& etc., “and if Luke the Gook knocks down one of your buddies, a fellow Marine, you are going to risk your life and go in and get that Marine and you are going to bring him out. Some weeks after Hey Baby began hassling Jorgeson, Sergeant Wright gave us his best speech: “You men are going off to war, and it’s not a pretty thing,” etc. He told me that what he really wanted to do was have an artist’s loft in the SoHo district of New York City, wear a beret, eat liver-sausage sandwiches made with stale baguettes, drink Tokay wine, smoke dope, paint pictures, and listen to the wailing, sorrowful songs of that French singer Edith Piaf, other wise known as “The Little Sparrow.” He was down on Jorgeson because whenever we were taught some sort of combat maneuver or tactic, Jorgeson would say, under his breath, “You could get killed if you try that.” Or, “Your ass is had, if you do that.” You got the feeling that Jorgeson didn’t think loving the American flag and defending democratic ideals in Southeast Asia were all that important. Jorgeson was my main man, and Hey Baby started calling him Jorgepussy and began harassing him and pushing him around. The reason for this was that he started in on my buddy, Jorgeson. Hey Baby was not in the Marine Corps for very long. To top it all off, shortly after the incident, Hey Baby got a Dear John from his girl back in Chicago, of whom Sergeant Wright, myself, and seventy-eight other Marine recruits had come to know just a little.

Hey Baby paid for the letter by doing a hundred squat thrusts on the concrete floor of the squad bay, but the main prize he won that night was that he became forever known as Hey Baby to the recruits of Platoon 263-in addition to being a shitbird, a faggot, a turd, a maggot, and other such standard appellations. It was a letter to Rosie Rottencrotch, he said at the end, and what really mattered, what was really at issue and what was of utter importance was not Rosie Rottencrotch and her steaming-hot panties but rather the muzzle velocity of the M-14 rifle. “Hey, Baby!” he began, and then as he went into the body of the letter he worked himself into a state of outrage and disgust. Sergeant Wright snatched the letter out of Hey Baby’s hand, and later that night in the squad bay he read the letter to the Marine recruits of Platoon 263, his voice laden with sarcasm.

We were sitting in a stifling hot Quonset hut during the first weeks of boot camp, August 1966, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Hey Baby got caught writing a letter to his girl when he was supposed to be taking notes on the specs of the M-14 rifle.

Iron marines holy hand grenade