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We Also Serve
A Family Goes to War
By Nanette Sagastume
iUniverse
Copyright © 2011 Nanette Sagastume
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-3089-7
Chapter One
Mario's Story
Daniel's decision to be a Marine was not random. The Marine Corps had been a low-voltage current pulsing through our family life before he was born.
Mario Roberto Sagastume was born in 1947 in the capital city of Guatemala, the second of three sons born to Aminda and Victor Sagastume. When Mario's parents divorced, his father moved to Los Angeles. His mother stayed in Guatemala with eight year-old Mario and his younger brother Edgar (Mario's older brother, Luis, was already living with family friends in San Francisco). Mario's mother moved the little family to the small town of Sololá, where she worked as a public health nurse and midwife. She struggled to eke out a livelihood. Years later, when Mario and I drove by that house where he grew up, I was stunned to see how poor his circumstances had been.
Mario came to the United States at age fifteen to live with his father; the two of them lived more like roommates than parent and child. Victor was fluent in English but Mario knew none when he arrived. There were few English-as-a Second-Language classes in the early sixties. He learned the language within two months and credits his rapid facility to his exposure to English in the classroom and—he swears this is true—to watching television shows such as Leave it to Beaver and Red Skelton.
Within a few years Mario adapted to California life. While a student at Belmont High School in Los Angeles, he participated in school musicals and made new friends. In summer he surfed at nearby Pacific beaches in fashion: bleaching his dark brown hair blond and sporting a large surfer cross. He took his after-school job as a bus boy seriously, even bypassing his prom because he was needed at work. By the time he had graduated from high school, he had earned enough money to buy a little Datsun car. After graduation he registered for general education classes in junior college, but was an indolent student.
Because the Vietnam War was escalating—and since Mario's grades in junior college were lackluster—he knew he would not be eligible for a student deferment from the draft. Despite the fact that Mario was not a United States citizen, as a resident alien he was still required to register with the Selective Service System.
He had intended to enlist in the Navy when he dropped by the complex where the recruiting offices for all the military branches were located. The office for the Marine Corps caught his eye first and the Marine recruiter encouraged him to enlist. "After you become a Marine, all you have to do is put in your request to become a Security Guard at the American Embassy in Guatemala. I'm sure you'll get it." At nineteen, Mario was just naïve enough to believe such a statement. The prospect of being stationed in Guatemala, where he would be able to see extended family again, was tempting enough to convince Mario that the Marine Corps was for him. Oh, he got guard duty, all right—in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Before long, he left his new Datsun with his dad for safekeeping and was on his way to boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) in San Diego. The moment he and the other recruits arrived by bus late at night, the drill instructor roared, "Get off my bus!" This is a time-honored command to every arriving busload. The recruits were then ordered to place their feet on yellow footprints painted on the sidewalk in front of the receiving area. It was at that moment that Mario began to entertain the notion he just may have made a big mistake.
During the mid-sixties, the usual twelve to thirteen weeks of boot camp training was compressed into nine in order to accommodate the needs of the Vietnam War. The training was—and is still today—rigorous, always preparing a recruit for the time when a Marine might find himself either in a war or perhaps a prisoner of war. Years later my husband remarked to me, "I don't regret any aspect of Marine Corps training. Even the stuff that seems too tough serves a purpose."
"But some of it seems cruel," I once objected. "What if someone can't handle the yelling or belittling? That could destroy a person."
"Do you think an enemy would be gentle?" he scoffed. "Trust me. The enemy would do far worse than anything a drill instructor might ever dish out in boot camp. Maybe the training seems cruel to civilians, but if a Marine becomes a prisoner of war, no enemy is going to be worrying about his fragile psyche!"
When he lived in Guatemala, Mario was accustomed to having few luxuries and to the necessity of hard work, so he did not find the rigors of boot camp as onerous as others did. One of the ways he coped with the demanding aspects of training was to see its absurdities. Farcical situations could range from recruits being ordered to rake grassy areas literally by hand—one leaf at a time—to the way in which drill instructors strung together colorful litanies of epithets and curse words. Of course it would have been ruinous for Mario to laugh out loud, but his sense of humor helped him cope.
In June of 1966, he graduated from boot camp, proudly earning the title of "United States Marine."
