Let the War Games Begin: For a Guest Trooper, It’s Semper Fi

It starts with suitably twisted Marine Corps humor.

As a nervous civilian prepares to launch a rifle grenade toward an old tank, a shout comes from Sgt. Raoul Wilkins: “Heads up! Somebody secure that golden retriever!”

Then Col. John Allen, commanding officer of the two dozen Marines gathered around the civilian, chimes in with rib-digging encouragement: “You know, there really is nothing quite like blowing something up.”

The tension broken, civilian Richard Castanet pumps the 40mm grenade at the tank’s rusted hulk at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia.

A flash of yellow beneath the smoke signals a direct hit. Castanet answers yells of “Oorah!” from the warriors with a quick grin, and the clock is running on a 60-minute odyssey that will be the Perfect Moment of his life.

Castanet, 47, has had his share of Big Moments--the births of his two children, winning the first of his two black belts in martial arts. But that recent hour was poetically perfect: his dream realized, his politics vindicated, his demons vanquished, all at once.

The son and nephew of World War II combat soldiers, Castanet in 1974 broke family ranks by choosing a career in industry. So in May, when the Defense Department announced its promotional “Yahoo! Fantasy Careers in Today’s Military Contest,” Castanet applied for five days of leadership training with the Marines.

He won the contest--aimed at promoting recruitment via the Internet--with an essay on how he made a mistake in not serving with the Corps and how he needed this opportunity to feel complete as a man, to find out whether he could indeed have done it.

This sentiment struck the Marines’ cerebral pleasure center so squarely they agreed to dump the prize parameters and let Castanet’s son, Chris, 17, join him for the training.

Now, on Day One, Chris fires shot for shot with his father at the range, blazing away an astonishing amount of ordnance from a weapons buffet that includes M-16s and M-240 machine guns, M-2 .50-caliber cannons and MK-19 grenade launchers, and AT4 antitank rockets.

Chris is hitting the targets--rusted tanks arranged on three hills--twice as often as his dad, a member of the National Rifle Assn.

When Castanet finally gets his light machine gun on target, he hangs on to the trigger for such an extended burst, the barrel starts glowing red, prompting disbelieving comments of “Oh, man, he’s cookin’ that weapon” from the gallery of Marines and, finally, a man hustling over to spray coolant on the gun, sending up a cloud of steam.

But Castanet, now reeking of cordite and striding over to an even larger gun, is ecstatic: “This is everybody’s dream! This is much, much more than I expected!”

The officers watch their guests with conspiratorial grins of the “cool, huh?” variety. But as the Castanets make pretty patterns with their red tracer rounds from guns they won’t have to clean, some noncommissioned officers raise their eyebrows. Says one: “We have to study these weapons for a whole day before they let us even touch them. There are guys who work on the range who have never got to shoot off the kind of ordnance these guys are shooting.”

Castanet is unrepentant: “As much money as Uncle Sam is spending here, I’m enjoying every bit of this! I’m already in the 39.4% tax bracket--this is the best way to get it back.” He dances half a jig step as he skips away.

But the spell breaks when father and son get a five-minute briefing on firing the big MK-19 grenade launcher.

An instructor tells them: “I want you to pay close attention to the misfire procedures on the 19, since we are dealing with high explosives here. You must count off 10 seconds in case it hang-fires; if it doesn’t, you may have to use this steel rod to pry the grenade out of the breech and catch it before it strikes the ground. If you don’t, you could lose your legs.”

Chris stares at his father. Castanet stares at the instructor.

After five long seconds, Castanet says softly, “Can we get some help on that?”

But everyone agrees the two are doing incredibly well, especially compared with the gaffes other civilians at the exercise have made.

Then, the session’s climax: the antitank rockets, huge, armor-piercing warheads propelled by jets of flame. (More Marine humor: “These weapons are used mainly for deer hunting.”) Afforded just one live shot each, the Castanets receive 20 minutes of intensive training for the bazooka-like weapon.

Castanet takes the first shot but flinches a millisecond after pulling the trigger, directing the warhead into the ground 20 yards in front of the target tank.

Chris hits it dead center, causing chunks of rusted armor to fly above the explosion.

The Marines applaud spontaneously, and Castanet’s Perfect Moment becomes complete. “Well, no one can critique my effort there, not even my NRA peers, since I don’t know anyone who’s ever fired one of these,” says Castanet. Then, in a choked voice, he points to his son and adds, “No siree, no one can critique that--no one except him.”

*

Richard Castanet is an accounts manager for General Electric, where he has worked for 25 years. He has delicate, studied movements, the gentlest voice and a stop-start manner of speaking.

Outside work, Castanet is a pistol marksman, a fisherman, a restorer of classic cars and an expert in Okinawan martial arts.

