57. A Fine Bromance

Author’s note: Happy 250th Birthday, Marines. Here’s something I wrote about Marine friendships. Hope you enjoy!

As I was coming to the end of my time at the at the United States Armed Forces School of Music, company enlisted band leader Master Gunnery Sergeant DeBauer pulled me into his office to ask me how I was doing at the school and what I was most looking forward to as I set out to join one of the Marine fleet bands in just a few short weeks. With the jowls of an old bulldog and the temperament of one, too, MGySgt. DeBauer was about as stereotypical a Marine as one could possibly be. After a couple of decades of doing military style push-ups several times a week and after a couple decades of Marine Corps experience that would take him all over the world many times over, he was large in stature, but even larger in reputation.

Although he was fair and even-handed, he was someone you wanted to be sure to always stay on the right side of. You didn’t have to be told that, you just knew it instinctively, and every Marine on that base made “not pissing DeBauer off” our number one priority. Everything else was secondary. A healthy fear of an almost folkloric old Marine was a great motivator.

If you screwed that up, you’d find yourself on the wrong end of the worst tongue-lashing you’d ever been a part of or ever would be a part of. Those were the stakes. I remember one such instance in which some Marines got caught leaving base when they weren’t allowed to and I can still recall how you could hear every syllable, every caught breath, and every piece of spittle being unleashed on those young dumb Marines, even from several rooms away. 

Although I was nervous about speaking with him, I was a good student who had gained a certain amount of proficiency at sliding under any radar you could throw my way. I had a feeling he was genuinely curious about how I was doing at the school and about my future as a Marine. Sure enough, we had a genial conversation about military life, what to expect when I got to Okinawa in a few weeks, and what I thought about my time at the School of Music. I told him that although the school had been a grueling place to be, I had a enjoyed my time there, had learned a lot, and made a ton of friends.

His face grew stern and he stood up. “Uh oh, what did I say,” I thought to myself?

“Nope! Listen to me now.” Master Gunnery Sergeant DeBauer said quietly but firmly as he held up 5 fingers. “In this life, you’ll likely only make 5 real true-blue friends. …friends who you can call on at any time of day or night who would move heaven and earth to help you out. The rest are, to varying degrees, just acquaintances or friendly acquaintances. You got that?”

“Yes, Master Gunnery Sergeant.”

“Five!”

Because of their uniquely additive qualities, comparing friendships I had in military life to friendships I had outside of it is a bit like comparing apples to apple pies. The closest comparison I can make would be comparing it to the kinds of friends you make in college when you’re in a dorm-like setting with them. Like dorm life, you can form intense bonds with people you’re roomed with. And maybe you’ll be in the same classes as this person and see them outside of the dorm setting on a regular basis. Military friendships stretch that dynamic out in every conceivable way, though. So, imagine if you lived with your dorm friends, but then worked at the same 8:00 – 5:00pm job with them, too. And then imagine if you were required to work out at the gym or go on runs with those same friends 3 or 4 times a week (every week) for years and years. And then when you’re done working out with those friends, you all go back to your rooms and clean every floor-to-ceiling surface until it’s so devoid of dust or grime that you could literally see your reflection in those same surfaces. And then, you travel all over the world with these same people. And when you’re hungry, what if you ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day with these people? And on top of everything else, what if you all went through the same type of basic training that instilled the idea… no… the belief, that these people weren’t just friends or acquaintances, but were your brothers and sisters and that you’d jump on a grenade for any one of them? And not just that, what if you all shared a common military lineage that dates back to November 10^th, 1775, when the Marine Corps itself was founded? OO-FREAKING-RAH!

I met my friend Eric Lorbach in Okinawa, Japan in the late Spring of 1997. I was a young and green Private First Class and had just finished the gauntlet of Marine Corps Recruit Training (aka Boot Camp, an intense 3 months), Marine Combat Training (the longest 29 days of my life), and the Armed Forces School of Music (another long 6 months) and was finally to my first duty-station on the tropical paradise island that is Okinawa, Japan. I had just gotten to the barracks and somehow lucked out with a room all my own. This isn’t so bad, I thought to myself. My own room! After about 12 hours or so, the powers-that-be figured out their error and paired me up with Private First Class Lorbach (Marines call each other by their last names so I’ll do that from here on out), who had gotten to Okinawa a couple weeks before I had. If you need a mental image of what Lorbach looks like, just think of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) from Rocky 4, only doughier. That is not meant to be an insult, by the way. Everyone is doughy when compared to Ivan Drago. But just imagine a Finnish blonde haired, square jawed type but by way of Minnesota, which is about as redundant a sentence as has ever been written.

