782 Gear

15 February 2010:

"Saddle up! Move 'em out!!" The Gunnery Sergeant's call to arms - and our arms were hurting. Our shoulders, backs, legs, and feet were killing us. The heat caused such pounding in our heads that we thought our helmets would explode. Just another lovely day in hell. While we chased an enemy dressed in black cotton shorts and a few rounds of ammunition, we sank up to our thighs in the rice paddies weighted down by the individual loads of crap we had to carry. I always pitied the radiomen and the mortar teams. They pitied me for carrying the extra medical gear (Ed Henry, USN, Corpsman, FMF). The truckers and Tankmen pitied all of us, the ground-pounders. We pitied all them when it came ambush time. They were always stuck in the middle of nowhere - poor bastards. At least we could move - if our legs hadn't been shot out from under us. So there was a lot of mutual pity that passed for esprit de corps and unit integrity.

We weren't having a lot of fun then - the darkness of Marine Corps humor kept us going and an occasional laugh at the oddest of really grim and terrifying moments. The fun is being an older man now, fit and healthy enough to look back on all of it and wondering what it was all about. So somebody asked me the other day what the term "782 Gear" meant and this person (who's never served his country) got a strange, deranged, look on his face when I blurted out, "Go look it up on Google, Dumbshit!"

I felt immediately sorry for calling him a Dumbshit and halfway apologized. You vets out there will intuitively know in your gut why I only halfway apologized to him. There is always that little piece of my gut that tells me that no matter what I say, no matter how much I try to explain, the listener just isn't truly listening. Or if he is listening, he's not understanding anything I'm trying to tell him. Kenneth Brown, the playwright, would have called this present said condition as experiencing "The Line." There's a line here. A line in the human male experience - and in today's world, a line in the female experience too, as the reality sinks in that women are assuming more and more combat roles and coming home in the body bags that were once only reserved for men. So I wished that person a nice day, and asked him about his grandkids. That's about as much pleasantry as I could muster. You men out there who once strapped on 782 Gear know what I'm talking about. And Gunny, wherever you are, God love you, you know what I'm talking about, too.