The Fellowship of the Hole

The original members of the Fellowship of the Hole.
I'm the ridiculously handsome one on the left.

Hello again, Dear Reader.  It’s been a while.  You look great! Have you lost weight?  Just kidding, we’re Americans, so you probably haven’t lost weight…  As for me, I find myself in Iraq.  Again.  I’m on what we call an “individual augment” or “IA” for short.  That means they pluck you randomly and out of the blue from whatever life you thought you were leading and stick you somewhere else where the quality of life sucks.  It wouldn’t be so bad if they sent me someplace exciting, you know like with bullets whizzing by in a hot LZ.  But alas, they sent me to another boring staff job, just now I live in a dismal little trailer-type thing with brown linoleum walls.  Being sequestered in Mesopotamia as I am, my usual diversions in life are greatly reduced—I’ve been here 2 months now, and I’m starting to get a little stir-crazy.  So, I felt it might be a good way to pass the time to start writing silly blog posts again.  And here we are.  I’m also trying to learn the ukulele, if you can believe that.  More on all of that later.  What I want to do today is tell you another Marine Corps “sea story,” as we call them, mostly to remind myself of why I still do this stuff.

The Fellowship of the Hole

               When I’m not getting IA’d to butt-fucking Iraq, I have a job in the Pentagon advocating for the combat engineer community in the Marine Corps.  It’s actually an interesting job, and has landed me in some unusual places to watch things explode a few times, which I find most enjoyable.  Almost exactly a year ago, in December of 2017, I had just such an opportunity.  There was to be a huge exercise on the West Coast and as a part of that exercise, 1^st Combat Engineer Battalion (at the time commanded by a good friend of mine, Chris Haar) was going to conduct live-fire amphibious rehearsals with Assault Breacher Vehicles (ABVs), Amphibious Assault Vehicles (AAVs), and armored bulldozers on San Clemente Island, off the coast of California.  For the lay-person, that means they were going to land on the beach in tanks and other big armored vehicles and set off really big explosions and do other manly shit.  The Marine Corps has been so preoccupied with chasing little guys in man-dresses around the Middle East for the last 15 years, that we hadn’t really tried this out for real in a very long time—like since 1992.  So it was all very exciting.  I was going to fly out there and observe the exercise, feel the explosions, perhaps remember what it was like to be a real Marine again. 

               The combat engineer community is relatively small in the Marine Corps.  As such, we all tend to know each other, or at least know about each other by reputation.  In this case, I knew personally several members of the staff of 1^st CEB.  A certain couple of officers in particular, I don’t want to embarrass anyone so I’ll assign them aliases—let’s call them “Nate Knowles” and “Eric Spalla,” both of whom I had known for years and had been their instructor twice—once at the Marine Corps Engineer School and once at Expeditionary Warfare School.  Nate was the battalion operations officer (OpsO), and Eric was the executive officer (XO).  They told me everything was going to be taken care of.  In fact, I spoke to Nate on the phone, he said and I quote, “We have a squad bay barracks locked on, so it’s going to be fine.  All you need is your sleeping bag.  Don’t worry about anything else. I got you, sir.”  This last sentence should have been a huge red flag.  I mean, this is not my first rodeo.  But I was so excited to get away from the Pentagon and go watch explosions and hang out with old friends, I totally fell for it. 

               So I flew to San Diego, got a rental car there, and drove up to Camp Pendleton (By the way, San Diego—I love you, but you gotta do something about the rental car situation at the airport.  Seriously.  Who wants to ride a bus for 20 minutes just to begin to get a rental car?).  Once at Pendleton, I got on a Marine Corps plane.  Not just any plane, but a VIP transport plane, like a Gulfstream IV.  Traveling like a rockstar.  So far, this trip was working out great.