Many of the details of those early days and weeks have been lost to the quantum realm of the past, but I remember distinctly that we hit it off quickly. We were both young Marines who were new to not only a new country but to life as Marine Corps bandsmen, neither of which are easy to navigate on their own. As a “Boot Marine” (“fresh out of boot camp”), no one really goes out of their way to really show you the ropes.

Don’t get me wrong; there are Marines who are there to tell you what’s what, but it’s by and large a very “this is this, that it that” black and white kind of sentiment. There isn’t a lot a lot of hand holding in military life. We all go through the same basic training. We all go through the same schooling. We’re supposed to fall right into line and be functional from the get-go. It can be hard. On top of all of that, there really is no “out” if you can’t cut it as a Marine. You can’t just get up and quit and head home. It ain’t that kind of job. You’re stuck. It’s sink or swim. And if you sink, it can be extremely isolating and difficult. I always felt bad for the Marines who couldn’t cut it. They carry that weight for a long, long time. But the more people you have going through that early experience together with you, the better off you’ll be.

I know that many of the early weeks and months of our friendship involved making sure it was a lot more swim than sink. We jumped into the procedure of it all and did our best to keep each other afloat. “What’s our uniform tomorrow” or “Hey, we need to be there at 0530 tomorrow morning, let’s set the alarm for 0515 so we have time to get dressed and over to the band hall.” Accountability stuff. We’d loan each other shoe polish for our boots or spray starch for our uniforms when our personal supply ran out. I never knew military life would require so much ironing. They don’t put that in the brochures. Syncing up on the details in order to survive would have been more than enough to make us successful roommates, but what made us quick friends were all the ways we’d fill in the gaps. You know, life shit.

So, we wouldn’t just leave it as “we’re in boots tomorrow” and then spit shine our boots to a mirror shine in silence. We’d talk. It almost sounds kind of silly now, but I’d never met anyone from Minnesota before, and I was pretty sure he’d never met anyone from Texas either. So, we’d shine our boots and chat about what life was like on the frozen lakes of Minnesota and I’d reciprocate by telling him what it was like down in Houston, Texas. I assured him we weren’t issued horses at birth. He assured me not everyone there played hockey on their frozen lakes. One of those sentences is a lie. I assured him not all Texans like football. He assured me that not everyone in Minnesota talks like they do in the movie Fargo. This time, both of those sentences are lies.

Or we’d iron our uniforms while we’d playfully break each other’s balls by having a pissing contest on which state was better. I always had him on food. Texas food is undeniably better. We also had the better sports teams (remember, this is the 90s we’re talking about). He always had me on the stuff that actually mattered; how Minnesota had the better education system and how Minnesota took better care of its citizens. Those are both undeniable, you betcha doncha know. I can feel his eyes rolling from many states away.

I could also talk about the countless (and I do mean countless) nights we chatted about God-knows-what from our bunk-bed racks as we fought off sleep. That’s probably where our best conversations took place, but again, the details of those conversations have been lost to space and time. All that exists now are the broad strokes of those conversations. We talked often about how Marine life wasn’t exactly a great fit for either of us. Lorbach had a fairly strong rugged individualistic core and that’s a hard thing to maintain in a place where collective uniformity was mandated. On my end, I was certainly too left-leaning to ever feel at home in an ultra-right leaning environment like the Marine Corps. Or maybe our conversations would revolve around how we were similarly thoughtful people who had a hard time fitting into an extremely regimented military environment where free-thinking is frowned upon. Or, we’d chat about how we both missed home and how relationships are hard to maintain from 7,600 miles away.  

It wasn’t just all talk, though. We also engaged in other ridiculous shenanigans. The III MEF Band Hall was positioned on a darkened hill and was rumored to have been a makeshift hospital for injured Marines making their way home from Vietnam. It wasn’t, by the way. I think our band hall was built in the early 1980s. But that didn’t stop us (the royal “we”) from developing an in-depth mythology that our band hall was haunted by a nurse that’d walk its halls at night, checking the pulse of any Marine on duty that night. One night, I was polishing our floors, already a little freaked out by the idea I’d be visited that night by said nurse, when Lorbach jumped out from behind a corner and scared the motherfucking shit out of me. When someone scares you like that, your brain instantaneously clocks what’s happening, but your body is still in a purely adrenaline fueled reactive state. Raging mad, I chased him down the hall and back out of the band hall. “You fucking asshole!” I was so flipping mad but I could hear him laughing all the way back to the barracks.

