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thedrifter
04-30-07, 07:29 AM
Last words
As he leaves the Marine Corps, Estrada speaks frankly about war, bureaucrats and today’s Marines
By John Hoellwarth - jhoellwarth@militarytimes.com
Posted : May 07, 2007

The 15th sergeant major of the Marine Corps never cleaned his boots.

During his final interview as the Corps’ senior enlisted Marine, Sgt. Maj. John Estrada sat in his Pentagon office wearing cammies, his right ankle resting on his left knee, showing the boot’s well-worn rubber tread.

His eyes briefly rotated upward as he mentally scanned an abbreviated list of the countries where his boots had collected dirt — Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Djibouti and others.

“I really don’t care how the Marines see me in my boots when I’m traveling back here because it’s my way of showing solidarity with the Marines that’s over in the desert,” he said. “So yeah, I haven’t cleaned my boots and I’m proud of that.”

On April 25, the Trinidad and Tobago native who spent eight months peering into the window of the Corps’ recruiting office in Washington, D.C., before beginning his rise from slick-sleeve private to senior enlisted Marine, left the last billet of his 34-year career. On that day, Sgt. Maj. Carlton Kent, formerly the sergeant major of I Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, Calif., became the commandant’s point man on enlisted issues.

Two days earlier, in a wide-ranging, two-hour-long interview peppered with salty language and frank opinions on his 34 years, Estrada voiced concerns for the future, explained what made him proud, detailed what has gone unfinished in his tenure, yet said he had “no regrets.”
‘Serious racial tension’

One of Estrada’s signature issues was his fight to elevate the lives of single Marines, specifically through the “barracks campaign plan,” a comprehensive effort to enhance single leathernecks’ quality of life by loosening restrictions placed on Marines living in the barracks. The plan was made policy in November.

Though some commands have done away with barracks field day — room cleanups and inspections — as a result of the campaign plan, only about 40 percent of the Marines Estrada talks to about it have actually read it, and “that ****es me off,” he said.

Still, even lukewarm acceptance of such policies shows how far leaders — and especially junior Marines — have come since Estrada’s early days in the Corps.

“We had some characters back then that nowhere would cut it today — the druggies, friggin’ some of them murderers, criminals,” he said. “A lot of young Marines don’t know this today, they’d be clueless on this, but we had some serious racial tensions in the ’70s and early ’80s.”

Estrada said the pressure Marines felt back then to join cliques within units was so intense that “I was scared of getting beat up because I didn’t take sides.”

He recalled an incident in his squad bay when he was a young Marine assigned to the air station in Iwakuni, Japan.

“It was a racial fight, and it was down the lines,” he said. “You had the blacks and the Puerto Ricans on one side, and I remember you had the whites and Hispanics on the other side. They brought in a react team.”

Estrada’s mood brightened as he contrasted yesterday’s Marines with the ones manning the vehicle checkpoints in Iraq’s Anbar province today. He’s proud of them, he said. And he’s not shy about letting them know it.

“We are a much, much better force than we were back then. Today’s Marines have been educated, which makes them more intelligent. They’re better trained than we were. They get the best equipment. Technology is better,” he said. “As I fondly put it, today’s Marines are the s---. That’s what I tell them. They look at me, and they start laughing. They like that. They are. I say ‘you guys are the s---.’”
Pain inside

The war in Iraq was only three months old when Estrada became the sergeant major. Since then, some 750 Marines have fallen in combat on his watch, many of them killed just days, hours or minutes after Estrada met them.

Estrada remembered a Marine who asked him to pose for a picture during a visit to Afghanistan.

“Right after we left that position, he got killed,” Estrada said.

During a visit to Kuwait, Estrada was reunited with a major in 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, who had been a second lieutenant in that same battalion when Estrada served as its sergeant major. They hugged, reminisced and took a picture together before the battalion moved north to Iraq.

“He got killed. Him and I was the last photo his family had of him,” Estrada said.

Then there’s the Marine in an Estrada poster, the one kneeling behind the sergeant major, just to the left of the word “Marines.”

“Every time someone looks at that poster, I always point out to them the one Marine in the center. I signed the poster and gave him a coin. He was with [3rd Battalion, 25th Marines]. He got killed,” Estrada said. “Those things like that have been the hardest.”