 

Straight Pimpin'

               After a short flight, we landed at a tiny airfield on the northernmost part of San Clemente Island.  Now I had never been to San Clemente Island before, but I ‘Google-Earthed’ it, and knew a little.  It’s a long thin island, owned by the US Navy and used mainly as a range for naval gunfire.  It’s just south of Santa Catalina (you know, as in “the fuckin’ Catalina wine mixer”). Then the truck arrived to take me to the SHOBA, short for Shore Bombardment Area, where the battalion commander was.  We drove along for about 30 minutes, and all was well until we entered the gate to the SHOBA, and then the road turned from nice, flat, normal pavement into an absolute nightmare trail.  It was hilly, eroded, and very slow going.  When we started out it was maybe about 3:45 PM, and we entered the SHOBA about 4:15 PM.  It took at least 45 more minutes before we actually arrived at the battalion’s location, a distance of maybe 2 additional miles, so it was now quickly growing dark. 

I got out of the truck, still in a good mood, and found Nate and after some handshaking and friendly greetings, I said “So where’s this squad bay?” He looked at me and said, without even the slightest shame in his voice, “There is no squad bay, sir.” 

I said, “Surely we aren’t driving all that way every day?”

He said, “No sir, we’re staying here,” and gestured around at the collection of two man tents in the area.  “The squad bay up the hill is over-run with rats, so it won’t work. Here’s your flak jacket and helmet.”

I said, “You are a terrible human being, Nate.”

To translate, a squad bay is a type of barracks with one big room filled with bunkbeds.  It sort of sucks, since you share the room with a bunch of dudes who are expelling MRE farts and foot odor everywhere, but it’s at least INDOORS.  I am now totally homeless, in a strange land, and it’s dark.  All I have with me is a steel thermos, some sunflower seeds, a long underwear shirt, a sleeping bag, and an IsoMat (a thin foam rubber mat).  Oh, I also have a pocket knife, some civilian clothes, a cell phone, and a laptop computer.  Unfortunately, there is not even a hint of a cell phone signal down here in the SHOBA, so the phone became only a camera and the laptop wasn’t much good except as part of a pillow.

I get the idea you are not appreciating the position I was just finding myself in…  Let me elaborate.

First off, it’s December and it’s at least 20 miles out into the Pacific Ocean.  And crazy windy.  Like hard-to-stand-up-straight windy.  Everything is rocky and uneven.  And let’s not forget the bombs.

This range is the only place remaining where the U.S. Navy can practice ship-to-shore fires, and has been in continuous use as such for about 80 years—since before WWII.  So there’s a LOT of dangerous junk left around everywhere as a result of this. Things like the expended cases of rockets, shrapnel, flare parachutes, etc.  And let’s not forget the random shell or bomb that failed to detonate, what we call UXO, or unexploded ordnance.  EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) technicians say that roughly 10% or so of explosive projectiles malfunction in some way.  I’ve always thought that estimate to be a little high, but even if it’s only 1%, you can imagine how many that might be in a range this old.  These are things that were meant to explode, and for whatever reason didn’t.  You can also imagine how hazardous that is.  They (EOD techs) periodically go through the range to try to clear out the majority of the UXO, but it’s very difficult to find them, even when they are on the surface, which they may or may not be.  High-velocity naval gunfire shells or even aircraft-delivered bombs that don’t detonate tend to burrow into the ground.  They sometimes do a “porpoise” maneuver, meaning they pop up out of the ground at a seemingly random place away from the point of impact, and just lay there waiting to murder you. 

Caution has never been my strong suit.

As if that isn’t enough, the island is also absolutely COVERED in cactus.  Like 15 different species of cactus, all of which have evil little spines just waiting to find their way into an unsuspecting toe or finger.  Also, as I would soon discover, it is also home to about a billion mice.  And foxes that chase them.  Neither of these two have much exposure to humans, and thus do not always keep the usual respectful distance that I have come to expect from wildlife.  Everything that lives on this island can either bite you, stick you, or stab you.

