The Few, the Proud, the Poverty-Stricken : Military: Many U.S. Marines are among the ranks of North County’s lower class, struggling to make ends meet on about $10,000 a year.
They are seen in welfare lines and spending food stamps at the supermarket. They can barely afford housing and often take low-paying second jobs so their families can survive.
They are, along with migrant workers and the homeless, part of affluent North County’s economic lower class, but with one stunning difference. They are United States Marines--the few, the proud and, for many, the poverty-stricken.
When Pfc. Gary Bowman gets leave from Camp Pendleton to visit Baton Rouge, La., he looks so sharp and fine, his family and friends are in awe. “At home, you just get idolized,” the 20-year-old said.
Nobody knows that his $811-a-month base pay gets him and his pregnant wife, Sandra, a modest one-bedroom apartment with bare walls in outlying Fallbrook. They slept on the floor for six months after they married, until they could afford a bed. A car is utterly beyond financial reach.
On being a Marine, Bowman said: “I’m very proud. It’s by far the hardest thing to go through. It makes a man out of you.”
On his plight, especially with the baby due in August, he said that “things, they’ve just got to get better.” If not, Bowman will leave the Corps when his four-year enlistment ends and find a higher-paying civilian job.
Steeped in elitism and elan, young Marines may be trained for furious, against-all-odds battle, but few are prepared to face the assault of high rents, utilities and auto insurance in North County.
The average salary at Camp Pendleton is about $10,000 a year, and, when it comes to affording housing, thousands of married, lower-ranking enlisted Marines are hopelessly outgunned in communities where the civilian median household incomes are much higher: $41,015 in Carlsbad, $31,136 in San Marcos and $26,174 in Oceanside.
Financial problems are having a sobering and sad impact.
Skilled Marines are leaving the Corps, and the military preparedness of many who remain is in doubt. Some Marine families live in unsafe neighborhoods because the rent is cheaper. And the Oceanside office of the WIC welfare program that provides basic foodstuffs for women, infants and children reports that a third to half of its cases are military family members.
Traditionally, Marines consider themselves a brotherhood that keeps its problems to itself and the military fraternity. That’s where the Navy Relief Society gets involved, and the Camp Pendleton auxiliary reports a sharp rise in the food bags, loans and grants it gives Marines.
“An awful lot of these folks live from payday to payday,” said Bill Pickett, manager of the base commissary. “They’re just making ends meet.”
During the past fiscal year, Pickett saw Marines spend $102,600 in WIC vouchers and $37,500 in food stamps at his market. And this fiscal year is worse, with that much spent during only the first eight months.
“We’re there already,” Pickett said.
A chronic shortage of base housing pushes three-quarters of the base’s roughly 16,000 married Marines to find housing in the community, where the high rents devour paychecks and leave military families waiting desperately for the next promotion.
The situation is worse now because more Marines are married, 46.4% this year throughout the Corps, 10% higher than in 1980. Yet armed forces budget reductions are slowing many promotions.
It used to take about a year to be bumped up from lance corporal to corporal, a $52 monthly difference in pay, but now many lance corporals stay put for three years.
The base commander, Brig. Gen. Richard Huckaby, worries that money problems are taking their toll on effectiveness.
“It can’t help but degrade military readiness when so many of the young Marines we train for demanding, sometimes dangerous missions are preoccupied with their financial hardships,” Huckaby said.
Marines who live in the community receive a housing allowance supposedly geared to an area’s cost of living, but Marines here complain that the subsidy is too low and that they must dig into their pockets.
“Even with housing allowances that are geographically adjusted to the cost of living in this area, many are below the poverty level,” Huckaby said.
Cpl. Tyler Couch, a 22-year-old Arizonan, and his wife, Sandra, know that well.
Eighteen months ago, they were struggling in a tiny studio apartment that cost $610 a month. They were too poor to buy furniture, and, by the time all the bills were paid, less than $50 remained of Couch’s paycheck.
Their old car conked out in 1988, and Couch had problems finding a dealer who would take a credit risk on any Marine who was a lance corporal or below, which Couch then was. Military ranks are often referred to by a common graduating scale. For example, E-1 is a private, E-3 a lance corporal, O-1 a second lieutenant and O-8 a colonel.
