Posted on 12/07/2005 4:56:33 PM PST by SandRat
ABOARD THE U.S.S. PELELIU (Dec. 6, 2005) -- One Marine sought the road less traveled while the other sought the path to self discovery. Both found that their road was one in the same, and it began at the yellow footprints.
Lance Cpl. Ryan J. Heist, operations clerk, 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, Camp Pendleton, never set out to be a Marine. Heist grew up in affluence, a self-described privileged kid who had everything handed to him right up until he joined the Marine Corps.
Lance Cpl. Christopher K. Morgan-Riess, tactical data network specialist, 11th MEU, came from an upper-middle class background. Morgan-Riess, who was the only child of a college professor and book publisher, graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a bachelors degree in philosophy. Growing up, Morgan-Riess said he lived in the sheltered world of academia with his face buried in books.
Both young men had everything going for them. They had money, nice homes, nice clothes and a pedigree that destined them to academic success and monetary wealth.
Heist would later realize that money wasn't everything and Morgan-Riess soon learned that the lessons of life he was searching for could not all be found in books.
So they both joined the Marines.
Now, both Marines find themselves sailing off the coast of Camp Pendleton, aboard an amphibious assault ship and part of one of the most elite fighting forces the world has ever seen. As Heist puts it, he is on a personal journey of discovery, while Morgan-Riess describes his quest as one for knowledge. Aboard the U.S.S. Peleliu, they are conducting dangerous and important training that they may one day have to use in Iraq or in some other war-torn place. Both are just a couple thousand miles from home, but almost a million miles from the life they used to live.
Before enlisting in the Marines, Heist spent his days going to college and working for a popular Jazz restaurant in Dallas. He played basketball and football, went fishing, and spent his time listening to music and going to the movies with friends and family. If he needed money, all he needed to do was to make one call. Until then, "everything was just handed to me, and I never had to earn it," said Heist.
Although extremely intelligent, Heist was uninspired in school and after a couple of years he had had enough.
So one night after work, Heist stopped and took a hard and honest look at his life. "I had no direction," said Heist. "I didn't have the discipline to go to class and do all my work at the time. I needed a place where I could get some structure and stability, and I couldn't think of a better place than the Marine Corps," said Heist.
Although their friends and family respected their decision, both Marines said most of their loved ones were not too happy at first.
"My father was pretty shocked. It took a couple of weeks of long dinners explaining to him what my reasons were for enlisting," said Morgan-Riess. "He was expecting for me to go on to pursue higher degrees right away," he said.
Heist's family had a similar reaction.
"But I think after boot camp, they really saw the change in me," said Heist. "saw me standing taller, being able to look someone in the eye and being able to express my opinions in a confident manner," said Heist.
It was this newfound confidence and an inherent intelligence that Heist brought with him to the 11th MEU more than one year ago. These were all traits that he would need, if he were to function aboard a ship loaded with aircraft and equipment that housed more than 2300 Marines and sailors packed like sardines.
"Life aboard a ship is a culture shock like no other," said Heist. It's like a small floating city inside a pressure cooker streaming toward the horizon, where the heat begins to rise and the pressure starts to build as soon as the warning order is dropped and a mission is assigned, he said.
Most Marines and sailors would say that the MEU is not a place for the meek, soft-spoken, thin-skinned or those accustomed to a full night's sleep. The sounds of Harriers taking off and landing is deafening and the rattle of chains being dragged across a hard-coated steel deck can be heard way down into the bowels of the ship. It's a place for those who are driven, undeterred and maybe just a little bit crazy.
It is a place where tensions can sometimes run high, where time off and a good nights sleep are virtually non-exist because everyone is focused on only one thing, accomplishing the mission, said Heist. It is also an environment in which Heist and Morgan-Riess have flourished.
"Morgan-Riess is the type of Marine I would want on my team," said Sgt. Mauricio A. Febres, computer technician. "He is one of the most capable troubleshooters in the MEU. He is extremely intelligent, very mature, and needs no supervision," said Febres.
According to Morgan-Riess, the work is endless and there is little time to sleep. Despite this, he said there is no other job he would rather be doing and he is confident that joining the Corps was the best decision he ever made. Morgan-Riess said he remembers the exact moment that he knew he took the right road. It was in basic training, while marching in silence to the chow hall on a cold dark and miserable morning. "I happened to look up at the stars and at the faces of the Marines around me, whom I had been sweating and bleeding with for the past two months," he said.
"I remember having this feeling of complete camaraderie and a certainty that if I ever needed them, they would help me, and that I would help them," he said. "I had never felt anything like that before."
"When you've worked 36 hours straight and you're sitting around talking about how tough that was with Marines from all walks of life, there is a certain amount of bonding that I don't think can be experienced anywhere else," said Morgan-Riess.
"I see friends of mine who have gone on to pursue Ph.D.s and they still have only those five friends they've always had going through school," said Morgan-Riess.
Although it's nice to form close relationships, life in academia has a tendency to insulate you from the rest of the world, he said. "At that point in my life, I wanted to see the world and experience how the military works from a first person perspective rather than reading it in a book," he said.
According to both Marines, since enlisting in the Corps, both have learned lessons in leadership, teamwork, mission planning and accomplishment in a setting like no other. And they have learned lessons that they could never have learned anywhere else.
