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As a youngster growing up in rural Pennsylvania during the Second World War, I realize now that we were pretty isolated and didn’t know much about what was going on in the world. We had no television until about 1950 or 1951. We didn’t even get the newspaper until I was ten or eleven, which would have been in 1948 or 1949. I can vaguely remember Gabriel Heatter on the radio speaking about the war. But I do remember the gas ration stamps and collecting tin and tinfoil for the war effort. Looking back over my life, I realize now the importance of having a fairly strict upbringing. We all had our chores to do every day, more in the summer months than in the wintertime. In the growing season we planted crops every year in the meadow. It was rocky ground and every year we had to pick rocks off the “patch.” We built a sizable rock wall built alongside the curb that ran by our house. I can remember riding the big white workhorse “Prince” to plow the garden. Dad also had a walk behind cultivator. It was a Bolens tractor. Later on he got a Model T Ford truck and cut the frame shorter to make a tractor out of it. It had much larger tires on the back and it had no exhaust system at all. When you started it, the fire blew right out the side of the engine where the manifold was supposed to be! We really had a great childhood because when we did our chores for the day we had free time then to do things. I had two good friends, Levi Walter and Luther Dodson when I was young. Our neighbors, the Divelys, had four boys: Jack, Johnnie, Ross and Morgan. They were pretty poor because their Dad never recovered from being in World War II. He was on Iwo Jima as a Marine, and was never able to hold a good full time job. They had a very hard life. I remember being over there at meal time and I never saw them eat anything except
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oatmeal! Ike Dively used to get very drunk and that’s the only time he would talk about killing Japs! One year for Christmas when I was twelve years old (1950) I got a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. I remember it like it was yesterday! I never loved my parents more than I did that Christmas! We usually got one great gift each year. Another special Christmas I remember was when I was probably seven or eight. Uncle Adam Weyandt bought me a set of two metal revolvers with holsters and a belt. I was so proud! In the winter months we didn’t have near as many chores to do. So Levi Walter and I did a lot of hunting and trapping for muskrat. We had loads of fun riding sleds on the road from the Burkett farm above to Joe Perry’s farm about a mile away. We also used to ice skate on the ponds a lot. I can’t remember the year, but probably in 1953 or 1954, I got a Winchester single shot .22 rifle for Christmas. That’s when I began hunting in earnest. Then to my complete surprise, the next Christmas I got a Winchester single shot Steelbuilt Model 37, 16 gauge shotgun. That year I nailed 49 squirrel tails to the smokehouse door! The summer I turned sixteen, I worked all summer and stayed at Blair Sell’s lumber camp in Huntington County. Tom Sell and I would offload lumber from the sawyer and stack it to air dry at the mill. We would also load and unload lumber by hand and it was delivered on a straight flatbed truck Johnny Sell would drive the truck and we would go along to unload it. I worked that summer for three months and made $35.00. That was the most
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money I ever had in my life. We had free time that summer to hunt and fish after working hours. During my high school years I never could decide what I wanted to do with my life. The chance of a college education was pretty remote. Just in case, I took the academic curriculum hoping I might get a chance to go to school. My grades weren’t that great; sometimes just 90-92 average. Everything seemed to come easy for me except algebra. And the fact that I was lazy when it came to studying didn’t help me much. I was always very shy about girls in school and never had a date. The only thing I really wanted to do during high school was to play football. Coach Wear used to bug me every year to play, but Mom always said, “What if you get hurt; what then?” But I knew in my heart the reason was that I had no transportation and no time to practice. I never had a car in my high school years. I learned driving my Dad’s ’49 Chevy. The day we graduated was a very sad day for me. Luther Dodson, Levi Walter and I used to hang out a lot during the months of May and June. Levi somehow acquired a very old Cadillac convertible and we would ride around Claysburg, Portage, and Duncansville looking for trouble. I never smoked (at least much) or drank because I knew if Mom found out, it would be the hickory stick for me. We did try to make our own smokes occasionally. One time I got into Dad’s cigarette machine and made some, but we never really enjoyed smoking. It was a short-lived experience. Late in June of that year (1956), Luther got the idea to join the service. I admit I had been thinking the same thing. We just couldn’t decide what branch to join. We finally came up with the notion that we wanted to come out of boot camp being the best trained we could 4
be. So by June 20th, Luther and I decided we would join the Marines. Neither of us had any idea what to expect, because neither of us talked to anyone about it, or ever even knew any Marines (except Ike Dively). And it turned out that there was a terrible incident that occurred right before we signed up. No one in our neighborhood saw it on television or heard about it. The scandal was that S/Sgt McKeon in Parris Island led his platoon of raw recruits through the swamps of Ribbon Creek, and drowned six men. In fact, we never heard about this until a year after we were in the Marines. Anyway, we signed up at the recruitment office in Altoona. We went by train to Pittsburgh and were sworn in there. Then we went by train to Yenisei, South Carolina and by bus from Yenisei to Parris Island. It was a long trip! We made a friend at Pittsburgh named McCree who traveled with us.
