Read Online My Men are My Heroes by Nathaniel R. Helms - Free Book Online Page B

embarked Marines and their equipment. Aboard Fresno Kasal found a home away from home.
    â€œI loved LSTs,” Kasal says. “They were my favorite ship. The bigger the ship you go on the more brass you have, the more people you have, the more crowds, bigger chow lines, longer mail call, and the more people to screw with you. On an LST itwas your company and that was it. It is the difference between living in a small town and living in L.A.”
    Fresno was part of a five-ship amphibious-ready group that usually included a “big deck” helicopter carrier or an amphibious assault ship plus a group of smaller vessels.
    The Marines had everything they needed and nothing that wasn’t required for a seagoing deployment. No gourmet meals. No tastefully decorated staterooms. No plush bathrooms. Only a steel box designed to carry bodies with the highest efficiency and lowest possible cost. There was no privacy, no space to stretch out, and very little to do except be a Marine.
    Certainly great chow wasn’t what drew Kasal to the life of a combat Marine. “You eat Navy chow,” he says. “The first week you are out at sea the food is pretty good. After that it is rice and hot dogs every day, rice and chicken, or rice and rice. The longer you are out, the lower the supplies get. After a while there is not as much to eat.”
    Being on a bigger ship was not the solution either. Grunts still lived in tiny berthing spaces crammed with their gear and themselves regardless of the size of ship. The chow wasn’t any better or more plentiful either.
    Life on board Navy ships at sea had a dull sameness to it. Kasal’s company trained in any open space they could find to keep themselves occupied. “We would find a corner of the ship where we could do push-ups and pull-ups and maybe run around the deck when they were not doing flight ops,” Kasal recalls. “You clean your weapons, and you find little nooks and crannies on the ship to give classes about tactics, weapons, riot control—sometimes we did hand-to-hand combat training, anything we could think of.”
    Toward the end of any deployment the tension among the men would begin to build. It was a time that tested leadership among the NCOs and officers.
    â€œThe cramped quarters, everybody tired of being gone, looking forward to going home, all these things added friction—especially looking forward to going home,” Kasal says. “We weren’t always on this ship—we’d go ashore for a week at a time to train and take liberty in Australia, Thailand, the Philippines. But still, by the end of six months we were ready to get off the cruise.”
    Fresno took Kasal and his Dragon team to many of the world’s most exotic ports of call. Australia was nice, Kasal remembers, particularly the girls. He liked Hong Kong the first time he visited there and Thailand every time—and the Philippines, especially the Philippines, where the young ladies warmed many hearts, including his.
    â€œThailand and the Philippines were fun,” he says. “I liked them because they were cheap, and I liked Third World countries. You go to Hong Kong or Sydney or any developed country and a city is a city—full of people, high prices, cops, cars. One developed country is like the next developed country. Skyscrapers, shopping malls—they’re all the same.
    â€œYou go into a Third World country and you never know what you are going to pop into. In Thailand they had snake shows, king cobra shows—or you could walk down the street with a monkey, ride an elephant, or go on a jungle safari. Third World countries were better.”
RANGER SCHOOL
    In February 1989 Kasal attended Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Rangers are the Army’s shock troops—rugged, hard-charging soldiers who take things away from a reluctant enemy with surprise and firepower. It is a grueling three-month, four-part course