The training schedule after boot camp is different now, but, in Mario's time, new Marines went to Camp Pendleton right after graduation for Infantry Training Regiment, or ITR. The name is now "School of Infantry," or SOI. After completing four weeks of tactical field training at ITR and an additional two weeks' training at machine gun school, he was given a standard thirty-day pre-deployment leave. Then his Marine unit landed in Da Nang, Vietnam.
As far as he's aware, none of Mario's letters from Vietnam still exist. He thinks he wrote only a handful to family members, and he did not have a girlfriend to whom he needed to write regularly. He definitely wasn't a journal-keeper, and his reputation as a notoriously poor letter-writer still stands. His memories are the only souvenirs of his war experience.
For a few months Mario was a member of a security platoon at the Marine base in Da Nang, but eventually he was assigned as a combat replacement to the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, serving with Fox Company's 3rd Platoon. Although the entire battalion comprised approximately one thousand men, the group of forty men in Fox Company's 3rd Platoon—and specifically his squad, an even smaller group—became his family.
As a platoon machine gunner, Mario's responsibility was to augment firepower. Gunners were favorite targets of the enemy; for the first time in his life, Mario's short stature became an advantage. The Viet Cong, expecting Americans to be taller, aimed their weapons higher; Mario's smaller frame provided a less prominent target.
"Vietnam is a really pretty country. It reminded me a bit of Guatemala. Even the poor people were like poor people in Guatemala. I think the transition was easier for me than for other Marines."
Despite the lush beauty of the countryside, Mario found the hot and humid weather difficult to cope with. He sweated profusely. Once, while on patrol, he needed to be medivacced for heat exhaustion. Intravenous fluids quickly restored him and he returned to the field. Fortunately, that was the extent of his war injuries.
He tends to be dismissive about his combat exposure, saying that he didn't see the amount of combat that troops who served later in the war did. In the late sixties, the U.S. death toll would frequently reach five hundred men per week. In one month during the Vietnam War, we experienced the same number of American casualties as we suffered in the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
As an infantryman, Mario participated in major operations and he patrolled the Vietnamese countryside, always carefully scanning the road for mines or booby traps. He also took his turn standing watch for the platoon. As a machine gunner, he was called upon to return enemy fire. He killed enemy fighters, but his platoon also took prisoners. Helicopters were a means of transportation of troops and supplies as well as evacuation of the wounded. Mario still finds the whump-whump sound of helicopter blades chopping through the air disturbing. The sound reminds him of the vulnerability he faced each time he and the others had to step out in the open landing zone, fully exposed to the enemy, in order to off-load supplies from helicopters and on-load casualties. All these years later, he is disconcerted by a sense of déjà-vu whenever he passes the many rice fields near our home.
His tour was punctuated by fatigue, boredom, fear, and brotherhood. "We didn't have e-mail or satellite phones. Unless there was a dire emergency, there were no phone calls to family. We just had each other. If someone's girlfriend dumped him, he talked about it with his buddy. He couldn't call home.
"I think it's better that way. Because today's combat Marines can keep in frequent contact by phones and web-cams, it keeps them attached to their families and inhibits being there for each other. They're more likely to stay homesick. I think all that family contact sets them up to become over-involved with their families' day-to-day problems. That's not good for them."
One story Mario tells illustrates the depth of the brotherhood and chills me to this day. On a moonless night, when his platoon headed out for patrol, they stopped at a river they needed to ford. The Marines could hear the Viet Cong on the opposite bank, so it was imperative they move silently. Mario's group slipped, single file, into the river. The river bottom was uneven, and when he was partway across, Mario realized the water would soon cover his nose.
"Even though my friend Kelly was somewhere behind me, I knew I didn't dare call out. That might have alerted the enemy to our presence, and I couldn't take that chance. Treading water wasn't an option either; that would have been too noisy."
Mario shrugged matter-of-factly. "So I figured I'd rather quietly drown instead. That was better than endangering the guys with me.
"But, just as the water reached my nose and I was about to go under, I felt a hand grab the back of my flak jacket, and I felt myself being pulled up and propelled to the other side of the river."
For thirty-eight years Mario tried to locate the platoon buddy who saved him, and he finally did so. We met this man and he has corroborated this story. Though he couldn't see Mario in the intense darkness, he knew that he was somewhere in front.
"I'm a lot taller than Mario. I knew that if the water was becoming too deep for me, Mario had to be in trouble."