“I will say I pain inside. I don’t show it because I know that’s why Marines joined. Not necessarily to die, they joined to go kick somebody’s butt. But I pain for them and their families every friggin’ time I read the casualty report. I pain every time because they could be my kids.”

Fighting wars “is what we do. That’s what we’re all about,” Estrada said. “But I hope this thing does not go the way it’s going right now for much longer. I hope somehow it comes to closure here. I don’t know how long the American people will give us, the military, to fight this thing because we work for the American people. The Marines understand that.”
Corps successes

One of the first things Estrada wanted to do when he became the commandant’s sergeant major was to get more female Marines, typically assigned to schoolhouse and administrative billets, out onto the battlefield.

He didn’t need to get a MarAdmin written to make that happen. He just picked up the phone and called his force-level sergeants major, he said during the interview.

“Did I threaten them?” he asked, turning to his admin chief and right-hand Marine, Gunnery Sgt. Debbie Calhoun.

“You influenced them,” she offered.

“I influenced them,” Estrada confirmed. “I told them this is what I want to start seeing and they knew, being that I travel so much, that I was going to find out really quick whether they were complying with what I asked them to do,” he said.

“Women today in the Marine Corps, they are all over the friggin’ battlefield. They are. That is motivating,” he said earnestly. “I remember two little females, Hispanic girls, came back in a convoy that got attacked, and laid fire down on some insurgents. They were so pumped up, and I was looking at them. They’re about 80, 85 pounds, but they shot up some insurgents. They get that Combat Action Ribbon, and I’m proud of that.”

Estrada is quick to point out that, even as some Marines have fought and died overseas, others have been fighting the battles that must be won on the home front, the ones that will determine his legacy as the Corps’ top enlisted Marine.

Estrada said one of his predecessors advised him early in his tenure that future Marines would judge him and his commandant on whether they sustained recruiting with high standards.

“If you didn’t leave recruiting in a bad way, if the force is sustained in a high quality, then you’ve been successful,” he said. “I consider recruiting a success.”

Estrada then referred to a tough time for recruiting — January 2005, when Marine Corps Recruiting Command failed to sign up enough enlistees to make its internal contracting goals, which it had made continuously for almost a decade.

“When we fell on tough times a couple years ago, we didn’t panic. And they didn’t come to the boss and say, ‘Hey, we need to lower standards, there’s a train wreck coming.’ Well, the train wreck hit us, and we didn’t panic. And now we’ve got everything back on the fairly good ground without tampering with standards.”

The Mojave Viper pre-deployment training the Corps developed and carried out on Estrada’s watch was another “huge success” because of “how it was done so quickly,” he said.

But Estrada seemed most proud of the way the Corps has treated its wounded warriors throughout the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The service has created wounded warrior barracks on both coasts, and has stood up a Wounded Warrior Regiment to help injured Marines deal with the bureaucracy of getting proper care and transitioning back into the Corps or into the civilian world.

“We were way ahead of the other services. We were always the service that the others had to try to emulate because we always seemed to be a step ahead,” he said.

Though Estrada also cited enlisted professional military education changes to “emphasize more on war fighting than some of the dumb things we’ve emphasized in the past,” he admitted that he wasn’t able to accomplish everything he wanted to regarding PME.
Still in the ‘in box’

If Estrada had his druthers, the Single Marine Program would be staffed by active-duty Marines, “not folks more concerned about protecting their jobs or protecting their retirement plan,” he said. “We need folks that are committed and want to take care of our Marines.”

In an interview with Marine Corps Times in September, Estrada announced that one of his goals was to create a senior enlisted academy for first sergeants, sergeants major, master sergeants and master gunnery sergeants. Though the other service branches already have these academies for their senior enlisted leaders, Estrada wasn’t able to get a Corps version off the drawing board.

“It’s really important, and I wish we could have made some headway on it,” he said. “I haven’t given up on it.”

Estrada said he would have liked to have seen the Corps’ sergeants major ask for the academy at their annual symposium, but the initiative never went forward because of “push back.”

