The Marines Are Shedding a Few Good Men : Military: As Pentagon cutbacks kick in, some Leathernecks are finding out that their services are no longer required.

On his final day as a United States Marine, Lance Cpl. Robert Jordan sadly bundled his belongings and waited for the bus that would take him without ceremony or thanks out the gate of Camp Pendleton.

The 23-year-old Texan returned from the Persian Gulf War last spring to rousing parades and public adoration. Now, a forgotten man, he was preparing to quietly leave, his longing for a military career dashed after only four years in olive green.

For Jordan, living through the war was easier than surviving the peacetime military reductions that may cut his beloved Corps from its current strength of 196,000 to 158,000 by 1997.

“They’re going to put me on a bus and say ‘It’s nice knowing you,’ ” Jordan said. “I don’t want a parade or nothin’, but it’s like they don’t want you. They’re kicking you out the door.”

Along with so many other young Marines, Jordan’s aspirations of a 20-year career were crushed when his request for re-enlistment was denied as his first four-year hitch was ending.

He is among the thousands of men and women in all branches of the service who are painfully learning that, despite rosy recruitment promises of secure jobs and comfortable retirement after 20 or 30 years, they are now expendable.

Under congressional fiat, the military is planning a 12% reduction over the next six years, but there are rumblings of deeper cuts. Nobody can say yet how many will be lost from any specific base, but it’s certain that a period of complex military reorganization lies ahead.

The Corps is undertaking reductions by slashing its recruitment goals, denying a larger number of first re-enlistment requests and ushering out more Marines with 20 years’ experience. More retirements will clear the way for the best Marines in low and middle ranks to keep moving up the ladder.

State employment officials are seeing early signs of the military exodus in California, a state that will be harshly affected because of the large uniformed population.

In a normal year, 60,000 people leave the military in California out of an active duty force estimated at 258,000, including 61,000 Marines. With manpower cuts ordered by Congress, the number leaving is expected to hit 100,000 in California alone next year, says the state Employment Development Department.

The brunt of military reductions hasn’t hit yet, and there are no comprehensive figures of how recently separated servicemen and women are faring in the depressed job market. Many are leaving California for places where it’s cheaper to live, say military officials.

However, just like civilians, those in the military are stunned and disillusioned victims of a shrinking work force. They are being unwillingly thrust into a wobbly economy with limited opportunities, especially for someone like Jordan. He is an infantryman.

“I’m scared to death,” he said. “In Texas, the economy is really bad. I have no real skill. I’m a grunt, maybe a little smarter than your average grunt, but what can I do?”

That’s a daunting question being asked a lot these days at Camp Pendleton, home to nearly 37,000 Marines who eagerly volunteered for the Corps and are instilled with ample feelings of pride and invincibility.

Being forced out is causing emotional wounds that Marines have rarely experienced. And it’s not just young Marines who are being denied re-enlistment.

Older and seasoned Leathernecks, many with 20 years in uniform, are also being told they must pack up all their memories and go.

“For 13 years I had been a Marine, and that’s all I ever wanted to be,” said Bruce Moody of Oceanside. “All of a sudden, the Marine Corps was telling me I can’t be that anymore.”

Moody used to be a captain, a battery commander who led 100 men and was responsible for millions of dollars worth of artillery. Passed over for promotion to major, the Gulf War veteran was cut from active duty Nov. 1.

Although nobody ever told him so directly, Moody believes he was cut to trim the Corps and because an old fitness report didn’t give him all perfect grades, making him less competitive for promotion.

He is trying to adapt to his unwanted civilian life, where the streets of his own county seem like some unrecognized foreign land.

On a recent walk in downtown San Diego, Moody was dismayed by all the rudeness, the laziness and the overweight businessmen who “couldn’t do a pushup if you put a gun to their heads.”

“There wasn’t any sharpness there,” Moody sternly protested, then admitted softly, “Marines have a hard time letting go.”

Glen Halsey knows all about that.

Halsey, a former Marine who lost an eye in Vietnam, is the state Employment Development Department’s assistant supervisor for veterans programs.

These days, he spends considerable time on military bases offering three-day classes on how to prepare for the outside world.

The classes explain how to craft a resume, where to find jobs, how to network and the all-important skill of excising the telltale military jargon from conversation.

Said Halsey: “We’ve had people come up to us after class just crying, it’ so stark. ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to earn a living?’ ”

The development department provides 150 such classes each year on military bases statewide, and Halsey said the agency will be ready to give 257 classes by the next fiscal year to handle the rising demand.

That demand is already evident at Camp Pendleton, where more base Marines and sailors than ever before are flocking to briefings on leaving the military.

A year ago, about 500 people a month were attending, but now, “we are giving separation briefings for approximately 2,100 military personnel a month,” said Mac McCurry, the department’s local veteran’s employment representative.

Although such people usually offer a prospective employer discipline and trainability, not everybody leaving the service is quite prepared to step into a civilian occupation.

As former artillery officer Moody observed: “There’s not much call for blowing up buildings.”

McCurry is worried, not so much about the worthiness and potential of those leaving the military, but about their ability to find decent-paying jobs in a stagnant economy.

“They come in expecting to make eight, nine dollars an hour and we can’t find $5.50 jobs for them,” he said. “We’re able to find good jobs for some of these people, but not like we could before the recession.”

Veronica Largent, a career resource manager for the base Family Service Center, agrees that it’s a rough time to be trading in uniforms for white, button-down shirts and ties.

“I think they’re in the same position as other people right now, this is an employer’s market,” she said.