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When we got off the bus at Parris Island it was after dark. And it was such a shock to hear the language the Drill Instructor used to get us to move. I don’t know if I should record this, but he used words like a…hole, turds, scum, and lily-livered scum buckets. When I think back about our first days there, my memory is kind of muddled. But I can remember everything was “double-time.” You couldn’t talk to a D.I. without first saying, “Sir, Private So and So wishes to speak to the Drill Instructor, sir!” We were issued clothes in a sea bag; or duffel bag as civilians call it. We were also given a locker box for under our bunk, and both were filled. We had to carry the locker box on our shoulder and the duffle bag on our other arm, and were told to double time it to the barracks. Some guys made it fifty yards before falling over; some a lot further. I don’t know exactly how far I made it but I ran out of breath, upchucked on my sea bag, and fell down exhausted. Again, the words that came out of the D.I.’s mouth were ugly. He would say, “You @x#@ing rejects expect to be Marines?” The second big shock after the fiasco of the first day was mustering for breakfast. But before that we had to get up at 4:00 a.m. and get into our uniform of the day to run around the parade ground race track. Then we had to get into ranks to go to the “head” or bathroom. When Platoon #221 was in ranks, the D.I. said, “When I say “at ease” you have ten minutes to go in, shower and shave, and be back in ranks at attention.” Of course we didn’t make it because if everyone was back except one, we failed. The whole platoon paid the penalty, which was more double-time. I began to appreciate my days of running up and down the ridges in Pennsylvania!
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Anyways, back to breakfast: we had a very short time to eat. For the first time I got a look at creamed chipped beef on toast, or as a Marine says, “shit on a shingle.” I looked at fried potatoes and cheesy looking eggs and decided I was not hungry. Several days later, with the exact same breakfast, I was eating everything in sight! Growing up at home, we never ate a large breakfast, usually just cereal or oatmeal. I did drink a lot of milk as a teenager, probably about a gallon a day. But I was skinny at 153 pounds when I joined the Marines. I don’t know how, but I gained 23 pounds in boot camp. We did a lot of pushups, grass drills, squat thrusts, and many exercises I had never done before. My legs were powerful, but my upper body was not developed. During the thirteen weeks of training, I gained all that weight. A lot of guys had problems, especially Gordon Smith from Bethesda, Maryland. (I suspect the kid came from a rich family). He could never shine his shoes right. Again, I thought back to home, because every Saturday night Mom made us shine our shoes for church on Sunday. So I think I had a leg up where shoe shining was concerned. But Gordon Smith was always in trouble. He dropped his rifle one day during inspection. As punishment, the D.I, S/Sgt Feemster made him hold out his arms and starting at the first rank, everyone gave him their rifle. After receiving eight or nine weapons, he slowly sank to the ground. Then he had to dig a hole and bury his rifle with full military honors. Then he had to dig it up and clean it for inspection. Finally Gordon had to field strip and sleep with his rifle all night. He never dropped it again! 7
J. T. Hale was a big hairy guy from New York. I felt so sorry for him, because he could shave at 5:00 a.m. and an hour later he needed to shave again. The D.I.s had a field day with him. I remember some other guys from boot camp. Buddy Reeves became a friend, and we visited him later in 1965 and again in 2005 in South Carolina. Bill Kirk was a short guy who was always in trouble. He remained a private for his whole tour. Albert M. D’Amico was the instigator of a lot of blanket parties. The first several weeks all melted into one long day for me. It all became routine: running in the morning for an hour, going to the showers, going to breakfast, and then getting in uniform for the day (utilities) for close order drill. Close order drill caused a lot of problems. We had a great guy for guide arm bearer in Buddy Reeves. He was from South Carolina and was about 6’2” tall with a ruddy complexion. But however good you are, there’s always about ten percent of the people who can’t get it. This was so true in close order drill. Gordon Scott got a blanket party (code red) almost every night in the barracks. He would mess up, and then the whole platoon would suffer. We would come back to the barracks, and everyone was dog tired. There would be our Quonset hut with the bunks upside down, butt kits with sand scattered all over the mattresses, and everything in chaos. Then we had to work like dogs to clean up the mess for inspection. It seems like the guy or guys who always instigated a blanket party were Italians from New York. A blanket party is when you throw a blanket over the victim so he doesn’t know who is beating him up.
