[jonascord]

To SSgt. Fox, SSgt. Cooper, SSgt. Moore, Plt 3074, 1970: It's been 40 years, and I still remember thier names. Oddly enough, the tin Quonset huts my platoon were in are still there, per Google Earth, as the new squad bays were being built on the south side of the Grinder.

A few years ago, I was contracting in Charleston, SC, and went down to Parris Island to the museum, on a day off. (This was pre/911.) My wife asked me a question about how I still remembered my "DI", and I explained that "DI" stood for "Damned Idiot" and the term was avoided, and some guy in cammies, walking in front of us, folded up laughing...

[NTHockey]

SSgt. Mode, SSgt. Mangrum, Sgt. Dobson - Platoon 102, 1959 Parris Island.

I had the honor to run into Sgt. Dobson two years later. He chastised me for calling him Sir and I responded that he would always be Sir to me.

SSgt. Mangrum never wasted a step; he believed in the platoon meeting him instead of the other way around. SSgt. Mode was the intense one who never missed a thing. His swagger stick was calibrated in inches to measure precisely the distances between items on a “junk on the bunk” inspection.

Semper fi