“The senior enlisted community didn’t push back,” he said. “There was push back in other places, obviously, and it didn’t happen.”

When Estrada tried to secure special-duty assignment pay for sergeants major to offset the out-of-pocket expenses they incur while working for general officers, push back, once again, stopped it from happening.
Stars and stripes

If there is anything Estrada is not going to miss about being the Corps’ senior enlisted Marine, it’s “all those individuals, God bless their hearts, who are always pushing back on progress, the bureaucrats,” he said. “We need to get rid of them because they’re not looking out for the Marines. It’s just amazing.”

Even as the sergeant major of the Marine Corps, Estrada had to push his agenda on behalf of the Corps’ enlisted ranks, which often meant influencing generals in an environment where even a second lieutenant, to Estrada, was “sir.”

“Over the last four years, I have probably had three that tried to so-called ‘flex’ on the sergeant major of the Marine Corps. That didn’t go over well at all. I didn’t put up with that crap,” he said. “There have been a couple lieutenant colonels, colonels, that all of a sudden decided, ‘I’m not going to share information with him that he needs.’ We need to put aside that crap. This is the sergeant major of the Marine Corps. He speaks on a lot of issues for the commandant.”

Estrada is quick to add that Marines are professionals and he’s never been flexed on by company-grade officers, and only “zero zero, point, zero zero one percent” of the light and full bird colonels he’s worked with. “But I’ve had those encounters,” he added.

And general officers? “Maybe two,” he said. “Two,” he said again with certainty. “I’m thinking of one right now. You can’t go visit his Marines, or you can only speak to enlisted Marines, which was so unsat because young officers also benefit from listening to the sergeant major of the Marine Corps.”

Estrada said most generals understand that the sergeant major of the Marine Corps works for the commandant and “if [the sergeant major] ain’t happy, he’s going to tell the commandant he ain’t happy. Then, someone has got to go explain to the commandant why the sergeant major is not happy.”

He said the commandant’s first question to the offending officer would be, “Why aren’t you supporting the sergeant major?” because, after all, the sergeant major is carrying out the commandant’s intent.

But that’s not to say all commandants can be expected to support the sergeant major’s enlisted issues with equal verve. It bothers Estrada that he wasn’t given the opportunity to include what would have been his final birthday message in the video then-Commandant Gen. Mike Hagee made for Marine Corps Birthday Ball ceremonies held around the Corps last November.

“We did get a bunch of inquiries about why that didn’t happen. A lot of Marines were upset because that was going to be the last one,” Estrada said.

He said he would have liked his final birthday message to thank Marines who continue to make sacrifices for the Corps and to reassure the families of the fallen that they will never be forgotten, that the Corps is committed to taking care of them.

“I don’t know why it didn’t happen,” Estrada said, laughing at the futility of recalling a round down range. “It happened in previous years. That would be something you’d have to ask General Hagee about.”

Hagee could not be immediately reached for comment. Corps-wide messages released on www.usmc.mil regarding topics ranging from the sergeant major slating process to enlisted PME show that many of the proposals Estrada put forward since 2003 had to wait until current commandant Gen. James Conway took over last November to finally become policy, which many of them have in the last six months.

“I’m excited about the commandant and the huge impact he’s made early. I think in the next few years it’s going to be even more exciting to see General Conway’s vision of where he’s taking our Corps,” he said. “I would love to be part of it. But all good things come to an end.”
After the Corps

Now that Estrada is no longer the sergeant major of the Marine Corps, he said it’s likely he’ll disappear for a while. He said he’s never been one to crave attention; he doesn’t even have a Marine Corps bumper sticker on his car.

His immediate plans are to lay low, wrench on the ’77 Corvette that has been his hobby for years and work on his golf handicap.

“Once I hang up the hat, I want to decompress for a while. I’m looking forward to taking some time off, spending some time with the little ones. They’ve grown up significantly, and I’m looking forward to doing that a little bit.”

He said he’s had “a few folks already talking about jobs,” but that he’s playing it by ear.

As far as where he plans to settle, he said, “I have narrowed it down to two places, California and Florida,” he said.

There was a pause as his eyes rotated upward again.

“And I haven’t ruled out North Carolina, either,” he said.

Ellie