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I had a fairly clean slate as far as incidents go until the time Mom sent a box of goodies from home. T/Sgt Wells called me to his hut and made me eat the whole bag of cookies. He asked me if I thought the Marine Corps food wasn’t good enough for me. Then he made me hang by my elbows on top of a metal wall locker while he jabbed me in the ribs with his swagger stick. It seems like I hung there for hours, but it was probably about thirty minutes. Midway through our training we had to go on a forced march of 12 miles. We camped out over night and headed back the next day. I was starting to love this stuff by then. Pretty soon hereafter we took off for the rifle range. It was hot! It was 96 to 100 degrees just about every day we were there. I couldn’t believe we were doing this. We had no live ammo the entire first week there. We just practiced on the sight and clicked on the target (how boring!). We had to do this offhand position, (standing), sitting, kneeling, and in prone position for a whole week. We all had to pull one week of mess hall duty while we were at the rifle range. It was unusual because we had to serve officers at mess. In other words, we had to be like waiters. Most of the officers were extremely rude and sarcastic. Finally, we got live ammunition and we shot 200 yards offhand, 200 and 300 yards sitting and kneeling, and 500 yards prone. We also practiced rapid fire at 200 and 300 yards. We did this for four days, and I did average, which was considered marksman. At last, record day came. I said a prayer. I don’t know why God would care about anyone shooting a gun, but I just prayed that I could do my best, Miracles happen! I shot expert at 200 and 300 yards. I still don’t know how I accomplished this. I was also voted the outstanding member of
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Platoon 221. I was also the outstanding marksman and made a Private First Class out of boot camp, which is rare. When we returned from the rifle range, our neighboring platoon had just returned too. They were all outdoors cleaning their weapons, which were MI rifles. My D.I., S/Sgt Feemster, who was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, told me to sweep up the deck before we started to clean our own rifles. I swept and the other platoon leader next door told me their D.I. wanted to see me. So I went and reported to him. He asked (in very bad language), what I thought I was doing. I repeated my D.I.’s orders and the next thing I knew I was laying on the ground and someone was giving me smelling salts! We learned much later that 1956 was a turning point in Marine Corps training. Most of Marine Corps Boot camp training is to determine how you will behave under stress. The physical training is tough but I believe the mental part is much tougher. The main emphasis is to get everyone working as a unit. After boot camp, we had a furlough before we returned for a month long bout in Combat Infantry Training at Camp Geiger. I still can’t believe I got all these awards out of boot camp. I knew so many guys who deserved it more than me. We had either a ten day or two week long furlough in October. My cousin Peggy Glass got me a date with Florence. At first, I didn’t want to go because I was still very shy and uncomfortable around girls. I finally went to her parent’s home in Queen and was immediately awestruck by her beauty and demeanor at our first meeting. I didn’t recall ever talking to her in high school since she had a totally different curriculum from me. We had a couple of dates and it seemed my leave was over so quickly! 10
Back at Camp Geiger, North Carolina, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump from Parris Island, we started immediately on infantry training. We were broken down into four man squads, and I was made squad leader. Guess what I got to use? A 20 pound Browning BAR, which is an automatic or semi-automatic rifle. That thing got very heavy on a forced march or while double timing it around the parade grounds at “port arms.” Being in this training during November, it was pretty cold. I remember enjoying this training because it was more in the line of what I thought we should have been doing from the very beginning. We still had a lot of P.T., running the morning hours, but then we did a lot of individual training. We did a lot of shooting at pop-up targets that came out of nowhere. We climbed ropes with a full pack, and crawled under barbed wire with machine fire over top of us. I am sure that they were shooting blanks. Then we were sent on nighttime excursions into the pine forest with a map and a compass. We had to find our way back. Along the way we would encounter machine gun fire from out of nowhere. This was exciting. On all the nighttime outings we were given blank ammo. After several of these outings, some of us wised up and didn’t fire our weapons as much, because the blanks really fouled up your rifle. Close to the end of our training one night we got to see a 75MM Recoilless Rifle firing live with white phosphorous ammo. It glows in the dark and you can actually see the path of the rounds and they hit the target with an awesome white explosion. The noise from these guns were so loud, it was deafening. Here is a picture of the gun:
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During our hand grenade training, we were all in line waiting our turn and Bill Kirk behind me, who I thought was my friend, loosened my cap on my canteen. When I pulled the pin, threw the grenade, and then fell to the prone position, all that cold water ran up my back. I never did get any retribution against him! After I.T.R., ended we were put in temporary housing for a while and I had two M.O.S.s. The first was 2nd Recon, and then that changed to the Air Wing at Cherry Point, North Carolina. Then that was changed again to my third and final M.O. S., which was 2531 (Voice Radio Operator) to the 8th Command Battalion right at Camp Geiger. I was decimated! I so wanted (I thought) to be in an outfit that did other things than communicate. I was in for a surprise! All the while, I kept thinking of back home and another date with Florence. Sometimes this part of the picture gets blurry to me, and I can’t remember exactly, but we had either twelve or sixteen weeks of training, and a lot of it was classroom training. We 12
had old equipment, like the hand held PRC-6 radio, which was good for 5 to 10 miles, depending on conditions. We had the Angry “9�, (the AN/GRC-9) which was a hand cranked generator set to voice radio, which was good for a little longer distance. But then we had a huge trailer that had a teletype unit, where we could communicate in code. I ended up getting secret clearance for this job. Mom and Dad got calls investigating my background.
PRC-6 We had a fleet of large 6X6 trucks with trailers that had huge diesel powered generators. We were responsible for these vehicles and had to get them through inspection. Believe me, they had to be clean inside and out. I’m talking engine compartments, wheel wells, and everything. I suppose this is where I got the habit of excessive preventative maintenance on all my vehicles. After communication school ended, things melded into a routine of work and inspections. I kept thinking about Mom back home a lot, and the possibility of another date with Flo. 13
During this time, we got assigned to do one month of duty in the Mess Hall. I remember my job as linebacker. I had to hand all the food to the line. We had to clean the hall two times every day. We scrubbed with soap and water and scrub brushes. We squeegee’d it out with a dry mop. Even with all this cleaning roaches were everywhere. You could go in at 4:00 a.m. and lift a table a couple inches of the deck. When you dropped it, roaches ran everywhere. I remember the Mess Hall got sprayed one night and that morning we shoveled and swept out the roaches into G.I. cans! We finally started getting 96 hour passes. Luther and I would catch a ride from Mainside with a guy from Pittsburgh who had a 1950 Ford. We’d ride with him to Breezewood or Bedford and hitch the rest of the way home. I got to see Flo again! I can’t remember how many passes we got, but every time we went I went to see her. One weekend, a kid named Garr and I rented a canoe at Mainside on Sunday afternoon and went out past the sign that read, Do Not Go Beyond This Point. We became very sorry that we did. We got into white water and it seemed that the more we rowed to get inland, the farther out we went. It was rough and we battled the waves and the current for at least two hours. We finally got back and were so fatigued, that we laid stone still on the beach for hours. But before we knew it, the summer of ’57 was over. In October of 1957 we were given three weeks’ notice before we left for a Mediterranean tour. I got a series of painful inoculations. We left out of Morehead City, North Carolina on a troop transport ship. I had the bottom bunk in a series four bunks high. On the very first night my canvas ripped down the middle and I ended up sleeping on the deck. When we entered the Mediterranean, we transferred to an LST, the USS Westchester County. The food
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was bad on the troop ship, but it was awful on the LST. We had to stand guard on the tank deck, where all the vehicles were. This was nice, because as guards, we had the chance to eat the “C� rations out of the vehicles. We had liberty at Alicante, Spain. Nothing exciting happened there, but we did have a meal on shore. The next stop was in Taranto, Italy, right on the boot of Italy. We had an exciting taxi ride through the town. There were a lot of oneway streets and intersections with no traffic signals. Everyone just blew their horn at intersections and kept on going. Our restaurant was in a narrow alley, and our taxi driver drove fast. Picture us, flying through small streets and alleys with chickens flying out of the way as we went! It was just like in a WWII movie. USS Winchester County
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Our next stop was Corfu, Greece. This was an exciting stop. We bought some kind of liquor off a fishing boat at the dock, per the insistence of Bill Kirk. We got hammered early. Bill wanted to enter a bordello, but I would have none of that. He was so plastered, I talked him into leaving. The next thing I knew, we were in a fight with a bunch of sailors. The next thing I remember after the fight was being put on the ship by M.P.s. We were lifted over the side in a big net on the end of a boom. Next I saw Lieutenant Colonel Hunt, Commander of the 4th Battalion being carried up the gangplank! What a night. The next day was awful. I couldn’t eat for twenty-four hours, and just had enough energy to make muster in the morning. I had no more liquor the rest of the trip!
