Baptism by Fire: Becoming a Marine in Practice as Well as by Name
December 22, 2021| Ronald Winter
Ask any Marine if they can remember the first day they actually became a Marine and you likely will be told it was boot camp graduation day. Whether it was Parris Island or San Diego, only when the senior officer in the graduation program proclaims the graduates “Marines” did the title apply. For officers, it would be a similar graduation from Officer Candidate School when their second-lieutenant butter bars were pinned to their uniforms.
The designation could not come at any time before that, and no matter how well the recruits or officer candidates did at the various stages of training that preceded graduation day, if they didn’t graduate, they were not Marines.
Ron Winter inside a hooch in Quang Tri, South Vietnam, four months and more than 100 missions into his tour. Photo courtesy of the author.
Ron Winter inside a hooch in Quang Tri, South Vietnam, four months and more than 100 missions into his tour. Photo courtesy of the author.
But as many Marines will also tell you, there are other defining moments in the journey to becoming a Marine veteran that eclipse the boot camp experience. These include the baptism by fire, when Marines enter combat for the first time and learn how they will react when the enemy shoots directly at them.
For me, that moment came on June 1, 1968, during an initial assault as we inserted troops into an area south of Khe Sanh where the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was building a road under the cover of a triple canopy jungle. I responded appropriately and survived, yet while that was a personal milestone, there was something missing. Even if I couldn’t articulate it, I felt it.
https://thewarhorse.org/marine-learns-meaning-of-semper-fidelis-in-baptism-by-fire/
