By Phil Roberts, 4-23-2024
“Pass in review!” The President stood at attention, saluting the flags being held high by the color guard, all attired in their dress blues. In the middle of the parade ground, were several companies of Marines, dressed in daily combat fatigues freshly laundered and starched for the occasion. It was the “Welcome Home” ceremonies for the last elements of the 1st Marine Division, the last Marines seeing combat in Vietnam. April 30, 1971, was a hot, dusty day in southern California.
Up close, the returning Marines were mostly a sullen group, rightly irritated for having to be there, sweltering in the Camp Pendleton late April afternoon. Many had been promised they’d be discharged on return stateside but now they were being held back just so that the President would have a larger group to address at his “surprise visit.” Presidential PR staff hoped the vets could provide the heft needed to make it a big national “news event.”
The large roof-covered reviewing stand was used weekly for the regular “graduations” held for Basic Infantry Training School (BITS) battalion, completion of ITR and other specialty combat training, just before the Marines departed to Vietnam. On this day, it was packed with Presidential aides, Commandant Gen. Chapman, other top brass from Headquarters Marine Corps in D. C. and from the national/regional commands around the country.
Nixon was to stand at the center front until he was escorted by a security detail of dress-blue wearing corporals and sergeants a few steps to the small open-air platform from where he would address the troops. The national press corps, broadcast and print, stood in the front and in the narrow space between the two structures, hoping to catch with their cameras the exact spontaneous moment when the returning veterans would express their love for their commander-in-chief.
But I could tell something was remiss. A colonel, who seemed to be liaison with top Presidential aides, was whispering to a major. He then turned to a nearby captain and commanded, “Get some of those guys from the buses up here!” He was referring to all of the new Marines, bussed up to Camp Pendleton from the Recruit Depot, San Diego, to make the crowd of onlookers bigger for the President and the national press. Some were new graduates and a few six-week boot camp Marines. Many more were still in recruit training, some platoons barely beyond top-buttoned shirts and unbloused trousers, and other full platoons barely into their training cycles.
i was standing to the left behind the reviewing stand when I heard a young lieutenant tell a boot camp drill instructor that his platoon, standing at attention, next to where I was, would be joining three others at the end of Nixon’s speech. The mission? To hoist the President on the shoulders of four already-designated strapping new recruits while the rest surrounded the four and cheered and clapped–all the while trying to fool the national press into believing THEY were returning seasoned Vietnam War veterans. Clearly, the actual returnees couldn’t be trusted to show any enthusiasm for Nixon!
Sure enough, just as Nixon’s “welcome home” speech ended, the four boot camp platoons came streaming from behind the reviewing stand where they had been standing at attention throughout the speech, cheering and shouting. Meanwhile, out in front, the returning Marines stood motionless (few even at attention) facing the President, now grinning sheepishly and awkwardly hanging on to the shoulders of the four big recruits.
The national press ate it up, reporting later how the Vietnam returnees showed their love for their commander-in-chief. (Some papers ran a contrasting picture of college students, as I remember, at San Jose State, booing Nixon later that afternoon). The false narrative was complete. But pictures the national press cameras missed were four drill instructors scowling and making menacing gestures at the boot camp recruits who weren’t showing sufficient “enthusiasm” for the President and some recruits looking back furtively at the DIs, anxious to make sure their ardor was sufficient not to suffer consequences once they got back to the recruit training base! And returning troops, melting away, anxious to get back to Casual Company for the discharge they’d been promised. Thus, the anti-climactic end of the Marines in the Vietnam War.
(Earlier, I told about then-VP Richard Nixon in Cheyenne. That story was one I heard. I wasn’t present, and if I had been, I’d have been a grade-schooler! This story about Nixon is what I viewed-as a Marine NCO stationed in southern California).