I wasn’t alone in my predicament.  Some other guys from various places in the Marine Corps had come too, with the same level of preparation as me.  They all came a few days earlier though, riding the ships and landing craft there with the engineer battalion.  So they had the lay of the land already.

After arrival the first night, after talking for a while to all my old friends, I just did the only thing I knew to do.  I found a relatively flat spot, kicked as many rocks and cactus away as I could, spread out my IsoMat and sleeping bag, and climbed in.  That night was pretty miserable.  For one thing my flat spot was not very flat, and angled toward a good-sized cactus.  The wind howled all night long, and when my bladder roused me at about 4 in the morning, I realized that it had blown my backpack down the hill about 20 yards.  The problem was that my boots and trousers were inside that pack, and I was in a field of cactus.  So I climbed down the hill in my underwear and socks (it’s maybe about 45 degrees, by the way), picking my way very carefully and very unsuccessfully through the hazards, to retrieve my boots and then to relieve my bladder.  Afterwards, I spent about an hour removing cactus spines and trying to get warm again in my sleeping bag before the sun came up.

That next morning, I was complaining to my friends about the wind, and that’s when they told me about the hole.  Of course I had seen the hole the night before, but I didn’t realize that’s where everyone else with no real gear or tent was.  Going down the steep sides was out of the question in the pitch dark of the night before, anyway.  But it offered a little protection from the wind, and best of all had a dozen or more concrete slabs, each about 4 feet by 8 feet in size.  Concrete is not usually the first choice as a sleeping surface, but at least cactus can’t grow there.  So I moved in, and thus began The Fellowship of the Hole—the group of seven of us poor souls who wound up living here for a while. 

The Hole

In defense of Nate and Eric, there actually was a squad bay.  There was an abandoned observation bunker complex up on another hill overlooking the area.  We didn’t use it because it was absolutely over-run with mice.  It had showers and toilets, but the running water wasn’t working.  I know all this because I went there.  It held the only phone that worked, so I and the rest of the Fellowship had to go up to it and take turns on the phone to change our flights when the timeline got screwed up.  The whole place smelled like a hamster cage.  The air was so thick with mouse pee that my sinuses were up in arms for hours after that.  One of the other guys told me a story about trying to take a nap here when they first arrived and waking up to find a rat sitting on his chest.  Ordinarily I don’t put much stock in stories like that, but in this case I believe him.

This is the one phone that works, in the rat building.  Doesn't look that bad, but be thankful we can't send smells over the internet yet.

During the day, we would go down to the cliffs overlooking the landing beaches and observe some truly remarkable combat engineer stuff, including everybody’s favorite—the MICLIC, short for Mine Clearing Line Charge.  That's 1,750 pounds of C4 in 3-pound bricks all along a 100 meter rope, fired with a rocket.  This thing is like porn for combat engineers.  The blast it produces has to be felt more than seen to really understand its erection-inducing qualities.  Here are a few pictures to give you an idea.

Tell me that's not cool...

  I was just enjoying the show.

And a YouTube video that shows it a little closer up.

But those blasts had long intervals of nothing in between, and with cell phones out of commission, what we did most was talk.  To an actual living, breathing human standing right next to you who was actually paying attention.  We talked about anything and everything.  We talked about everything from the texture and odor of our latest poops, to war stories, politics, women, religion…you name it.  Nothing was really off the table.  And in a world where you can’t post a funny cat video on social media without some asshole making it into either a Pro-Trump or Anti-Trump statement, it was quite refreshing.  I mean, guys would still say fucked-up things, but it was to your face, and you could argue back in real time.  And you actually had to sort of listen to the other side in order to participate.  And you also always knew that the other guy might just punch you in the face if you went overboard.  These factors (especially that last one) allowed a certain civility to be maintained during even highly contentious discussions.  A vast improvement over the state of affairs in the anonymous virtual world. 

