I WENT TO WAR WITH RACISM
RACISM DID NOT WIN
My journey as a United States Marine began in August of 1988. For over a year I had been preparing for the day that I would become a heartbreaking, life-taking member of the world’s finest fighting force. When that day finally came, I found myself in the place that all Marines before me and after do likewise… on the yellow footprints.
Yellow
I am not sure exactly when this tradition began but we all begin our journey by placing our feet on these painted footprints. It is the first of many unifying points that we all share. Although we may tease about which coast you went to bootcamp on, we all know that whether it was the right or left coast, you still started with you heels together, online, and at a 45 degree angle.
Not long after that our transformation began. We were all told in no uncertain terms how utterly pathetic, worthless, and filthy we were. We may or may not have been told interesting things about our girlfriends, sisters, or even mothers back home that extolled their lack of virtue. The skill and tenacity of the drill instructors to find every button that could be pushed, and then effectively and repeatedly push it was uncanny. This of course was all part of the process of tearing down the individual to build them in to a cohesive Marine unit.
Green
Yellow was the first unifying color of our experience. The next color that was introduced was green. I am not referring to the service uniforms or even our camouflage. At this point in the Corps, the mantra had become that Marines only come in one color and that is green! Now, we have some light green Marines and some dark green Marines but WE ARE ALL GREEN! This was the second color and the second major point of unification. As a dark green Marine I was aware of some of the challenges that the Corps had faced regarding racial issues and why this was important.
It should be obvious that much of the thought behind the training was to create the Band of Brothers mentality that we were to claim. It worked. I still carry many of my Marine brothers and sisters in my heart today in a unique and extraordinary love.
Brother from another… Mentality
One of the brothers, we will call him Michael, I have not seen or spoken to since 1992. We did not go to bootcamp together and neither were we stationed together. Our connection was made in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a part of operation Desert Shield and then Desert Storm. I was deployed there from Okinawa and he was stationed in North Carolina. We were in the same occupational field and our detachments formed a forward deployed unit.
Michael was a southern boy from Mississippi. It did not take long to know that once you met him. He was a little younger than me and seemed to be a good Marine. Michael was also a racist. To be fair though, I did not know he was a racist until he told me. Michael told me that he was a member of the KKK as well as all the men in is family. He shared with me how the yellow and green experiences made him feel differently in that context and how he also reverted back to his pre-footprint days whenever he left the base and went home.
Michael and I were part of a detachment that ended up a few miles from the border of Kuwait. We were there for a few months and while we were there our days pretty much went like this:
·8 hours of working in our military occupational specialty (we were electronics technicians)
· 8 hours of guard duty sitting in a fighting hole pointing our M16s at Kuwait
· 8 hours to sleep, write letters, do pushups or whatever else needed to be done
Fire in the Hole!
As fate would have it, Michael and I had guard duty together. For eight hours each night, we were together, in a hole in the ground, almost shoulder to shoulder. During most of that time we were on 100 percent guard meaning both of us had to be awake the whole time. Staring into the desert darkness and looking up at the innumerable stars of the desert sky, we had a lot of time… to talk.
This is when I learned that Michael was raised in the Ku Klux Klan and grew up literally hating black people. The stories that he told me were ALMOST unbelievable, but I had my own stories from growing up, so I believed every word he shared. He told me about being a little boy sitting on his front porch with his fists balled up and teeth clenched trying to figure out a way to, “Get rid of all the N***** in the world.” He told me about seeing weapon stockpiles and the coming race wars they were planning. He even told me about scientist trying to figure out a way to cause drinking water to react with the sickle cell trait… I was shocked he knew what sickle cell was!
Michael shared other personal experiences like when he had to wrestle a black kid and how disgusted he was having to rub bodies with him. He was so disgusted by it that afterwards he ran to the locker room and cried as he showered. He also told me that if his uncles knew that he was talking to me as he was and sharing the things he had, that they would shoot him down like a dog in the street and leave him there.
We talked about a lot. Through all this sharing though, one thing never happened. We never got mad at each other. He never insulted me, and I never looked down on him. I think we were both getting so much out of the dialogue. On the other hand, maybe it could have been because we both had loaded M16's in our hands the whole time. I don’t know.
What I do know is that we were both honest. We both listened, and we were both impacted. The Marine Corps had given us both brothers and sisters that life had not. Many of them very likely would have never connected otherwise. Now the Corps had brought together one young man who spent his life growing up fighting racial stereotypes, negative perceptions and being impacted by racism since 1st grade and another young man who had been raised in environment of hate that was bred into him.
As time continued, I went from being curious about his upbringing to being genuinely interested in him. I wanted to understand who he was as a man and the conflict that was going on inside of him. I truly wanted to care and know about him as a person. Without a doubt, he had become my friend and my brother. He mattered to me and I mattered to him.
One day, during one of our more powerful conversations, he gave me one of those looks that usually only comes when Marines have been drinking too much and the Lee Greenwood song, “Proud to be an American” is blasted as we start confessing our undying love for each other. He looked at me and he said words I have never forgotten. He said, “Metcalf, I love you brother. If I were blind, I would want my sister to marry you.” Wait…
I choose to call it progress…
And this is where a lot of people fall off when I share this story. The ‘if I were blind’ part is what some consider that an insult, prejudicial and racist. I get it. I choose to call it progress. What it showed me is that he was seeing me for me, while still seeing what I looked like and both things mattered. He had enough respect to share with me his true feelings and that made me love and appreciate what was happening so much.
At that point, he had close to 20 years of being taught to hate everything about me. Yet, in a couple of months, he was ready to call my future children nieces and nephews. Racism did not win because the circumstances made us show up and once we were there we were honest. Change took place on the inside. I realized if he had never told me about who he really was, then we would have NEVER had the conversation that we had.
So, it took somebody else’s war to bring together a black kid from Texas and a white kid from Mississippi to not only liberate Kuwait but also free a mind and serve an L to racism. Sometimes I feel like the whole war was worth my time with Michael and in the same way that Sadaam was defeated, racism took a major defeat.
Semper Fidelis
Gunny