Just finished reading the latest newsletter and found a few things that pertained to some of my service, IE: the pinning of stripes, and the field landing at (sp) Aranchi Bay, Spain named Operation Steel Pike??? not sure…….
I was promoted to CPL by The Commandant of the USMC during an formal Evening Parade at the 8th & I Barracks along with a few other members of the 2nd. place GOLD SQUAD or Combat Squad Competition unit in 1963. Since the 3rd battalion had already boarded ships to the Med and embarked, we got to fly to Rota, Spain, and then on to Malta where we finally caught up to our shipmates. So, no one ever 'pinned' on anyone of us who made CPL.
When we made our landing, we were 'Pappa ' boated over to the Boxer which was then a helicopter assault ship, from the APA 36 Cambria.
Somebody mentioned that the beer on the beach was not all that cold, I also missed that as well as we spent much of our time on some huge hill made of gigantic boulders. When some happless Marine fell down between some of those boulders one night and broke some bones training at night was cancelled. So we would sneak down to a small local village and trade money and cigarettes for bottles of the local wine. Anisette is a wine that tastes like licorice, and that stuff was plenty strong but you smelled of the stuff and had to drink a ton of coffee every moring and chew all of the gum you could find to get rid of the smell, and not get caught.
I'm not saying that Marines steal, lets just say we are better at procuring things than most other folks. One morning after the sun came up we trudged down to the local company mess tent. About a hundred yards from that giant tent we found 8 cardboard boxes that had been hidden in some brush. Upon closer inspection what the 'thieves' had stolen instead of canned peaches or some other tasty goodies turned out to be 8 cases of powdered eggs.
Not sure if this is true or not. We were supposed to make a landing on Corisica but it was cancelled when one of the 'traks' ran over a mine left over from WWII. Some really harsh weather had eroded much of the beach we were supposed to assault. So we re-boarded our ship and the demo teams probed the rest of the entire beach to clear it. That was the story we were told.
We were waiting on the beach that evening for our landing boats to pick us up in the morning when we recieved the word that Kennedy had been killed that created quite a commotion. But we got back on the ship, sailed to Cypress and floated around for a week or so to see if we needed to evac any civilians. None were and we left for home.
Sgt. DT Lang PMI MCRD PISC