               The thing I discovered is, your smart phone has been cheating you out of some things.  First of all, you never have to be truly bored.  You can play solitaire, or candy crush, or look at Facebook, or Insta-Twit or any number of a thousand other things besides talking to the guy beside you.  If some crazy person tries to engage YOU in a conversation, you can just sort of smile at them and go right back to your little electronic buddy until they go away.  This lack of boredom seems like a good thing, and it is, but it’s an essential ingredient for things like reading, the arts, story-telling—virtually all forms of admirable human endeavor.  These things are much more rewarding than candy-crush or Clash of Clans or whatever else, but they are on the other side of boredom , and boredom sucks. These types of games and apps are interactive and engaging enough to keep you occupied, sort of, but don’t result in anything useful at all, apart from filling the time you have until your inevitable death with random noise.  As I type all this out, I am fully aware of how smug I sound.  As though I figured out the meaning of life and I’m just letting all you poor dolts in on it.  I also recognize the irony that I’m using those very electronic devices to tell you about this.  If it makes you feel any better, the very instant that internet connection returned, I was right back on my smartphone with the rest of the herd.  I’m like a junkie telling his junkie friends about the time he went to rehab for two weeks and got clean, while in the act of tying off his arm and searching for a fresh vein.

Like crack cocaine, but harder to quit.

               Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that I actually talked to these guys.  A lot.  And I listened to them too.  We didn’t agree on a lot of things, but there’s just something about shared hardship and tall tales that brings men together in a way that is difficult to describe.  Camaraderie is just not a good enough word.  I guess it’s the reason I am still hanging around in this Gun Club, long after I thought I would. 

By the way, I was supposed to be there for a couple of days, but a combination of weather and Nate being a bad human caused me to have to wait and ride the LCAC back to Camp Pendleton with everyone else instead of getting another ride in the pimped-out VIP plane.  Actually, it’s really not fair to blame all of this on Nate.  I’m just doing that to be an ass.  He totally promised me we were sleeping indoors though, so he’s not off the hook.  It’s really just the way things go in the Marine Corps.  We call it getting fucked by the “big green weenie.”  This time it resulted in another night or two in the hole, but also in these cool pics.  And another good story.  So thank you, Big Green Weenie.

 

LCAC coming in for a landing.

Damn, I'm handsome...

Where's the Innovation?

If there is one thing that we Marines are good at, it's believing our own press releases.  There's actually a lot of good in that.  Young Americans will do amazing things, as long as they believe in themselves and in each other.

USMC Video

But senior officers need to stay a little more realistic.  Believing in yourself is good.  Fooling yourself isn't.

When I joined the Marines, 20-something years ago, I was made to memorize a long list of facts about the Corps.  Or at least I accepted them as facts at the time.  It went something like this:  

A drill instructor asks a question, and the whole platoon of recruits recites the answer back at the top of their lungs:

"Who is the Grand Old Man of the Marine Corps?"  

"Sir, the Grand Old Man of the Marine Corps is Archibald Henderson, sir!"

"Who is the father of Marine Corps aviation?"

"Sir, the father of Marine Corps aviation is Alfred A. Cunningham, sir!"

"Where did the Marines earn the name 'Devil Dogs'?"

"Sir, Marines earned the nickname Devil Dogs from the Germans at the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I!"

These stories of the Corps are mostly at least sort of true, at least I think they are.  Over the years, I heard these stories repeated, over and over, to the point they became a sort of a dogma, almost a religious scripture, something that was beyond question.  It doesn't matter if it's bullshit or not.  

They aren't all that open to the idea of debating things at Parris Island...

One of the big things that we Marines tell ourselves is that we, as a service, are very innovative.  Some examples of this innovation are below.  There is an underlying truth in all of these, too.  

• The close integration of fire support from aircraft with ground maneuver during the "Banana Wars" in the 1920's.  This resulted in what we call "close air support" today.
  
  
  
• The first use of helicopters to deliver ground forces in a combat maneuver (called vertical envelopment) during the Korean War.