“Salesmen asked, ‘Are you E-3 or below?’ ” Couch replied yes and was told, “Well, I can’t help you.” Finally, he got a car at a dealership where the finance manager was a former Marine.
These days, Couch is feeling more fortunate, but is concerned that better times won’t last.
The couple, now with a son, share a rental house in Vista with a woman and her two children. They pay $550 a month rent, and their child shares a room with the woman’s son.
Couch’s $1,001 monthly base pay, plus a $554 housing allowance, means “we just make enough to pay our bills.” But Sandra got a job that lets her work at home, without which “we wouldn’t have much extra, if any at all,” said Couch.
However, their housemate is leaving in September, and, Couch said, “there’s no way we could make house payments of $1,100 with the lady gone.” They’ll have to find a new place, and he worries about getting by.
“We’re making more, but the cost of living is going up, too,” he said.
Couch has enlisted for a second four-year hitch, and the signing bonus helped pay some pressing bills. Even so, he said, “if I could get out right now and get a job I liked that paid more money, I’d do it.”
Locating an affordable dwelling often takes young Marine families to the seedier side of a community, leaving many troopers to fret about the safety of their wives and children while they’re away.
“They’re told to be one of the proud and the few, yet they’re living in a situation with a bunch of scum buckets,” said Maj. Philip Arnold, director of the Joint Legal Assistance Office and Family Service Center. “You have a crazy irony.”
There’s also bitter embarrassment that people in uniform should have to accept welfare or even military charity.
So far this year, the donation-supported Navy Relief Society on base has had an 18% jump in the dollar amount of food bags, grants and loans given to needy Marines and their families.
Navy Relief Society worker Jo Rilling, who is married to a former Marine officer, acknowledges that some young troopers cause their own poverty by getting caught in the “credit trap” and overspending on new cars and stereos.
“I think they encounter a lot of pressure to live the good life here,” she said. That’s vividly true when Marines arrive fresh from poorer states and mistakenly believe their pay is enough for a new car, furniture or stereo equipment.
However, Rilling pointed out that the minority of cases handled by the Navy Relief Society involve personal financial mismanagement. Of the 5,765 cases in 1989, 739 were caused by irresponsibility.
The corps can only do so much to take care of its own, and Marines are receiving welfare through the WIC program and food stamps.
Of the 2,600 cases that passed through the WIC office in Oceanside last month, a third to half of the food voucher recipients were military and their dependents. It’s not known whether military cases are increasing, because cases are frequently opened and closed as different Marines come and go.
Marines get food stamps to a much lesser extent, and the county Department of Social Services said only 20 to 30 of the 476 food stamps cases in North County are military recipients, typically large families.
Still, the use of food stamps by financially strapped members of all branches of the armed forces has gotten the attention of Congress, which asked the secretary of defense for a report that’s expected late this summer.
The public has had a painful glimpse at military hardship before.
A wrenching insight came in 1984, when Danny Holley, the 13-year-old son of an Army sergeant stationed at Ft. Ord in Monterey, hanged himself after telling his mother, “If there was one less mouth to feed, things would be better.”
With military families, there are usually more, not fewer, mouths to feed.
For Sandra Bowman, 20, the wife of Pfc. Bowman, the WIC program helps meet a critical need. Not only is her baby due soon, but her 4-year-old daughter is coming to live with them later this month.
Each month, WIC vouchers, which are similar to checks, provide her with 3 pounds of cheese, 2 dozen eggs and 20 quarts of milk. The program emphasizes basic, nutritional foods.
But the Bowmans still struggle to get along without a car and with an unforgiving budget.
“Our friends are real good; they’ll take us to the grocery store,” Gary Bowman said. “Basically, we eat cheap stuff--chicken, sandwich meat, Hamburger Helper.”
Living so close to the margin causes marital friction, but the Bowmans have learned to understand why they sometimes argue, and then put it to rest. “We fight because we know we have limited resources, and we take it out on each other,” he said.
Sandra had hoped that, once her baby arrives, base child care would enable her to work, but she hears there’s a seven-month waiting list. She thinks about leaving the infant and her daughter with a sitter while she works, but knows, as many other Marine wives do, that low-paying jobs scarcely pay for child care.
