TUPAVIEW: VETERAN’S DAY

By Mike Tupa 

Nov. 11, 2025

BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT

In less than a month I’ll reach the 40th Anniversary since I stopped being one of the Few and the Proud and stumbled back into the ranks of civilian-hood.

Even now the memories of those four years hover in my mind as an almost ethereal experience — somewhere between too wonderful or too rugged to have ever been true.

Sometimes I have to stop and ask myself: “How the heck did I get there?” “How the heck did I make the grade?”

A surging wave of pride — mingled with a small rip-tide of guilt — flows through my mind and heart whenever I hear the “Marine Corps Hymn.”

I belong to that fraternity known by many as “Former Marine.” (The term “ex-Marine” is anathema.)

But even though I jumped through all the hoops to be a full-time Marine, I’ve always wondered whether I measured up to the full stature of that group of unique heroes, or whether I just got in with a pass because it was peacetime and the beginning of the Ronald Reagan Era (which is a major reason why I enlisted) and they were swelling the ranks of the enlisted as quickly as they could.

I guess I’ve always wondered whether I measured up to all the incredible opportunities God has given me in my life.

It was the summer of 1981. I was a few months past my 25th birthday and closing in on the end of my college undergraduate studies. I had a full-time job at more than $6 per hour — good pay back then in Ogden, Utah — with benefits. My 1973 Gran Torino was nearly paid off and I lived in one of my great-grandmother’s apartments for just $75 a month. My mom and sister lived only two miles away and my grandparents just across the street from me so I enjoyed plenty of family support and positive neighborhood church visibility. Other than a drought in my social life, my existence seemed to be about as vanilla idyllic as it could have been.

Then I got the urge again. Enlisting in the military reserves had first tickled my mind in 1979 due — to all things — a phonograph record of patriotic essays by John Wayne. The Duke unleashed an effusion of patriotic vignettes and the pride of being a soldier.

You see, I had always considered myself a committed patriot, a student of American history and a devotee to those who served and sacrificed for our country. But there was an issue — how could I present myself in that way without ever having served myself? I had already spent two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and invested four years into college. I had tried to serve mankind and to prepare myself to contribute to society in a positive way.

So why did I have this crazy thought at age 25 — hampered with an arthritic right knee that had undergone two major surgeries and being about 25-30 pounds overweight — of enlisting in the military. To show the power of advertising, while attending a movie theater to watch the new movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” there was a pre-movie commercial pushing for recruits in the Marine Corps. The deep bass voice of the narrator — especially on the line “The Few. The Proud. The Marines,” haunted me. I still hear it 45 years later in my memories.

I thought of it as some kind of sentimental delusion — but I could shake it. One August morning in 1981 — during vacation from my job — I drove over to the local recruiting station in Ogden. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. My notion was to look into signing up for the reserves with the Navy or Army or Air Force. But I had absolutely, positively, definitely no intention of considering the Marines. I figured they were well out of my league.

So, I walked through the rear entrance of the recruiting station, which included offices for all four major services. First I came to the Navy door. But no one was in the office. Next I went to check out the Air Force but they couldn’t talk to me then. Just up the hall was the Army office. But they were out to lunch. Suddenly I stood in front of the rear door to the Marine Corps office.

Somebody opened the door knob and pushed it open. I guess it was me.

To my despair, a recruiter sat behind one of the desks. I had hoped the office would be empty. I emphatically explained I wasn’t really interested in joining Uncle Sam’s team and that I was just there out of curiosity and, if anything, I was only interested in the reserves. He said he understood and asked if I would mind watching a little film on a video machine. A recruiting film flickered on the screen and extolled the fun of boot camp training and of becoming a Marine.

Before I left he gave me some splashy pamphlet and a booklet that singled out the kind of careers available in the Marines.

I walked out of the building in a daze. I still knew absolutely, positively, definitely there was no way I wanted to join the Marines. Trouble was I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I drove immediately to my mom’s rented house to get her to talk some sense into me and to help exorcise this whacky thought. To my utter surprise, she endorsed the idea of my enlisting. In addition to the patriotic aspect, she thought it might be a good life experience for me and perhaps my path to a career. I think she kind of knew I was floating through life not really knowing what I wanted to do after graduation. My hope was to become a newspaper reporter — but I had no idea of how to make that happen and had no comprehension that I might have to move out of town on my own and start somewhere else.