  

  U. S. Marines of the 1st Marine Div. Reconnaissance Co. make the first helicopter invasion on Hill 812, during the renewed fighting in Korea. September 20, 1951. T. G. Donegan. (Marine Corps)

• The development of amphibious armored vehicles (now called AMTRACs) that can deliver troops to shore and then move inland on land.
  
  
  
• The use of personal body armor ("flak jackets") for ground troops, also in the Korean conflict.

  

  Marine holding the shrapnel stopped by his body armor in Korea.

• The development of amphibious assault doctrine in the 1930's, just in time for World War II. 
  
  
  

The most significant thing from that short list of examples is the last one: amphibious doctrine.  It saved the world's bacon in the 1940's, in case you don't realize that.  Amphibious doctrine is the how-to guide for delivering land forces to a hostile shore by ship.  It integrates naval gunfire and air support.  It describes in detail how to load ships, how to organize the landing craft, and how to allow for logistics and resupply.  What it did, in effect, was to analyze the disastrous Allied amphibious assault in WWI at Gallipoli, and then it solved all the problems through planning processes and new technologies.

Not sure how they failed, given that they had Mel Gibson with them.

This new doctrine, after some tweaking early in WW2 at places like Guadalcanal, became wildly successful.  It allowed for some of the most famous American victories ever: Normandy, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.  Perhaps you've heard of them.

The most famous photo of all time...
"This guarantees a Marine Corps for 500 years"
-James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, 1945

  All of this success during World War II most definitely went to our (meaning the USMC's) heads.  The Corps transformed, almost overnight, from a small, specialized force of 17,000 Marines into an amphibious force of more than 500,000.  We had generals and bases and funding.  The public loved us.

But we had become too big for our britches, it seemed.  During the post-war drawdown, there was a serious attempt by some to dissolve the US Marine Corps, on the grounds that it was a redundant capability, essentially a second land army.  Furthermore, nuclear weapons had made major amphibious landings obsolete, or so it was said.

“Large-scale amphibious operations will never occur again.”
-Gen Omar Bradley, US Army, 19 October, 1949.

US Marines landing at Inchon, Korea on 15 September, 1950.
This landing reversed the course of the Korean War, and saved America's bacon.  Again.
Take that, Omar Bradley.

The Marine Corps survived this period of infighting amongst the services, but we developed an intense institutional paranoia about people trying to get rid of us.  The "graybeards" of the Marine Corps at the time understandably wanted to hold on to this impressive force they had developed.  Furthermore, the idea of keeping a large amphibious force ready at all times seemed vindicated by what happened in Korea.  In fact, there was so much protective love for the Marine Corps, that Congress codified the minimum size and composition of the Corps in 1952 in an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947.  The Marine Corps still clings to this mission, large-scale amphibious assault, as its raison d'être.  Many still quote the National Security Act of 1947 as if it were sacred scripture.  But what if Omar Bradley was right (read the article in the link)?  Then what?  

When Major Pete Ellis was dreaming up amphibious doctrine in the early 1930's, the Marine Corps was facing a fiscal strain and looking at an uncertain future.  The Corps' missions up until then had been what we would call special operations today, but then we called 'small wars.'  In fact, at the same time that they were busily developing amphibious doctrine, other Marines were writing the "Small Wars Manual," which is still highly regarded today, from the experiences of the Marines in the interwar years.  But World War II was on the horizon, and small, specialized operations was not where the action was going to be, and the Marines damn well knew it.  So they reinvented themselves into what was needed for the time.

Well, the world has turned a few times since 1945, and the Marine Corps once again faces an identity crisis during a fiscally tight period.  Technological advances in sea mines and anti-ship missiles have undercut some of the traditional ideas in how we might conduct an amphibious forcible entry operation.  The ways of the past are out-dated.  It's time to reinvent ourselves again.

