Marines Battle Area’s Mounting Living Costs : Military: Many members of the corps are among the ranks of Orange and San Diego counties’ 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 San Diego 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 that 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.”
Of his plight, especially with a 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 San Diego County and Orange County.
The average salary at Camp Pendleton and at the two Marine Corps Air Stations at El Toro and Tustin 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 vitamin-deficient women, infants and children reports that a third to half of its cases are military family members.
At the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, where there is a year’s wait for base housing, many have taken second jobs as security officers or dockworkers. Many car-pool from outlying areas in Vista or Riverside. Some volunteer through a church program to earn $40 worth of groceries for $13.
But no Marines at El Toro are on welfare or food stamp programs, a spokesman said.
Traditionally, Marines consider themselves a brotherhood that keeps its problems to itself. 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 that it doles out to 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 store. And this fiscal year’s figures may surpass the last one, 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 Pendleton’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 that is 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 was then. 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,” Couch said.
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 noted.
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.”
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.
“We have gone to great lengths and great expense to take care of our own,” said Maj. John Sayre, director of the 8-year-old Family Service Center at El Toro. In some cases, officers will barter with apartment managers in Tustin and Irvine to lower or waive first and last month rental prerequisites.
“We say, ‘This is a Marine. He is the salt of the earth. Basically an all-American-type person.”
The center has helped Marines obtain furniture and appliances, cribs and car seats. They make use of civilian thrift shops and food giveaway programs. 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 stamp 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.”
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.
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.
Last month, 241 enlisted Marines left the base, up from 132 the preceding May.
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.
Capt. Greg Smyth, assistant chief of staff for housing at the Naval Base in San Diego, 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.
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.”