Or maybe I could talk about the time when we watched Dances with Wolves late one night. Lorbach must have woken up in a half-asleep, half-awake state and thought a member of the Pawnee tribe was waiting in our room to ambush us while we slept. That coat draped over a chair in our room never knew what hit it.

It got to the point that where you’d find one of us, you’d probably find the other. People used to jokingly call that out, like we were an old married couple or something. We’d laugh at the joke but then wouldn’t do much of anything to change the perception.

The longer you’re at a duty station in the Marines, the more situated you get into the routine of your day-to-day life. And the more situated and better at your job you get, the more relaxed you become. And with that, you start expanding your social network. You learn that those intimidating Marines that used to make your life a living Hell were mostly cool folks in their own right and could be fun to hang out with outside of work hours, too. And it isn’t too-too long before newer Marines than you start showing up. That was always a trip. One day you’re green behind the ears, a little awestruck and barely staying afloat, the next you’re a seasoned vet with a little salt behind your ears and are helping those new Marines out.

I think being friends with someone in the military is probably more akin to what it’s like being in a rock band and being on the road with your bandmates. You inevitably wind up doing everything together whether you intend to or not. We were in an environment that fostered a lot of togetherness. Every single one of us was way, way, way far away from home. We all would have gone to great lengths to get a home cooked meal but there’s no real way to cook something like that in our barracks rooms, so we ended up eating at the Globe and Anchor (the on-base restaurant) a lot. That a lot is underselling it. I think we ate there almost every meal. We didn’t just know the wait staff there (all Okinawans), we became lifelong friends with many of them. We had all of our basic needs met. We had free shelter. We were given extra money for living overseas and were given extra money for food allowance. We weren’t allowed (or it was frowned upon) to own a car, so we didn’t have many real financial responsibilities. And because of that lack of real responsibilities, we all had a decent amount of disposable income burning a hole in our pockets. Those are all ingredients for having a metric shit ton of fun.

It wasn’t long before that super tightknit dynamic we had was expanded to a larger group of folks. People like Joseph Hewitt, Brandon Innes, Jeffrey DeHaven, Steve Higgins, Tammy Crain, Paul Carey, William Barker, and Kevin Schutte (and countless others) became not just faces in the hallway but people I hung out with practically 24/7 while stationed in Japan. I think this dynamic is common in the Marines. We all gang-up. …not on each other, but with each other.

It was common to walk around base and see little groups of 4 or 5 people palling around with one another. And in an environment of tight-knit groups, I felt like I had the tightest and knittest friend group of them all. Like I said, we did everything together. We worked together. We ate together almost every night. We did movie nights in each other’s rooms and did stupid costume dress-up skits to see who could get the biggest laugh from people in rooms down the hall. We’d jokingly figure out more and more grotesque ways to gross each other out. A friend of mine was particularly good at making puppetry out of his … his … you know. His junk. He did an amazing turtle. We walked around base together. We explored Okinawa together. We rode the Tokyo subway and made inappropriate jokes together. We’d wake up on Saturdays and go play this weird form of football-soccer-rugby where some of us would end up with bloody noses. We had parties at our band hall every couple of weeks, and everyone would show up. When we weren’t having parties, we were getting drunk in each other’s rooms. We quoted The Simpsons to each other a lot. The conversations were plentiful and the laughs endless.

On top of all the things we’d do outside of work hours, there was also the work itself. Being in a creative environment with so many interesting people provided so many cool and unexpectedly great avenues for friendships to develop, too. Maybe I’ll talk about that some other time, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a more collaborative and fun working environment than the ones I found myself in while serving as a Marine bandsman.   

I often see something go around the internet, usually accompanied by an old, yellowed picture of college-aged kids having fun, with a caption saying something to the effect of “we didn’t realize we were having the best time of our lives until it was over.” I don’t know if I buy that. I certainly always knew that we were a friends group living on borrowed time. Another way that military friendships are particularly unique is that they’re transient in nature. That’s true of all friendships, I think, but it’s more pronounced in the military, especially for people who are stationed in Okinawa one one-year deployment at a time. A person’s one-year deployment comes to and end and they leave. It happens all year round.