But what passes for innovation in the Marine Corps today is really just clinging to the past glory of World War II.  Our developments are not really revolutionary, they are evolutionary.  Our new technologies, like the Expeditionary Assault Vehicle and the MV-22 Osprey are really just new technologies that help us to accomplish a landing that would look very much like the one at Iwo Jima nearly 70 years ago.  We aren't thinking up new ways to provide a useful service to our country in the modern world, we are busy cramming a square peg in a round hole, trying to justify our existence.  Another thing--I'm tired of listening to people use the requirements of O-Plans (contingency plans developed in advance by DoD) as justification for a certain number of amphibious ships and the appropriate size of the Marine Corps.  Those plans were made to use existing capabilities, and using them in turn as as a source of what our requirements ought to be is circular logic, and is guaranteed to stagnate our thinking.  The plans should be adapted to the forces fielded by our nation, not the other way around.

It isn't all bad, though.  Some of our new technologies, like the MV-22 and the LCAC hovercraft, actually do provide some amazing capabilities to the amphibious world, but they go far beyond their use in a traditional large-scale amphibious assault.  But these new capabilities haven't made much of an impact on our roles and missions, because we remain dogmatically locked to the past.

LCAC - Landing Craft, Air Cushion
It's a hovercraft, and it's really fast.

So I ask you, Marine Corps, where is the innovation?  Where are the forward thinkers?  Where are the new ideas?  With no money available, we aren't going to technology our butts out of this one.  We are going to have to really think.

Those of you still reading this far down the page who aren't Marines, may not realize the absolute heresy of my even saying any of this, especially in a public forum.  I may end up like the ending of another Mel Gibson movie if I'm not careful...

Like this one.

Or like this one...

Our True Heritage

One of the things that some Marines will tell you is that large amphibious assaults are our heritage, our service identity, our tradition.  I disagree.  That's only a part of it.  Our true heritage is our adaptability.  Our true heritage is in small wars and independent actions, at least since the end of the age of sail.  There is the previously cited example of the Banana Wars in the Caribbean, but also think about the actions in China between the world wars, and even many of the smaller landings during World War 2.  We are the original American Special Operators.  In fact, I think that the development of the modern SOCOM community was necessary to fill the void left by the Marine Corps' transformation into a conventional force in the 1940's.  

So there's one idea for you.  Return the Marine Corps to its true roots.  Make it an amphibious arm of the special operations community, like a seaborne version of the Rangers, but with the heavy equipment that being on ships allows.  Using the MV-22 Osprey and the LCAC, our reach is enormous, and we can completely bypass most types of beach defenses and obstacles.  We could shrink the Corps and the amphibious fleets drastically, while raising our training quality and increasing our interoperability with SOCOM forces.  This would drastically reduce the size and cost of the Corps, while increasing the utilization of Marines in real-world operations.  

When Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was created in 1987, the Marine Corps stiff-armed it in disdain.  The Corps didn't want to lose control over its best Marines to some outside command.  The Marines are too small of an organization to survive this kind of talent bleed.  Also, the whole Marine Corps considers itself elite, and doesn't like for some Marines to think they are better than their brothers.  That kind of thing really damages Esprit de Corps.

I'm not talking about MARSOC the way it is now, which is exactly what was worried about.  I don't mean a few "operators" or some dudes who think they are badasses jumping out of airplanes.  I mean the entire service of the United States Marine Corps falling under SOCOM.  That removes the big problem right at the source.  I mean completely redefining the missions and roles of the Corps; actually I mean redefining the roles and missions of all the services.  It's damn sure time for it, too.  The organization of the Department of Defense is a bureaucratic nightmare scenario, which defies the understanding of many career military officers, including Yours Truly.  It's wasteful, unwieldy, and bloated.  And it wishes mainly to preserve itself, above all else. 

I'm no Pete Ellis, but this seems like an idea to me.  Our current organization was codified early in the Cold War, a war that has been over since 1991.  I think two decades is long enough to wait for someone to take another look.

You don't like my ideas?  Let me hear some better ones then, Marines.  I'm just wiping a booger on the wall to see who notices.