To Keep Our Honor Clean

 Ensure that no Marine who honorably wore the eagle, globe and anchor is lost to the Marine Corps family.

James L. Jones, 32nd Commandant of the United States Marine Corps

 

It was a small moment, not meant to carry any weight beyond what it purported to be - a man in his 70s asking a question of a uniformed grocery store security guard. It struck me as much more.

The customer was gray-haired and stooped, wearing a nondescript tan jacket and jeans. On his head the ubiquitous ball cap of his era, writing on it indistinguishable to me because all I could see was his back.

The young man, tall and slim, appeared to be in his early twenties. He wore his uniform crisply, his boots polished. Short, dark hair trimmed and neat. He stood watching the exit of a store that has seen more than its shared of police response.

"Are you the security guard?" the older man asked.

"I am, sir," the officer responded. His eyes scanned the man's hat. "Semper Fi, sir."

Semper Fi. Among veterans and current members of the Marine Corps, it is a greeting that is more than "Thank you for your service." It is even more than an exchange between people who have had common experiences. It is an acknowledgement that the people involved had signed a very special blank check.

Many years ago, my brother accompanied my mom and dad to DC. There, they visited the Marine Corps Memorial, an outsized sculpture (the cast figures are each over thirty feet tall) depicting the second (and iconically famous) flag raising on Iwo Jima. My father had been on the other end of the island the February day Joe Rosenthal took the photo that inspired the sculpture, but to him the meaning was special, and personal. It meant that fellow Marines had fought their way to the top of Mount Suribachi - many being killed or wounded in the process - and what was essentially a giant honey-combed artillery firing position had been overrun, and was being silenced. Guns from that mountain had rained destruction down around my dad and the other "kids" accompanying him for four days and nights.

Uniformed Marines were present on the day my father visited. He was readily identifiable as a veteran of the Corps by his ball cap, and the modern day warriors flocked around him. "He was there," those Marines said in hushed tones, my brother standing nearby as witness. Men of a different generation expressing their awe and admiration for one of those who had gone before them.

Semper Fi is not always a compliment, or expressed as a positive. But, in that little moment at an out-of-the-way grocery store on a weekday morning, it was an exchange between two men who had been there, wherever their there had once been. They had raised their right hand, signed the blank check, undergone the hardships necessary to earn the right to wear the eagle, globe and anchor. Served with honor in the many places their country had needed them.

I was an outsider, an observer. A writer recording and reporting a special moment masquerading as a chance encounter. Blessed to have been there. Blessed to be the son, and son-in-law, of Marines.