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for partying for about five or six years. We would go to Subic, Barrio, Olongapo, places like that. We would go out, drink, party, stay out all night, and stagger back to the boat about 5 in the morning. Then we would be tired and half-dead all day waiting for liberty the next day, and then we would be all wide-eyed and bushy tailed and do it again.
    â€œWhen I was 18 or 19 years old, I could do that. We would go out in groups, three- or four- or five-man groups, and drink and party all night. Now I would have to have a four-day recovery.”
    Another well-known pursuit in liberty ports was fighting. Marines like to fight. Because they are trained to fight, disagreements over who is the best and who is the worst and I-just-don’t-like-your-face opinions erupt into fights. Servicemen from rival branches of the military make good targets. But Marines would fight each other if no one else were around. Even officers aren’t immune. When one highly placed officer was rousted in front of a urinal in a Filippino bar by an enlisted Marine, the recalcitrant young Marine ended up cleaning the urinal with his face.
    â€œIt would have been the end of my career right there,” the officer later admitted privately, “but nobody identified me.”
    For the young Marines brawls were the stuff of legends until they got back on board and sobered up. Then it was time to face the wrath of their commanders, which could also be legendary. However more than one Marine surmised that his commanders would have been even angrier if the Marines were forced to admit they had been subdued by “doggies” (Army soldiers), “squids” (Navy personnel), or civilians instead of holding their own in impromptu tough man contests.
    More than once Kasal found out the hard way that the local authorities have little patience with wild-eyed Marines on liberty. “I was arrested for fighting in a bar in ‘86 in the Philippines by the Navy Shore Patrol and held overnight and released the next morning,” he says. “I was charged but it got dismissed. In fact I have been arrested for fighting in four different countries: Okinawa, Mexico, the United States, and the Philippines. But like I said, you get in a partying phase. I got into it for a few years and then I outgrew it. After I was 26 or 27, I never did it again.”
    In December of 1986 Kasal returned to Pendleton. Almost immediately he was assigned to be a team leader for a Dragon section. In January of 1987 he was appointed to be a section leader, a staff sergeant’s billet and one responsible for leading three squads—a heavy duty for a 20-year-old Marine.
    â€œAll of ’87 I was a section leader and we would do training at Camp Pendleton,” he says. “That is also where my reputation for never getting tired and the whole routine was made. In January 1988 I was meritoriously promoted to Sergeant. In June of ‘88 we deployed overseas again. My section was attached to Fox Co., 2/1 on the USS Fresno. We would do the same thing, pull into a country, do training, go on liberty, and then back to sea.”
    Kasal’s youthful vision of being a Marine was now realized. He was a sergeant of Marines, an infantryman, and a locked-and-cocked warrior ready for war.

CHAPTER 5

THE LONG HAUL
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    For most of the next five years Kasal did what Marine infantrymen do in peacetime—he trained. He went from ship to shore and back in routine cycles of training and forward deployment. One ship that made a lasting impression on Kasal was the USS Fresno, a landing ship-tank (LST) he sailed on in 1988. Decommissioned now, Fresno was an ungainly looking craft with a portable landing ramp that looked like an alligator’s snout poking into the air. Fresno was 522 feet long, had a beam of 70 feet, and displaced 8,500 tons. She was rated with a top speed of 20 knots and carried a crew of 14 officers, 210 enlisted sailors, and approximately 350