Perhaps, the Bowmans think, Gary could watch the children when he gets home from base while Sandra takes a night job. But he doesn’t like that idea, believing he and Sandra would rarely see each other. “That ruins the relationship,” he said.
But the family inevitably will need more money, so he figures there’s little choice but for him to take some kind of second job and leave Sandra home with the children at night.
It’s not unusual in Marine families for financial pressures to pit a trooper’s love for the Corps against love of family.
Said Rilling: “I think most of the wives feel resentment and anger toward the Marine Corps and want to get out.”
And the indications are that’s just what’s happening.
Master Sgt. George Collier, a base career planner, said he’s seeing a flood of younger Marines leaving the Corps because of poor pay and slow promotions.
“We’re losing a lot of good Marines, good talent. I’d like to see them stay,” he said.
Last month, 241 enlisted Marines left the base, up from 132 the preceding May.
“It’s getting a little out of hand,” Collier said. “The way it’s going, I don’t see it getting better soon.”
If the housing situation in North County and on base is any gauge, Collier will be right.
The Corps has begun building 600 new units for junior enlisted people and their families as part of a 2,000-unit development on base to supplement the existing 4,500 family units.
“But that won’t be nearly enough,” said base commander Huckaby.
Stephen Russell, the civilian director of base housing, said a recent study for Camp Pendleton reaches an unsettling conclusion. “By 1994, the deficit or inability of the community to provide housing will total 8,000 units,” he said.
Additional housing pressure comes from an unlikely source: the new Cal State San Marcos campus, which eventually will enroll 20,000 students, Russell said.
“And they’re not building housing,” he said.
Although housing is a problem for all lower-ranking military--the pay scale is the same for all the services--the situation for Camp Pendleton Marines is significantly worse than for sailors attached to the Naval Base in San Diego.
Capt. Greg Smyth, assistant chief of staff for housing at that facility, said housing is somewhat easier for Navy personnel because “we tend to homestead people here” longer than the Marines do.
Marines change duty post more often than sailors who are assigned to a ship for a three-year term. In fact, a sailor may re-enlist and keep changing assignments often enough to stay in San Diego for years, long enough to find stable and affordable housing.
“There’s more opportunity to stay in place for three, four, five years,” said Smyth, adding that “less pricey” National City, Chula Vista and El Cajon offer a bigger supply of cheaper housing than North County.
Marines complain that their housing allowance leaves them short when it comes to paying rent plus utilities.
According to Russell, the allowance often leaves Marines to pay up to 30% of the rent out of their own pockets.
The way base housing experts figure it, the 30% costs a private $123 a month above the housing allowance, $149 for a corporal and $222 for a master sergeant.
Smyth said the allowance “certainly has not kept pace with the cost of living.”
As an example, the Bowmans get a total $485 housing allowance, which is also expected to pay utilities, but their actual rent is $505 and doesn’t include utilities. The difference is significant to a private who makes $811 a month and soon must find a bigger apartment.
Russell said low-paid privates and corporals may have the hardest time, but ranks up through gunnery sergeant need help, too.
And junior officers, second and first lieutenants--paid $1,387 and $1,597 a month, respectively, after two years in grade--often struggle to pay housing costs, he said.
Marolyn Hady, who is Russell’s personnel support director, said that, between the wait for decent housing and the high rents, “I have a lot of people who send their families back home. . . . They have no choice; they can’t make it financially.”
She believes the housing problem is so severe that it has become a “very volatile subject. It makes it difficult for a Marine to get on with his job when he doesn’t know if his family is in a safe, secure house.”
The Corps, mindful of the privations for young married Marines, has taken some steps to help. Camp Pendleton offers child care priced according to income, as well as financial and other counseling programs.
Still, only so much relief is available.
The Corps pays full medical and dental costs for Marines, but dependents must pay a cost share and a deductible when they need health care in the community that’s not available on base.
Further, although Marines themselves receive a food allowance--$183 a month for enlisted and $124 for officers--their wives and children do not.
“There’s a misconception Marines are taken care of in every respect,” said Heidi Winter, the wife of a captain.