With my mom’s backing, I ruefully accepted this path.

So during the next few weeks the recruiter took me through the steps of enlisting. I finally got very cold feet and I hoped I would fail my medical examination — because of my knee — so that I could gracefully back out. But — just by chance — the doctor who examined me was the same one who had operated on my knee! He proclaimed it sound enough for boot camp training.

I knew then I was hooked. I entered the delayed enlistment program, which meant I wouldn’t have to go to boot camp for four months. That allowed me to complete one more quarter of college and also to try to get into shape. I began strenuous self-programmed conditioning training during that time and found out I had a knack for distance running. Within a matter of days I was up to running three miles on a hilly course without stopping. Within a few weeks I could run five or six miles at a stretch. My knee held up fine.

One day I set a goal for myself at the Weber State track to run five miles in October rainy, windy weather. The raindrops soon felt like bee bites or little daggers on my face and chilled bare arms and legs. But with a newly-found focus and determination, I went the full five miles.

I reported to boot camp between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve in 1981. On the day I flew out to San Diego, my car broke down while I was completing last minute chores — and I was holding the flight vouchers for me and three other recruits leaving from Salt Lake City. Fortunately, my grandparents were able to help me get to the airport in time for the flight. I hugged my mom and sister just before getting on the plane after the last call and the sober thought of fear hit me about the unknown portal I was about to walk through.

After me and the three other guys landed in San Diego, we had time to eat in the airport and sit around. All of us felt pretty scared and I — as the designated group leader — kind of had to nudge them and me to check in at the Marine liaison desk at the airport. As soon as we reported at the desk the growling began. The guy barked at us to stand at attention in front of the desk — while happier travelers than us strolled past and looked at us like we were zoo animals. 

Finally, after other guys had checked in, a drill instructor ordered us to board a bus just outside the airport. We sat there in complete silence — the guy promised dastardly consequences if we talked to each other — until everyone was on board and we took off for the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego.

I could write thousands of inches on my experiences that first night at boot camp. To keep it short, we arrived, stood on some yellow footsteps while more drill instructors shouted at us, then were moved to the barbershop where we lost all our hair — while what seemed like an infestation of drill instructors continued to pass by and find some reason to yell at us individually. Then we paraded single-file into a large room — almost like a wrestling workout room — with big pads on the ground and were ordered to pick up our uniforms and strip all the way down. What seemed like three drill instructors walked around us on the mat and screaming at individual recruits. Unfortunately, all three of them worked on me at once, ordering me to stand up, drop back down, stand up, drop back down, etc., while saying some not too nice things to me. 

Finally that ended. After more introductory stuff, we finally got to shower and go to bed in a huge squadbay filled with what seemed like acres of bunk beds. I imagined it was around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. by the time the lights went out — but I had no idea. It could have been 11 a.m. That evening and night had seemed to last forever. I couldn’t believe that less than 12 hours earlier I had been with my family. It was as if the world had staggered.

Somehow, I tried to fall asleep — out of pure exhaustion, if nothing else — feeling like fate had dropped me into a grease chute toward a hopeless nightmare. Blessed unconsciousness stopped my fall.

CRASH! CRASH!

A sudden explosion of light stabbed into my brain and an ungodly clanging of metal assaulted my ears. I sprang up. The drill instructors were banging on trash cans, hurling their lids on to the tile floor and shrieking for us to get up. 

Everything was frantic — pulling on our G.I. clothes, fumbling with our boot laces. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

Finally they told us to line up outside — in a pouring rain — where a drill instructor marched us in pitch black toward the chow hall. My poncho did little to stop rain trickling down my chest and back. My cover (cap) was completely drenched in a couple of minutes. While we walked along in formation, the D.I. howled out the sometimes garbled and almost always indiscernible to the untrained ear the mournful high-pitched cadence associated with the art of training and controlling troops.

Well, no reason to give a whole lot of detail about how I made it — or almost didn’t — through the next 12 weeks, or so, of boot camp.

As soon as our permanent D.I.’s took charge of us, I became one of five or six guys that absorbed the brunt of their wrathful attention. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was because I was the only guy out of the 63 of us that had had any serious college education. Perhaps it was because I was a contract PFC (guaranteed a stripe if I successfully completed boot camp). Perhaps it was because I was a little heavier or visibly insecure. Perhaps they didn’t like my uneven shoulders.