I offer this anecdote as a tribute to the extraordinary loyalty and sense of brotherhood with which Marines are imbued: that allowing oneself to drown would be preferable to imperiling Marine brothers.
When a Marine's thirteen-month "in country" tour was completed, he was taken out of the fields of Vietnam and flown home. Every individual was on a different schedule. In October 1967, Mario was plucked from his platoon, leaving behind buddies who had not completed their tours. One day he was in a war; the next day, he was flown to the United States.
No one was waiting at Travis Air Force Base to greet him. "I don't remember whether I even told my family when I was coming home."
He took a commercial bus the fifty miles to San Francisco where he spent a few days with his older brother before going to see his dad in Los Angeles.
Mario still had two more years to complete in the Marine Corps, which he did as a supply clerk at Camp Pendleton. In January of 1969, his request for an "early out" from the Marine Corps was granted, allowing him to enroll for the spring semester at the University of San Francisco. Since the GI bill helped with only some of the tuition fee, Mario took a job washing dishes in the University's dining hall to supplement his income.
The morning of September 15, 1969, when I arrived for breakfast at the close of the dining hall's mealtime, few students remained. As I sat down next to an acquaintance, I noticed someone wearing a large white apron, one of the kitchen staff. He leaned back in his chair, absentmindedly tapping a smoldering lump of ash from his cigarette against the silver foil ashtray. He was stocky but muscular, and his manner gave him an air of being larger than his five-foot, three-inches frame. His eyes were dark brown and seductive. A well-trimmed mustache bristled across his upper lip. As I was introduced to Mario, I noticed he was polite—even courtly. Since my primary-grade days, when I drooled over the popular romantic television character Zorro, I had harbored a secret fantasy of a Latin dream man. Here he was! From our first meeting I was smitten.
Chapter Two
My Story
I was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1950, the younger of two daughters of John and Virginia Magrath. Alexandria is a town rich in Revolutionary and Civil War history. Unlike anyone in my family, I was a history devotee. Geographic intimacy with those places and the artifacts associated with significant events in our nation's past thrilled me. I got goose bumps to realize that I walked where George Washington or Robert E. Lee had actually walked, or I stood where Lincoln had watched a play at Ford's Theater. The nearby battlefields of Manassas and Gettysburg captivated me. My sense of the historical also extended to a resolute patriotism. In grade school, I kept parchment paper copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on my bedroom wall and made a point of reading them every Fourth of July.
I attended a private all-girls' high school—sadly, no longer in existence —the Academy of Notre Dame in Washington, D.C. In traveling to my school,locatedneartheCapitolbuilding,Ipassedmanyhistoricallandmarks each day. Depending on which bus route I chose, I might pass the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial—exquisite when the cherry blossoms were in bloom—or the Pentagon. I cherished those architectural symbols of our country. To this day, whenever I gaze at the monuments and symbols of our country, I am filled with a surge of love for our nation.
In the summer after my graduation from high school, I traveled with other students from my high school and my French teacher as part of a larger tour to French-speaking countries in Europe. We spent three weeks in Leysin, Switzerland, and three weeks in Brussels, Belgium, with side trips to other European countries. In several of the countries (notably in Cologne, Germany) evidence of damage during World War II was still apparent, even more than twenty years later, underscoring for me the destruction of war, which I took to heart.
This travel opportunity allowed me, in a limited way, to experience living in another country, communicating in a foreign tongue, and handling the feelings of being homesick. Traveling and living abroad, even for that brief time, helped me to be more sensitive to immigrants—an advantage to me when I eventually met my future husband.
After my high school graduation, my family moved to the West Coast. I was in my second year in the nursing program at the University of San Francisco when I met Mario.
The frayed green field jacket with his name on its pocket revealed he had been in the Marines Corps, and I learned he'd been in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was the topic of much divisive national dispute, and I was curious to hear his thoughts. His response to various inquiries, however, was typically a verbal parry, telling one superficial story to one person and a contradictory one to another. He made it sound as if he had never seen action. But, in fact, he just didn't want to talk about it. He especially didn't want to engage in a political debate. When he met my mother, he minimized his role altogether; he didn't want to be caught in a discussion with my mother, who had a habit of skewering people with her questions. This reluctance to speak of his war experience and avoidance of discussions, I later learned, can be a symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We Also Serve by Nanette Sagastume Copyright © 2011 by Nanette Sagastume. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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