I awoke about

3 a.m. on that Sunday morning in the spring of 1970 and stumbled out of

the bunk, searching for my clothes and boots.

I was used

to getting up early, precisely at 5 a.m., or 0500 hours as they liked

to say, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina.

Of course, when one goes to bed at 9 p.m., getting up at 0500 still provides

eight hours of sleep. Still, no matter how you looked at it, 0300 came

early. "God isn't up yet," one recruit grumbled.

I was near

the end of my boot camp experience and was on "mess duty" for

a week. The Army called this detail "K.P.," or "kitchen

police," but, whatever it was called, the week involved 16-18 hours

a day, seven days a week, working in the kitchen, serving hundreds of

Marine Corps recruits thousands of meals. It was hot, muggy, exhausting

work. The two benefits were (1) we could eat whatever we wanted and (2)

we didn't have to exercise or do the daily three-mile run while we were

assigned to the mess hall. The downside was the utter and total exhaustion

that came with each day.

That Sunday,

for some reason, we had finished our first assignments early and the mess

sergeant gave us a 15-minute break. Some of the recruits took the opportunity

to lay their heads on the long folding tables and grab a quarter hour

of sleep while others journeyed outside to have a cigarette.

I wandered

off by myself to sit on top of the trash cans and watch the sun slowly

come up over the waters in the East. It was a little after 5 a.m. and

soon the first wave of recruits would be showing up at the mess hall for

morning chow and would later be marched off to church. Church? I would

miss church today, I thought, for the first time since arriving on the

island.

And then I

remembered it was Easter Sunday. For the first time since arriving at

boot camp, I tried to think what my friends and family would be doing

about now. Sleeping, of course, I realized, but soon they would be awaking

and preparing to celebrate Easter Sunday. Most of my close friends that

I had in high school, Steve Duncan, David Brewer, and others, all went

to Mountain View United Methodist Church. In a few hours, they would be

sitting in Mrs. Bridwell's Sunday School class and would later listen

to the Easter sermon by the Rev. Fred Austin, one of the great influences

of our lives. Another friend, Mike Brewer, was in the Marines and stationed

somewhere in North Carolina.

My dad, mom,

and 11-year-old brother Wayne would have breakfast together, most likely

a wonderfully constructed Southern breakfast of milk (real milk, not the

skim stuff I have to drink today), fried eggs, biscuits and gravy, and

sausage or bacon, and would go off to Grandpa and Grandma Duckett's for

a Sunday dinner, which is what we called "lunch" in those days.

"Dinner" was actually "supper." It's a Southern thing.

At least it was back before the corrupting influence of foreigners, "foreigners"

being defined as anybody not from the South.

Easter Sunday,

and I, having turned 19 a few short weeks ago, was sitting on a trash

can by myself watching the sun come up over the bay while, in east Tennessee,

my family and friends were carrying on without me, blissfully unaware

that I was lonely, homesick, and miserable and only faintly aware that,

across the world, the war in Vietnam raged. Truthfully, I didn't think

about Vietnam either on that Easter Sunday morning. I thought only of

my own loneliness and how much I wanted to be home. And then the break

was over, we were called