Whatever the reason, they constantly yelled at me, criticized me, called me up at the end of pretty much every day for extra punishment and just plain rode me with both spurs sharpened.

I wanted to quit, to go home. But I didn’t know how. A letter from my mom helped — she said she was certain that I’d pass “with flying colors.” 

There were nights on guard duty in the barracks — it got to the point where they made me and five other guys to do it every night rather than rotate — I would stand in front of the squad bay windows, look out at the car lights on a highway in the distance, bang the back of my boots together and say softly to myself, “There’s no place like home.”

Somehow I endured. If God was going to pluck me out of boot camp it was going to be in some honest way, out the front door.

I received more encouragement by an old gravel-mouthed Sergeant Major who was part of the training chain of command. One day while we were marching, he walked beside me and expressed respect that I was going through boot camp while my college friends back home were having fun. Around that time, another recruit ran away in the middle of the night and he gathered us together the next morning and spoke about how going AWOL was against the law and singled me out to the other recruits as someone who had a bright future perhaps as a governor someday and the importance of staying in boot camp and not risking our futures.

The only thing I felt I really did well in boot camp was distance running — thanks to all that training in the fall. Partway through training, my series commander threatened to drop me and send me back into an earlier training cycle — a possibility terrifying to me because I just wanted to get done and graduate and get out of there — because I failed a test on pull-ups. But he decided to give me another chance to stay with my platoon and state “You better just be damn glad you can run fast.”

So the weeks passed. I failed on my first time qualifying with the rifle, but passed the second time through. Finally, when they saw I wasn’t going to quit, the D.I. 's lightened up on me quite a bit (although they still made me do that stupid guard duty every night)!.

I endured a medical issue that sent me to a hospital for tests and fought through some other minor challenges.

But I made it. On our final Physical Fitness Test, I performed enough pull-ups to pass and I ran the second-fastest time in our platoon in the three-mile cross-country run (exactly 18:00), to earn a first-class physical rating.

On boot camp graduation day, the band played the “Gonna Fly Now,” theme from “Rocky.” Tears flowed because the night before I had gone to boot camp, my mom and sister and I had watched “Rocky II.” That tune just seems to link everything together.

Then it was on to the regular Marines. I would attend electronics/computer school in Millington, Tenn., and serve the rest of my active duty on bases in South Carolina, Oahu, Hawaii and Iwakuni, Japan.

I honed myself into a very good distance runner, usually the fastest in my company, including a three-mile time of 16:50. During my time at Iwakuni, I used to run about six miles, or so, on top of a seawall on the edge of the base near an ocean — often in complete darkness, other than that emanating from the building lights of the base below or the car lights on the road that ran through the base. Whenever the base music signaling the end of the day blared over the loudspeakers around the base, I would stop my run and stand at attention even though there was no one else around to see me.

My four-year tour was not without interesting incidents. I suffered another knee injury and underwent complicated surgery in Hawaii. I worked on part of the electronic system of the F-4 radar — although I never considered myself very good at it. I was promoted to Lance Corporal and Corporal and earned a Good Conduct Medal. I dated some very lovely young ladies from my church, who I would have otherwise never met.

I made many friends among the Marines in our work space or at the barracks and with church members in the community.

I decided pretty early on, however, that the military life wasn’t for me. I wanted to be close to my family and have more freedom of movement. So, in December of 1985, I boarded a commercial airliner at the Honolulu airport and flew back to Salt Lake City to stay with my mom and sister for a while.

For the next two years I doggedly pursued a job with a newspaper. Finally, when I was 31-and-a-half, a small paper in rural Nevada hired me.

Even though I left my Marine service behind, in some ways the Marines have never left me. Although I felt I left no mark and got more from my service than I gave it, I still burst with gratitude to think I was one of those guys, that, however it happened, even if I was one of the least, I still made the grade. I’m still a member of the club of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of us that are linked together by the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor.

God bless those who have been Marines. God bless those who are Marines. God bless those who will one day stand vigilant in the defense of the freedoms and peace of our great nation and of other oppressed people.

Semper Fi.

OORAH!