From the Halls of Montezuma To the OGCP's Cellar Office

Slinking into the OGCP yesterday morning to escape the SDS picketers due to arrive two hours later. I sidled up to one of the chic secretaries that populate the office and nervously whispered. "I'm here to see the, uh. Marine recruiter." She managed to keep a straight face and directed me to the Marine recruiting officer, safely hidden in the OGCP basement.

I had sort of expected to find a steely, crew-cut sergeant, but instead I was greeted by a mild, soft-spoken captain, who seemed as nervous as I. However, he did not exactly look effete behind three rows of medals, including a Vietnam War ribbon and a silver medal with "Expert" written on it, and he appeared to be a little surprised to see me fruiting in the door. After a few polite preliminaries, he looked at me and asked increduously. "Are you really interested in becoming a Marine?" I explained that I "want to keep my options open."

He talked about character building, discipline, and fighting elites for a while, and I asked him if all the training and tradition ever made the Marines a little over-eager. He answered that in the early heavy fighting in Vietnam in '68, "the Marines had often charged up hills when they should have stayed at the bottom," and that his chief problem as an officer in Vietnam was to get his men to treat the Vietnamese "as human beings." "There were a lot of casualties caused by my men driving 60 miles an hour through the native villages," he said.

He didn't seem very interested in probing my character, so I blundered on, asking him if the disappearance of ROTC at universities like Harvard had affected the Marine Corps. This roused him slightly, and he launched into a lecture on the necessity of Harvard, etc., men in the armed services.

He explained that he didn't "want to see a Corps" composed of "a Virginia redneck caste of officers," and that he himself was a Dartmouth man, sympathetic to "liberal, intellectual colleges in the Northeast." "When I talk to the Texas A.M. boys," he smiled and said, "I know I'm superior."

He added that the Marine Corps is making an attempt to improve its recruiting in the Northeast. Such recruiting has dropped off at the two traditional sources of Marine officers. Boston College and Holy Cross. "We used to be able to walk on the B.C. campus and pick up 20 or 30 men. Now there is more organized resistance at B.C. than anywhere else," he said.

The college that supplies more Marine officers than any other college in New England, he added, is Harvard