The Journal: A Reminiscence

In today’s Journal

* Happy Veterans’ Day
* If you’ll allow me a reminiscence…
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Happy Veterans’ Day, or as Marines call it, Recovery Day. (grin)

We often joked that if an enemy of the United States ever wanted to attack this nation, they should do so on November 11 while the Marine Corps was nursing a collective hangover.

Yesterday I spent the day with my wife, my youngest son and eldest grandson and with my friends (many in memoriam) from the Corps. For the first time since I joined, I didn’t toast my fellow Marines with a shot of whiskey. But we did enjoy some birthday cake.

If you’ll allow me a personal reminiscence, tomorrow I’ll get back to business as usual.

Hard to believe it’s been 49 year since I took the oath of enlistment and stood on those yellow footprints at the recruit depot at San Diego, a scared kid wondering how I’d wandered into a nightmare.

Then I blinked. And suddenly it was 21 years later and I was back in the civilian world.

That was 28 short years ago, and my time in the Corps remains the most cherished time of my life.

And really, that time wasn’t about the nation or the civilians we left behind. It was all about the guy on our right or left, the other Marines, male or female, and the Corpsmen who served with us.

It was about the shared values, shared knowledge and shared experiences.

To be clear, it was not the absence of higher ideals. We had the ideals all right, but we were actually serious about them. It was about our collective willingness to be unselfish enough to set those ideals aside as necessary for the greater good. To this day, I can’t imagine anyone longing for world peace more than a US Marine.

Now and then various people thank me for my “service.” I feel a little cheesy when they do. I usually respond by telling them the truth: Everyone has to be doing something (shrug), and frankly, it was my pleasure.

Those folks can never understand that my time in the Corps was not service, and it didn’t bear even a passing resemblance to a sacrifice. On the contrary, it was a very fortunate circumstance for which I will forever be grateful.

Being a Marine is an experience that can never be adequately explained to anyone who hasn’t lived it. And those who have lived it wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was a time that I will treasure as long as I draw breath.

Today I’m only a novelist, and a writer of short fiction and nonfiction. I’m good at it, it’s fun, and I enjoy both writing and having written.

But I would trade it in a heartbeat for another go at the Marine Corps.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

See “Finding and Using Competing Book Titles in Your Book Marketing” (by Penny Sansevieri) at https://annerallen.com/2019/11/finding-using-competing-book-titles/.

See “A Writer’s Contract With The Reader” at https://prowriterswriting.com/a-writers-contract-with-the-reader/.

See “The Johnson Vandyke Grigsbys of the World are Never Free” at https://www.leelofland.com/the-johnson-vandyke-grigsbys-of-the-world-are-never-free/. Maybe a story idea or twelve.

The Numbers

Fiction words today…………………… 0
Nonfiction words today…………… 510 (Journal)

Total fiction words for the month……… 6481
Total fiction words for the year………… 391574
Total nonfiction words for the month… 8330
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 289410
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 680984

Calendar Year 2019 Novels to Date…………………… 7
Calendar Year 2019 Novellas to Date……………… 1
Calendar Year 2019 Short Stories to Date… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 43
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 197
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31