4 Chapter Four: In the Marines

Right out of high school, Doug joined the marines. He was encouraged to do so by Door County’s Sheriff  Bridenhagen, who was a former Marine himself. He went over his experiences with Doug, as well as how he benefitted from them. As Bridenhagen was now a successful and well-off sheriff, it made a big impression on Doug, and he and a friend of his went to go enlist. The two went to Green Bay to enlist, and to Milwaukee for the physical.

During testing, they went around and asked if anybody could type. Doug had taken a typing class a Gibraltar, and he was rather good at it, reaching around 45 words a minute. The qualification for teletype operators for the marines at the time was 38 words a minute, making Doug a prime recruit for the communications office of the Marines. After he was successfully enlisted, Doug was assigned to be a teletype operator. This particular position ended up landing him a lot of different jobs and assignments.

While he could not talk a lot about his experiences, Doug was able to share some of them with me. His first position was in Twentynine Palms, California.³ Twentynine Palms is a base of operations for the Marines where “the big guns” were stored and dispersed. Doug was in Twentynine Palms when the Cuban Missile Crisis took place, and Jack Kennedy was his commanding officer at the time. Doug division helped set up the blockade all night, spending the whole night in the “vault” processing communications. They would come in encoded, and Doug would decode them into regular English and bring the report right to his Colonel. The teletype operators would work alone in the vault, besides a sergeant to be present with them. If the bells rang to indicate top-secret information, the sergeant and operator would close the vault. Doug recalled that “the bells were ringing a lot that night.”

^{Doug on the bells – 7 seconds}

After the night of the blockade, Doug remembers going into town and eating at a local restaurant. In the restaurant, they had the radio going, and it was reporting on the current military situation. Knowing exactly what was actually happening in Cuba, Doug recognized the disconnect between what knowledge the military had, and what was being told to the general public at the time.

Doug’s next assignment was supposed to be in Iwakuni, Japan. He was on a Navy ship in the South China Sea, and they ended up landing in Formosa, modern-day Taiwan.⁴  His mission had changed. In Taiwan, Doug arrived with his crypto van–a 4×4 truck with a vault instead of a bed for his and his sergeant to take the communications from. From the crypto truck, they would communicate with the jeep radio towers in Vietnam. The Marines there were primarily advisors, helping advise the Southern Vietnamese on how to fight against the RVN.

What Doug remembers the most about his time in Vietnam are the “Chinese” Marines and their families. The Chinese Marines were part of the Free Chinese who had fled to Taiwan when China began to become Communist China. Every evening, these so-called Chinese Marines would walk to the shoreline, and Doug would go with them. As the sun set, they would stand all stand together and they would look at mainland China–it’s visible from the shore there. He can distinctly remember how every night, the tears would flow heavily from their eyes as they looked at the home which had been taken from them.

^{Doug on Taiwan – 19 seconds}

In Taiwan, the Marine would eat in mess halls. After each meal, the Marines would dig a hole wherever they were, put the leftover scraps and garbage in it. Before they left, they would burn whatever was in the hole and cover it back up, making it essentially a small landfill. Now the Taiwanese people were starving, and they would go into these holes, even with the fire burning, and they would pick out scraps of food, and Doug saw that. In the evenings, the Marines would bring out candy. They would toss handfuls into the and watch the kids run and grab them–like a pinata being broken open. Doug remembers one time seeing an old man come over and knock a little kid down to take his candy. The memory of the plight of the Taiwanese still hurts his heart.

Doug feels deeply for the friends he made in Taiwan and the people he saw there, and he’s bitter about how they’re being treated today, with China breathing down their neck and most places not recognizing them as their own country. He believes that if we promise someone that we’re going to take care of them, that our army should stick to that promise. He resents how his actions were seen as those of invaders. “When we were in Japan,” he recalls, “We didn’t invade anybody.” Doug holds that the situation bad situations in Vietnam, both in the past and current, stem from the US army pulling out and dropping support for the Southern Vietnamese.

^{Doug on Japan – 16 seconds}

When Kennedy was assassinated, Doug remembers that he was sleeping in his rack, and it was 2 am in the morning where he was. The bells had started ringing at the comm center, and the communicator there at the time wasn’t allowed to take in top-secret transmissions, so they went and woke up Doug to take in the transmission. So Doug went to the comm center and started processing everything. The sergeant with Doug loaded his gun and said that if anyone were to approach the jeep with the comm vault, he would shoot to kill. They burned all the communications from that night–carbons and all. What he can say about it is that most of the historical information about the Kennedy assassination is pretty much true, with very little skewed information.

Doug’s original plan was to go career in the marines, to re-enlist and work his way up to become an officer. However, for the last six months of his first tour, they had him stationed in the Great Lakes. Instead of working comms, where he was stationed as a brig guard. While he was there, working on the ships, he met Dixie. Dixie was helping manage the shipyard maintenance crews, ensuring that ships got their repairs and upgrades in a timely manner and that the shipyard had all the parts and pieces they needed to do so. Dixie and Doug hit it off, and soon started dating. Doug still planned to become an officer, however, and his superiors wanted the same. Towards the end of his first enlistment, they started pressuring him to re-enlist and go to officer’s school. Dixie, whose time was about to run out as well, told Doug that if he re-enlisted, he would be alone. So Doug and Dixie left the Marines together and got married.