just to get them off the market), and you’re never going to have any light industry there to diversify it because there is no space, no available land unless you drive ten miles out of town, and that’s being snapped up.Next to the government, the (distant) second most active contributor to the economy in Havelock is subdivisions.The bottom line:I like the Marine Corps, and I’ve had my differences with them over the years.They’re human. (Occasionally, that’s been the subject of some dispute, but they really are.) The Corps — both the organization and the individual Marines who are its members — has its their good points and bad, its virtues and vices, its strengths and weaknesses, their magnificence and their garbage.They’re like our wayward children sometimes: they deserve more than we’re often able to, or than we’d like to, give them; but occasionally they seem a little spoiled and feel entitled to everything they want, and go about demanding it all with an attitude that tells you that no matter what you do for them, or how much money you throw at them, it’s never going to be enough. (Special interest groups having to do with public education, and people with disabilities, can have the same annoying tendency. They provide something of incalculable value, or have suffered something of incalculable cost, so their logic tells them, no matter what you could do for them, you’d still owe them, and you’ll never even out. They forget sometimes that there’s a limit to what we can do for them in return . . .)Nowadays, I don’t live in a military town. I haven’t had a need to set foot on a base — and deal with the aggravation of access and getting a pass at the gate, and providing a justification for my presence that will fly with them, and dealing with the Mickey Mouse crap from a 21-year-old MP with some discretionary authority to wildly swing around, and arbitrarily granted or denied access, and being told I can’t buy so much as a soda at an exchange store without a military ID — in years. And I’m older now.From that much distance in time and space, I can like and admire what I like and admire about the military, and not have the things that drove me nuts about them flaunted in my face day to day. Sometimes, the way to deal with them is leave them be and stay out of their way.But . . . we’re honored to know them, and are much safer day to day knowing they’re there. The Marine Corps is like your brother-in-law or your wife’s nephew: on a good day they’re almost family, you share a lot of stories and history, you’re there for each other, there’s a lot of great things you can do together, they have a lot to offer — but you’d really rather not have them out of work, showing up on your doorstep and having to move in with you for lack of anywhere else to go, crashing on your couch, eating up all your food, taking over the place, and crowding you.