A Short Story About Chance, Luck And Kharma-Part 4

If you have never been thru Marine Corps boot camp I'll try to give you a little peek at what goes on. They arrange it so you arrive about 2:00 A. M. It starts immediatly as you step off the bus from the airport. The D. I.'s are screaming at the top of their lungs telling you to line up on the yellow footprints on the the asphalt. It goes nonstop from that point on. You are marched to a barracks where you are issued all of your military clothing, then to another where you remove and package your civilian clothes and ship them home. Somewhere in this mayley your head is shaved down to bare skin by barbers who have no feelings and very dull clippers. Next you are taken to your new home for the next few months and told to mark all of your clothing with stamping kits you have been issued. You spend the rest of the day running and doing exercises while you are being yelled at and called every kind of low life the D. I. can think of. You are finally put to bed about 10:00 P. M. that night totally exhausted.

Now is the time you are wondering what the hell you have gotten yourself into. And your thoughts are drifting back to your home in Kansas. To make matters worse the Recruit Depot in San Diego is right next to the airport where you arrived. You hear the planes landing and taking off all night long and you wish you were on one of those planes headed home.

Back to labeling the clothes for a bit. In the military you go by your last name first then your initials. Most of the guys that were in my platoon in boot camp I only know by thier last name. I never got close enough with the majority of them to find out what thier first names were. And so I sat there marking my stuff, Luck EE. That's right my given name was Edward E Luck. Mom didn't want to give me a middle name but Dad insisted on at least giving me a middle initial. So it was I was Edward E. And Lord only knows what the "E" was for. Anyway the D. I's had a field day with the Luck EE stamped on my fatigue's.

Thier main goal was to break us down to dirt, then build us back up again to thier standard. It was a rewarding experience in the end but I don't wish to repeat it. One of the recruits died during training. The D. I.s said it was heart failure, not surprising.

Butch, Woodrow, Roger and I were together in the same platoon. But that was as far as the"Buddy System" went. After boot camp we went seperate ways, but all were in basic infantry. And would all end up in Viet Nam in different units.

It's a wonder as many can live thru a war and return home in one piece physically. It is such a time that you begin to start thinking about chance, luck and kharma. Your spiritual beliefs are stretched to the max and then you question how there could even be a god. If there were, how could he allow such horror?

Anyway, Butch, Woodrow, Roger and I all returned home physically intact, which to me is an amazing fact when you consider our units were in some of the worst combat that occured in the I Corps (northern south viet nam).

But little did we know that something even far more evil than what Victor Charlie threw at us would follow us back to the real world.

Fiction ? By X.