In other words, an alpha male trapped in a beta existence.

Castanet has never spent a day in any kind of national service, yet he has more than 70 books on the U.S. military and a carpetbag of opinions on foreign intervention that generally give top billing to the stick rather than the carrot.

One of Castanet’s most euphoric moments at the range is when he joins Col. Allen in a spontaneous quote from “Apocalypse Now”: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like . . . victory!”

Theirs is a pure form of machismo, undiluted by chauvinism or even bravado. It’s about knowing you’re part of the better team, not pretending to be the better man.

Castanet’s dream world is a super-cool, righteous one in which people use phrases like “expedite the maneuver” and “make ‘em pay” in the same sentence; in which “errgh” means “I agree,” “oorah” means “I respect what I see” and a “light-combat rubber reconnaissance craft” means a dinghy.

Says Castanet to his Marine escorts: “Saddam actually thought he’d hand Americans their hats in the Gulf--ha, ha, ha. He had absolutely no understanding of technology, not even the need for night sights.”

“Errgh.” “Errgh.”

The week was frenzied. After officer training at Quantico, the Castanets went to Parris Island, S.C., for grunt training; Beaufort Air Station, S.C., for a taste of jet fighters; and Camp Lejeune, N.C., for a visit with combat-ready Marines.

Some of the exercises were lightweight, like a 20-minute ride on the Potomac in a rubber dinghy. But most were surprisingly hard and authentic. At Parris Island, the Castanets were greeted with the king-hell curses and “Move it!” commands straight out of “Full Metal Jacket,” then given the chance to rappel down rock faces, experience down-in-the-mud crucible exercises, and shoot tracer rounds into the night.

Castanet began his first day of training--after the haircut and mustache removal--with a four-mile run along Quantico’s “Yellow Brick Road,” the path Jodie Foster runs in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Later, the Castanets were dumped into a company of candidate officers going through anti-sniper training, the red-carpet treatment at the live-fire range replaced by anonymity and a screaming drill sergeant.

Said Castanet, “I just tried to keep up with these guys, not get in the way and keep from exposing any body parts.”

*

Castanet’s father earned five battle stars as an Army sergeant during World War II; two other relatives died fighting in Europe.

“What has been missing in my life is the opportunity to be battle-tested,” he says. “My father was 30 months overseas in the war, in North Africa, Italy--he was part of the invasion of Sicily. That’s character for you.”

In his winning essay, he wrote, “My son is 17 and I hope to influence him to consider a career in the U.S. Armed Forces.”

The close-combat training on the second morning proves as good a test as any for both father and son.

Blond, bull-shouldered and apparently incapable of small talk, Staff Sgt. Tony Polzin is the quintessential scary Marine. He spits every few minutes, never says “um,” and drops opponents in a way that makes you wonder why the Corps even bothers with “smart bombs.”

“Now we’ll look at some nonlethal close-combat techniques--applicable, for example, to dealing with people in our humanitarian engagements,” says Polzin. Chris blinks. “Let’s say a 14-year-old who’s never seen an American in his life rushes at you in a disaster zone. Do we want to kill him?”

Chris doesn’t look sure.

“Of course we don’t. We can bring him to the ground and control him by using a simple wrist lock.”

For the next exercise, Polzin slams a Marine to the ground, stomps a divot out of the turf with his boot--inches from the man’s head--and barks at the Castanets, “Do that!”

They tentatively tip two Marine volunteers onto the ground and pat the grass with their boots.

Polzin stares, then barks: “Sirs, this action requires vigorous execution, such as this.” (Slam! “Oof!” Thunk!) “Do that!”

That’s all Castanet needs to hear. He rips his Marine partner over his knee and pummels the ground as if it were the face of Satan.

Chris tries a halfhearted tug but is saying, “Sorry about that” before the adversary is thrown gingerly to earth.

Another Marine shouts: “Come on, dump him, man! Lay him out hard, he’s trained for it!”

Chris simply says, “I’m not going to do that.”

And so--Castanet’s pursed smile tells the group--the family warrior line ends.

*

By week’s end, Castanet has learned this: “I know now that I made a mistake in ‘74--I could be the guy across the aisle from me now, wearing those stars.”

The man who awarded him the Fantasy Careers prize, Capt. Steve O’Conner, agrees he’s got the stuff: “If he’d gone the Marine Corps route back in 1974, I believe he could have been giving the Basic School CO’s (commanding officer’s) brief this week. Here is a very motivated individual who already shares a lot of values with the Corps.”

Does this make Castanet’s regret all the more severe?

Incredibly, it’s the opposite. Castanet is thrilled: He has earned the right to feel regret about the Corps.

“I’ve answered my question: Could I have done it? The answer is yes.”