This dismal predicament is the last thing Gunnery Sgt. Roy Miller expected to face at age 40 and with 21 years in the Marines. He easily figured he’d enjoy a 30-year career and depart with hefty retirement checks to keep his family secure.

And yet he is typical of a tenured enlisted man who, in the fierce competition for promotion, has been passed over once despite a good record. If he fails to make master sergeant a second time, when the promotion board meets again in February, he will be a civilian by next December.

Miller’s chances for advancement, because cutbacks have limited the number of openings for master sergeants, are not good. More than ever before in the military, the dictum is “up or out.”

Like others in his vulnerable position, Miller has conflicting emotions: “It angers me that it’s happening, make no bones about it. But I still love the Marine Corps.”

He boasts of having “an outstanding record book,” and insists the promotion system is giving the advantage to younger gunnery sergeants who have more service ahead of them.

“They’re telling us older people ‘Well, you’ve served 20 years, now get out,’ ” Miller said. “It’s like use and discard . . . use up every ounce of leadership, knowledge and experience I’ve put in, and I’ve got to get out in December.”

The Corps is hardly pleased about losing so many skilled people.

“We’re going to lose some quality Marines who in the past we’d be able to retain,” said Col. Joseph Holzbauer, who is in charge of personnel for the 1st Marine Division, whose units are split between Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms.

Maj. Nancy LaLuntas, a spokeswoman at Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, said, “In Southern California, you’re going to see an awful lot of shuffling of people and units.”

As for the life and careers being affected by cuts, “I don’t think anybody should take any of this personally. An awful lot of this is numbers-driven,” she said.

However, many Marines are despairing that their aspirations--indeed, their sense of worth--have become a matter of manpower mathematics involving the number of recruits, re-enlistments and retirements.

“We’re trying to do this with as much class and dignity as possible,” Holzbauer said.

But his 1st Marine Division demonstrates how harsh the attrition can be.

Now 21,000 Marines and sailors strong, the division could lose 3,000 to 5,000 people by 1997. Those cuts are separate from reductions that will hit other units at Camp Pendleton, such as supply, aircraft and other support groups.

In the division, about 1,512 first-term basic infantrymen are approaching re-enlistment time. Some will choose to leave the service, and of those who do re-enlist, only 35 can remain basic infantrymen. In the past, almost all the Marines who wanted to were allowed to stay “grunts.”

Why only 35 now?

The division is shrinking at the same time as fresh recruits are entering the division to maintain a high quotient of young and physically fit Marines. That dynamic leaves few basic infantry positions for re-enlisting, low-ranking Marines.

What happens to the majority of Marines who want to remain basic infantrymen but can’t?

They must battle thousands of other Marines in the division to shift into other military occupations whenever possible, but that requires flexible skills not every Marine has.

For the many Marines who need retraining to secure another military job, the entire Corps has only 632 retraining slots available this fiscal year to prepare Marines for such lateral moves.

The result of all this is incredible competition to remain in the Corps and win promotion. Many Marines, through little or no fault of their own, are taking good service records and heading out the gate.

“It hurts to see a good Marine have to go out,” said Master Sgt. Ron Eby, senior career counselor for the division.

Traditionally, not every Marine considered for promotion actually wins advancement, but what’s happening now is such fierce competition for limited promotions that even some accomplished Marines aren’t moving up.

And a minor blot or a slightly less-than-perfect fitness report is enough to ruin the chances for re-enlistment or promotion.

Jordan, for example, had an infraction that didn’t even bring judicial action, but it was enough to give the re-enlistment advantage to someone with a spotless record. When he introduces himself, he says with painful humor, “I’m Jordan. You can call me ‘mister’ now.”

For another Marine, Lance Cpl. Patrick Lara, 22, escaped from a bad neighborhood in the Bronx and found refuge in the Marine Corps, where he hoped for a secure 20 years.

However, his plan was wrecked by a youthful mistake that kept him from being allowed to re-enlist.

When Lara was just 19, he was discovered to be dating a 15-year-old girl. He went through a court-martial for seeing an underage female, and was reduced in rank and sentenced to 25 days in the brig.

By the time re-enlistment came around, he was more mature, married and the father of a 1-year-old son, but he learned that the Corps has a long memory for error. “They told me even before my paperwork was sent off they wouldn’t let me re-enlist,” he said.

In better times, Lara could have had a chance of re-enlisting, especially if some strong accomplishments had eclipsed his earlier mistake and his commanding officer recommended him for another term.

Like many Marines who can’t escape the cutbacks, Lara blames himself and not the Corps: “It was my fault. I’m the one who screwed up. The Marine Corps was just pushing its rules. If you’re not perfect, they can get you for that.”

He refuses to return to the Bronx and is thinking of starting fresh with a career in law enforcement. “There are openings now in South Carolina for state troopers, but I don’t know if they’ll accept me because of the blemish on my record,” he said.

The future can be just as frightening for a 38-year-old man like Moody, who can relax for a little while because his wife has a teaching job and he left the Marines with a severance check.

Yet, before Moody can truly find a new path, he must reconcile himself to his emotionally wrenching departure from the Corps that was his life.

“I was brought up to believe that serving your country was an honorable profession,” he said. “I was always told ‘you’re a fine officer. If I ever go to war, I want you with me.’ ”

Although he no longer wears the uniform, he feels he is still left with one thing that nobody can take away from him.

“Being a Marine is something in your blood, in your soul,” Moody said. “There’ll always be a lot of the Corps in me.”