I got to drive a 6X6 trailer off the tank decks of the L.S. T. (Landing ship tank), the U.S.S. Westchester Co. in Saros Bay off the Coast of Turkey. I drove up the wire mesh that the C.B.s 16
(Construction Battalion) laid out in the beach. This was our next stop, and I found this to be pretty exciting. On a bright, beautiful morning we offloaded all the vehicles from the tank deck up onto the beach. After everyone was safe on shore, we took a dip in the water, jellyfish and all. We made our way about ten or fifteen miles up into the mountains and set up bivouacs, stringing camouflage nets over everything and settled in for the night. I can’t remember how long we stayed in Turkey, but I do remember it was very hot in the day and very, very cold at night. I got to see real Turkish soldiers up close. They all had handle-bar moustaches and curved swords, and dressed in heavy green wool uniforms. This country was very poor and mostly desert, with few trees and lots of sand. In the middle of the night I remember hearing some chanting coming over the radio. It was probably Muslims doing their vespers or whatever they call their call to prayers. When we left Turkey, after about a week, we set out for the return trip to Morehead City, North Carolina. It took us 35 days via the U.S.S. Westchester County. The LST is flatbottomed, so in heavy seas it lifts and bottoms out with a shudder that vibrates the whole ship. We broke down three times in the Mediterranean. That fall, I got another stripe and was promoted to Corporal. This was a big step, because then I had to count cadence and march the platoon to Mess Hall and different places. I couldn’t help thinking, “Why me?” It seemed like my gunny sergeant was always calling me to do things. One thing every Marine remembers is the Marine Corps birthday on November 10, 1775. On that day, we were all treated like royalty. We still had regular reveille at the same time, but we were given a day off regular duty. We had the day to do personal tasks, like writing
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letters, or whatever you wanted to do. The Mess Hall was a different place. It was stockpiled with different foods than we normally ate. Ham, turkey, fruit of all kinds, and even pastries covered the tables. We could eat all we wanted and were even allowed “to go� bags to stash at our bunks That winter we had a field excursion that lasted a week. I was driving a 6X6 truck with a trailer that had a generator on board. One night while driving, my dingy wheel dropped down and got bent. I thought the Warrant Officer was going to nail me to a cross and crucify me. He told me I would be up before a court martial trial for being so slack in my duties I worried, but time passed and I never heard another word about the aforementioned mishap. During all this training we had to spend time on guard duty and fire watch duty. A lot of times we wondered what we were guarding. We were trained that if we were ever captured by the enemy we would only reveal the following: Name: Clair Glass Rank: Corporal Serial Number: 1612941 Another thing every Marine knows is his rifle number. Mine was No 4280348. After boot camp training, the only other weapons I fired were the Browning BAR and the .45 caliber handgun. This weapon was reserved for officers only and we only got to shoot it to try it out.
.45 caliber handgun circa 1945
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The Bill Kirk I knew in the 8th Command was so much like the Bill Kirk I knew at the Pepco Control Center, it was remarkable. They were both very short in stature. Both had the same mental attitude about life. “What; me worry?” was their viewpoint. Both of them would do things that would end up getting me in trouble. Bill at the control center told me many times when I relieved him from his shift that there was not much going on but regular work. Five minutes later, I would be getting calls asking me to switch out a circuit for someone having trouble! Back at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina again, when we did get liberty to go off base, the closest place was Jacksonville, N.C. It was full of restaurants and beer joints. When we got a chance to go there, many of he guys couldn’t wait to go to a food joint that served burgers and fries and milkshakes. They called it “freedom food.” One night Bill Kirk talked me into going with him to a place called “The Hole in the Wall.” It served pizza and beer, and needless to say, we had more beer than pizza. The next day I was so drunk, my bunk was spinning in circles. I was so sick, that I never went with him again! Every time we got a 96 hour pass, I wanted to go home because I couldn’t stop thinking about Florence.
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