Category: Marine Corps Stories

I have fond(?) memories of my six months as a butter-bar lieutenant at Quantico and The Basic School.    I remember my TBS (3-72) class and our "three day war" in the wooded hills of Virginia as well, particularly the December "night defense" in the snow.  By that point, people in my class had figured that it was smart to hang out with someone who had some "OJT" time in the bushes when we went to the field.  People were clamoring to be my "foxhole buddy", and it finally came down to coin-flipping.  I found an old, partially filled-in, crew-served weapons hole on the foreword slope of the hill in the snow-covered woods we were to defend, pointed down to the bottom and said to my buddy Joe, "dig".  He said, "Why go to all of that trouble?  We're only going to be here overnight, and the ground's damned near frozen!"  I told him to shut up, unfold his E-tool, and do what I told him.    By dark, we had a two-man position 6 feet deep, 6 feet wide, 7 feet long, floored, roofed and camouflaged with some downed pine limbs and boughs from a nearby tree line, except for a two-foot place at the down-slope lip, above our firing step,  where we could pop up and shoot.  As soon as it got dark, I spread my poncho over the boughs, which kept our little hooch dry, despite the heavy snow that was falling.  I had dug a one-foot niche in the back wall and set up my little "Svea 123" backpacker stove, which heated C-rats, water for coffee and hot chocolate, and did a pretty good job of warming up the hole, without the dull blue glow giving away the roofed position.  As everyone else shivered in wet, frozen sleeping bags in their shallow, snow-soaked prone foxholes, we spread our sleeping bags out on the dry pine boughs on the floor, on top of the mud, and went to "50% alert".   About midnight, we began to get probes from the opposing company’s attackers.  Nervous lieutenants around the perimeter began to "pop caps", and my companion Joe said, "Sounds like someone right below us, in the brush at the edge of the clearing…let's fire-em up!"  I admonished him and explained that their scouts were deliberately making noise so that we would fire at them and give away our positions.   Finally, about 0200, the assault began.  The positions which had been identified by the earlier probing were assaulted, got CS grenades on top of them, and overrun.  Ours, with the roof conforming to the surrounding ground and covered with snow, was bypassed.  Joe whispered to me, “Don, what do we do now?”  I replied, “Do what I do.”  I carefully unzipped my bag six inches, reached out with one hand into the freezing night, grabbed my M-16, shoved the BFA'd (Blank firing adapter) barrel up through the firing slot at the edge of the hole, cranked off a 30-round magazine of blanks on full-auto into the sky, and went back to sleep.  …A legend in my own time!   The best, and funniest, part of the whole incident involved two of our more notable TBS instructors, CPT McKasgell, who was leading the defense, and his friendly rival and buddy CPT North (Yes, Ollie “Old Blue” North, who was just back from his second combat tour in Vietnam, and who taught us “Scouting & Patrolling” at TBS.), who was leading the offence.  ("Rabbit" McKasgell was a Texas native, an Aggie and a competitive marathoner—hence the sobriquet—who owned his own rum distillery in Haiti.  Just before Christmas, his father called him and informed him that a wildcatter, who bought drilling rights on some scrub cattle land McKaskell owned back home, had struck it big.  "Rabbit" bought himself and his wife matching Mercedes sport scars for Christmas!  He had done a two-year exchange tour with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, and carried a petrified camel penis as a swagger stick…one of the Corps' numerous eccentric characters.)   CPT McKasgell had gone to sleep in a shallow foxhole in the clump of trees at the top of the hill, which constituted the CP, and his sleeping bag had shifted during the night so that his zipper was underneath him, and frozen.  North, about five minutes into the assault, appeared like a wraith through the dark, confusion and snow of the battle, leaped through the defensive lines, deposited a CS grenade next to "Rabbit", and vanished again into the night.  The spectacle of McKasgell, who could neither don his mask nor shed his bag due to the frozen zipper, hopping frantically off down the snow-covered hill into the night, looking like a giant "Willie the Worm", was one from which "tales of the Corps" are made….    Our legendary Three Day War “Defense of McKasgell Hill” is one of the incidents that earned me a reputation as the go-to guy on military field-craft for the remainder of TBS and the nickname of “Gunny” from the other non-“Mustang” lieutenants in my Company.