'Always a Marine'
By Matthew Barakat
ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 2, 2005

QUANTICO, Va. -- When he enlisted in the Marines in 1969, Randall Arnold had to fight past a friend who literally held him back from the recruiting office.
Thirty-six years later, Master Sgt. Arnold had no regrets as he finally retired from the Corps as its last enlisted Vietnam veteran.

At a retirement ceremony yesterday at Quantico Marine Corps Base, Sgt. Arnold said his reasons for signing up were "purely selfish. It was just about travel and adventure. I was 18 years old, and I wanted to see the world."

His friends preferred he find a safer outlet for his wanderlust. Ray Sedgwick, who graduated with Sgt. Arnold at Coolidge High School in the District, grabbed his friend and physically restrained him when they walked past a Marine recruiting station on Pennsylvania Avenue during a job-hunting trip.

"I told him, 'You gotta be crazy,' " recalled Mr. Sedgwick, who attended yesterday's ceremony. Eventually, though, Mr. Sedgwick relented to his friend's wishes when Sgt. Arnold made it clear he had made up his mind.

Col. Mike Lowe, the commander at Quantico, said he suspects Sgt. Arnold had more than adventure on his mind when he enlisted.

"Marines don't like baring their souls or discussing their individual motivations," Col. Lowe said. "But when he enlisted, people were being inundated on the news every night. ... There were protests, burning flags. He stepped up to the plate to show that his entire generation wasn't represented by that mindset."

In an interview after the ceremony, Sgt. Arnold acknowledged that many factors influenced his decision.
He had been successful in the Junior ROTC in high school and had enjoyed the marching, the uniforms and other trappings of military life. But he did not enlist immediately after graduation "because for a while I was being guided by public opinion."

But the military was never far from his mind. One day, he tried on a dress-blue uniform that his older brother, also a Marine, had left at home.

"I stood in the mirror, and said, 'Oh yeah, this is it,' " he recalled.

After enlisting, he volunteered for service in Vietnam, and served there in 1970 and 1971 as a radio telegraph operator.

I did what most Marines did," he said. "I pulled guard duty. I stood watch in the tower along the perimeter, and I stood radio watch."

Sgt. Arnold, a Charlottesville native who now lives in Stafford with his wife and two children, left active duty as a sergeant in 1973, and served in the Marine Corps Reserve from 1973 to 1975 and in the D.C. National Guard from 1976 to 1978.

He met his wife, Kim, in 1977 when he was out of the Corps.

"He's always loved the Marine Corps," she said. "When he was out, he went from job to job. It wasn't that he wasn't good at those jobs, it's just that he wasn't happy. When he rejoined the Corps, that's the happiest he's been."

After returning to active duty in 1983, he served in Grenada, South Korea and Somalia, among other stops. He spent much of his second stint training other Marines.

The biggest change, he said, between 1969 and now is "we have a lot more females in the Corps. And that's a good thing. They bring a little more civility, a little more humanity. But don't get me wrong, some of those women are just as tough as guys."

He was offered the chance earlier in his career to become an officer, but he turned it down, saying he "wasn't ready to accept responsibility and settle down."

He is retiring now because he has to -- the military puts limits on the number of years one can serve. He hopes to find a job that will allow him to continue working with the Marines.
"Once a Marine, always a Marine," he said.

Ellie