Heist, an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, has seen the devastation of war and the devastation that Hurricane Katrina inflicted on Americans here at home. Heist was with the MEU when they traveled to Gulf Coast Region to assist the victims of one of the worst natural disasters to hit the United States. Given his background, Heist said one of the most important lesson he's learned while in the Corps is to not to take so many things for granted. That as Americans we are very privileged and we that we should appreciate everything we have."
Both Marines plan to leave the Marine Corps after their first enlistment and to continue their education. Heist plans to continue to pursue his degree while in the Marines and then use the leadership, logistical and technical skills he has learned to open his own restaurant. Morgan-Riess plans to pursue a degree in Law with a specialization in International Human Rights after fulfilling his commitment to the Corps. His dream is to some day work to prosecute war criminals in international criminal courts.
Both Marines say they are confident they will look back on their experiences and at the lessons they learned with the MEU and consider them as the focal point in their character development. For his part, Morgan-Riess said that when the time comes to look back at the road the he has traveled, a segment of the famous Robert Frost poem "The Road Less Traveled" will probably come to mind. "…Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
Don't ping that list. Don't do it. I'm begging you!
:) HA!
Only the under privileged, poorly educated, minorities, and poor are in the military fighting this war?!
Guess what all you Leftist Quislings; "YOU'RE WRONG!"
Wait, I thought all enlisted military personnel were folks who would never amount to anything and could get no other job? Didnt the MSM say that, sort of?
Good luck Marines, you are off to a great start on the road to becoming real men. I wish you the very best in life!
They honor us with their service to our country.
Where's Al Sharpton and his whining about how our military is composed of the poor and uneducated? These guys will be in the top of any organization or profession they choose to follow, and we're very lucky to have them as Marines.
Monetary wealth from a philosophy degree?
I used to work next to a guy--computer tech, smart, middle-aged, stable marriage with a good solid son. His son went to The Citadel on a partial academic scholarship.
Two and a half years later, the kid got kicked out for some total stupidity involving using a fake ID to get beer at a Charleston bar. (They don't play around at The Citadel, as you probably know.) So here this kid is, 21 years old, thoroughly screwed up his dreams of education, no job, back at home with his dad and stepmom, totally unsure about what to do with his life next.
He joined the Marine Reserves. His dad about crapped himself, but he couldn't stop his son, and a couple months later, his son was on the bus to Parris Island.
I met the kid after he came back from the Island. Let me tell you, he wasn't a kid anymore. He was a MAN. Everything was "sir" and "ma'am," very soft-spoken, very polite, very squared-away in that khaki shirt and blue pants. He was training with the Marine Reserve unit in Charleston, which is some sort of logistical outfit.
Then they got called up and sent to the sandbox. A year before, he was drinking himself stupid underage in Charleston. A year later, he was working the graveyard shift, dusk to dawn, unloading helicopters somewhere in Iraq...when he wasn't VOLUNTEERING to man Ma Deuce on a Humvee, escorting supply convoys from Kuwait to some of the worst spots in Iraq. His dad told me that their unit's CO had to explicitly ban all his Marines from volunteering to go on convoy escort duty, because so many of them wanted to get in on it that they weren't leaving enough people behind to unload the choppers. They all wanted to get into the sh!t.
I couldn't hack the Marine Corps. I know that with total certainty. But God bless those who do, because it can really do something special to young men and women.
By the way...last I heard, that "kid" was thinking seriously about going active-duty and working toward OCS.
}:-)4
Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps (Hardcover)
by Frank Schaeffer
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786710977/104-4914374-6174369?v=glance&n=283155
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
The story of a young man having a growth experience by joining the military is a classic scenario, and John Schaeffer does justice to his take on it in his account of personal transformation from high-school graduate to U.S. Marines corporal. Interspersed with his narrative are his father Frank's remarks on the rest of the family's incidental affiliation with and new perspective on the marines in particular and the military in general. They brought to the encounter the ignorance and prejudice against the military that too often accompanies their status as members of the college-educated white middle class, from which, in fact, precious few of America's servicemen come. But in the end, Frank expresses open pride in having sent one of "the best ye breed" to the corps before September 11. One of the better books of its kind, and likely to remain so. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
In 1998, Frank Schaeffer was a successful novelist living in "Volvo-driving, higher-education worshipping" Massachusetts with two children graduated from top universities. Then his youngest child, straight out of high school, joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Written in alternating voices by eighteen-year-old John and his father, Frank, Keeping Faith takes readers in riveting fashion through a family’s experience of the U.S. Marine Corps. From being broken down and built back up on Parris Island (and being the parent of a child undergoing that experience), to the growth of both father and son and their separate reevaluations of what it means to serve. From Frank’s realization that among his fellow soccer dads "the very words ‘boot camp’ were pejorative, conjuring up ‘troubled youths at risk’ " to John’s learning that "the Marine next to you is more important than you are," Keeping Faith is a fascinating and personal reconsideration of issues of class, duty, and patriotism. But as John and his fellow recruits battle to make the cut—and John’s family struggles to deal with the worry and separation, it is also an extremely timely, moving, and wonderfully written human interest story—a moving chronicle of love, duty and patriotism in contemporary America. "Beautifully written ... great insight and unselfconscious humor."—Publishers Weekly
BTTT
God bless these two fine young Marines.
Semper Fi'
JarheadFromFlorida
SEMPER FI
Shades of Frank Schaeffer's son, John
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