thedrifter
11-15-07, 06:15 AM
What bonds Marines
A woman, moved by the connection the Marines of Casta Del Sol share, sees a place at the table for her father.
Dana Parsons
November 15, 2007
I usually don't do one Veterans Day column, much less two. But I'm still hearing echoes from a hour or so I spent last week in a Mission Viejo living room with six combat vets -- five Marines and an Army man.
Much of what they talked about was standard issue, the kind of friendly put-downs and one-liners that they'd perfected over the years. Some of the stuff would make outsiders groan, but these guys -- all in their 70s and 80s -- had sensibilities well beyond the comic.
From time to time, their conversation would drift back to the uniqueness they attached to their experience. On a superficial level, it showed up with them saying, "To the Corps!" when they cracked open Miller Lites, but these guys also dug deep.
And the bedrock of it all was the profound belief that only another Marine really knew what they knew about war and a certain kind of relationship. It isn't the knowledge in books or catechism; it's the knowledge that you'd risk your life to save your buddy and that he'd do the same for you.
If you allow yourself to ponder that from the safety of civilian life, it's a fairly profound thought. Most of us forge treasured bonds with wives and children and friends, but not even those are immutable. Some bonds crack, some split wide open.
Among the Marines, these men said, those bonds are fire-treated and welded tight.
Semper fi means what it says.
These guys impressed me, but I considered the possibility I was getting a bit overwrought.
Then came the e-mail from Sylvia Valle, an adult-education art teacher in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District. She'd seen the column and wanted to reach the group in the hopes her widowed 86-year-old father, Robert Ramos, an ex-Marine who fought in the Pacific during World War II, might hook up with them.
I wondered if she was tapping the same vein as I -- the notion that the connection among former Marines had a subtle yet distinctive power to it.
When I asked her, Valle began by saying, "My dad never spoke about the war, other than to say how beautiful the Pacific was or how beautiful the islands were. He never articulated what he had personally gone through."
That matched her observations when she taught a class called "Writing Your Own Life." Most of her students were women, she says, either the daughters of or wives of World War II combat vets. The men typically had stories "so painful they couldn't articulate it when they came home. Life had changed so much when they left here to go to war, and then to come back and pick up the pieces . . . it was as if, if they didn't talk about it [the war experience], it didn't exist."
The vets' link, Valle believes, is rooted in the traumas of war. She saw firsthand those connections when, a few years ago, she and her daughter joined Valle's husband for a Vietnam vets reunion. "From that," she says, "I saw what it was my father was missing -- the camaraderie, the brotherhood, their feeling that 'we've been through something together and no one else can understand.' "
Two years ago, her mother died. "From high school to the Marines to my mother, my father had never been alone," Valle, 60, says. "He was extremely lonely."
When she read the column about the Marines at Casta Del Sol, a light went on. "He's obviously been searching for something," she says of her father, "but I think if he found a group of men that actually shared a part of his life at one time, he'd be able to find he was not alone, that he really has something in common with someone and that they do have a bond."
Why not direct him to a senior center, instead? Why not some club that matched his other interests?
Why the Marines?
"It was something that has impacted his life down to his core," she says. "Other than family, I think that has impacted his life the most."
I ask what she hopes will happen. "He's the kind of person, it'd be best if someone approached him. He's very shy. My whole wish is that he'd be able to meet some men that were, best-case scenario, in the Marine Corps in the Pacific when he was there."
We chat a bit more about life's turning points and seminal moments, the stuff that fills up the meaningful chapters of our life stories. I ask if, in a strange way, we should envy the kind of bond that brothers in arms had.
"Difficult question," she says. "It's not that we would envy their experience. What's enviable is that they found a way to heal that experience. It's not anything about it being a fun time. It's that spiritual cord that bonds them together, holds them together."
Ellie
A woman, moved by the connection the Marines of Casta Del Sol share, sees a place at the table for her father.
Dana Parsons
November 15, 2007
I usually don't do one Veterans Day column, much less two. But I'm still hearing echoes from a hour or so I spent last week in a Mission Viejo living room with six combat vets -- five Marines and an Army man.
Much of what they talked about was standard issue, the kind of friendly put-downs and one-liners that they'd perfected over the years. Some of the stuff would make outsiders groan, but these guys -- all in their 70s and 80s -- had sensibilities well beyond the comic.
From time to time, their conversation would drift back to the uniqueness they attached to their experience. On a superficial level, it showed up with them saying, "To the Corps!" when they cracked open Miller Lites, but these guys also dug deep.
And the bedrock of it all was the profound belief that only another Marine really knew what they knew about war and a certain kind of relationship. It isn't the knowledge in books or catechism; it's the knowledge that you'd risk your life to save your buddy and that he'd do the same for you.
If you allow yourself to ponder that from the safety of civilian life, it's a fairly profound thought. Most of us forge treasured bonds with wives and children and friends, but not even those are immutable. Some bonds crack, some split wide open.
Among the Marines, these men said, those bonds are fire-treated and welded tight.
Semper fi means what it says.
These guys impressed me, but I considered the possibility I was getting a bit overwrought.
Then came the e-mail from Sylvia Valle, an adult-education art teacher in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District. She'd seen the column and wanted to reach the group in the hopes her widowed 86-year-old father, Robert Ramos, an ex-Marine who fought in the Pacific during World War II, might hook up with them.
I wondered if she was tapping the same vein as I -- the notion that the connection among former Marines had a subtle yet distinctive power to it.
When I asked her, Valle began by saying, "My dad never spoke about the war, other than to say how beautiful the Pacific was or how beautiful the islands were. He never articulated what he had personally gone through."
That matched her observations when she taught a class called "Writing Your Own Life." Most of her students were women, she says, either the daughters of or wives of World War II combat vets. The men typically had stories "so painful they couldn't articulate it when they came home. Life had changed so much when they left here to go to war, and then to come back and pick up the pieces . . . it was as if, if they didn't talk about it [the war experience], it didn't exist."
The vets' link, Valle believes, is rooted in the traumas of war. She saw firsthand those connections when, a few years ago, she and her daughter joined Valle's husband for a Vietnam vets reunion. "From that," she says, "I saw what it was my father was missing -- the camaraderie, the brotherhood, their feeling that 'we've been through something together and no one else can understand.' "
Two years ago, her mother died. "From high school to the Marines to my mother, my father had never been alone," Valle, 60, says. "He was extremely lonely."
When she read the column about the Marines at Casta Del Sol, a light went on. "He's obviously been searching for something," she says of her father, "but I think if he found a group of men that actually shared a part of his life at one time, he'd be able to find he was not alone, that he really has something in common with someone and that they do have a bond."
Why not direct him to a senior center, instead? Why not some club that matched his other interests?
Why the Marines?
"It was something that has impacted his life down to his core," she says. "Other than family, I think that has impacted his life the most."
I ask what she hopes will happen. "He's the kind of person, it'd be best if someone approached him. He's very shy. My whole wish is that he'd be able to meet some men that were, best-case scenario, in the Marine Corps in the Pacific when he was there."
We chat a bit more about life's turning points and seminal moments, the stuff that fills up the meaningful chapters of our life stories. I ask if, in a strange way, we should envy the kind of bond that brothers in arms had.
"Difficult question," she says. "It's not that we would envy their experience. What's enviable is that they found a way to heal that experience. It's not anything about it being a fun time. It's that spiritual cord that bonds them together, holds them together."
Ellie