But when that deployment year is coming to an end, you’re often given the option to stay on another year. Since so few people actually ask to be stationed in Okinawa in the first place, they’d usually let you stay if you requested it. I suppose it’s easier to keep a Marine there than to bring a new one in. I really enjoyed my first year, though, so I decided to re-up another year. Lorbach ended up doing the same. Most of the rest of my friends group did the same, too. I wonder now if we all re-upped because we really enjoyed being stationed on Okinawa or if we did so because we wanted to keep the good times going. For me, it was about 70% the friends, 30% the island itself. I didn’t want this to end.

By the time we got to our second year, we were so seasoned and proficient at our jobs, we could practically do most of the work with our eyes closed. The thing about being a Marine that doesn’t get discussed much is that the Marine standard of professionalism is dependent on the Marines maintaining it. The standard is the standard and there’s no getting around it. But by the time that second year was underway, both Lorbach and I were getting a little tired of it. For Lorbach, pushback came by way of testing the limits of his hair length. For me, it was refusing to tuck in my shirt when I was out and about town in my civvies (basically “business casual attire”). I suspect we both knew we weren’t lifers and were itching to push back on the many standards expected of us. It all sounds so silly now, but like I said, the Marine Corps is a hard place for people who try and maintain a sense of individualism.

Sadly, all great things come to an end, though. One by one, we all headed back to the United States for new duty stations. Lorbach left before I did and I remember we sent him off in style. In those days, that just meant everyone getting plastered on cheap beer and having one final meal at the Globe and Anchor. One of the great traditions of any great Marine band is on the last day a Marine is on base, the entire band goes around and talks about the person who’s leaving. They tell stories. They talk about all of the great things that Marine brought to the unit while they were there. They talk about how they’ll be missed. It’s as close to a living-eulogy as I’ve ever been a part of. I don’t remember what I said then, but I’m sure whatever it was, it closely resembled the last 20 minutes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. What I lacked in words, I made up for with a lot of knowing head nods.

So even though I can’t remember what I said then, I can say some words now. Some 30 years later, and in writing, I can say that that friendship was everything to me.

Coming from a divorced family where I moved around a lot, I didn’t have a ton of friends growing up. By the time things stabilized in middle school and high school, I was either too shy or too self-conscious to be great at making and keeping friends. At night and on weekends, it’d still be mostly just me hanging out all by myself in my room. *cue the sad violin* Too much alone time with your thoughts is a good recipe for implosion.

So, these two misfits somehow finding a friendship 7,000 miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean… it felt like a life raft to me. But just typing that sentence feels inadequate. That friendship (and all the friendships I made there) weren’t a life raft, they were a rocket ship. I left earth and went to new places. They helped me discover that I didn’t really have anything to worry about. They helped me untie all that self-consciousness and self-doubt that had plagued me for much of my childhood. Those friendships helped me learn that my whacked out stutterer’s brain was actually a brain well-suited for storytelling and for making people laugh. They helped me see that it could all just be okay. Friends are great teachers, but they’re also found family. All of them.

I joking called this post “A Fine Bromance,” because I’m a man and men typically aren’t good at the whole expressive, heart-on-the-sleeve thing. We’re required to cut sentiment with jokes, right? But just so we’re 100% crystal clear here, I love my friends. I hope each person who was with me on that journey back then knows that. Y’all really do mean the absolute world to me.  

So, all these years later, I think back on what Master Gunnery Sergeant DeBauer told me as I was about to head out for the grand adventure that was Marine life. I quibble with his “5” number. I think the older you get, the higher that number goes. And being the 20+ year Marine veteran that he was, surely, he knew all of this, too. He was trying to make a point, not write a peer-reviewed textbook. But I do think there is something interesting about that idea that there are people in our lives that are true blue friends that we’d crawl over broken glass to go assist and there are people who are in our lives that end up fading into the background after enough time has passed. But then I think back on those times. And I remember all the times we’d walk around Camp Foster, cracking jokes, seeing the world on the government’s dime, and just being there for each other … When I think back on how it all felt, I’m left with this thought; I think the old Marine was wrong.