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]]>2024 Suicide Charley all Generations Reunion Cruise. We will sail out of Long Beach, California to Ensenada, Mexico. The dates are Friday March 1, 2024, to Monday March 4, 2024.
The cabin rates are with tax included and per person for the entire trip (not per night). There will be a onetime $43.50 gratuity fee per person for the trip. Cabin rates:
When booking use group Booking Number N5C4H3 “Suicide Charley” to get the rates posted above.
Carnival Cruise Lines 1(800) 764-7419
Ask for group Booking when you call. Once we get closer to the date and a good head count, we will post the price for the reunion polo shirts.
Any questions feel free to contact Chuy Perez, if he doesn’t answer send him a text and he will get in contact with you to answer any questions.
This reunion is an all-generations reunion. If you know people that are not on Fakebook and have email addresses, please private message Robert La Fleur with their information. I will add them to future emails. Or have they email [email protected].
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]]>The post In Memory of MGySgt Larry Deyott appeared first on Suicide Charley.
]]>Although 40 years has passed since we were all young Marines, full of energy and grit, we still managed to all reconnect with each other. Larry was the glue that held our little band of warriors together!
Last May, one of our brothers passed away from Covid 19, Cpl. Terry Koplitz. I had the pleasure of being able to se him about a month earlier down in Florida. We found out that we were only 45 minutes from each other while on vacation. So what does one do…We got together for Beers! Had a great time talking about the old days! It was in Florida that he caught thee Covid and past a month later. This is setting the stage for the Warrior Road Trip! Myself, Larry, Michael Horne and John “Hank” Polyzos all made the trip to a small town in Wisconsin for Terry’s final send off. I have to say, it was an amazing trip! The time we spent together was awesome! Larry acting like a typical Master Gunns was leading the way.
Prior to this road trip, Larry wanted to have a get together at his house in Stafford VA. He was hoping for a wide turn out, but many couldn’t make the trip on short notice. Michael drove up from North Carolina and I was only 45 minutes away from him, so it was easy. He decided to pull out his large collection of Bourbons and it all started! What a night! Now I blame him for my addiction to good Bourbons! Shit isn’t cheap, thanks Larry!!
You’ve heard from me, but the best is yet to come! – Kirk Harris, Cpl of Marines. 2nd platoon
“Master Gunnery Sergeant Deyott “Larry” was one of the best friends I ever had the pleasure of calling Brother. He was a true leader and never tried to be the center of attention. He was well respected simply because of the caliber of man he was. One of the fondest and funniest memories that I have is when I was living with he and his wife Deanna. I was missing home, North Carolina; so I decided to cook up some collard greens. Naturally I knew they we’re delish but had an awful odor when cooked. Larry being from Montana had never had collards. He cussed me for all I was worth and threatened my life if I ever cooked that shit in his house again. Thirty eight years later he still complained about that awful smell and I still laughed as hard as I did on that day. This is only a snippet of the memory’s that we made. Gods speed my Brother, your mission is complete” – Cpl. Michael Horne Suicide Charley 1983-1985
“I first met Larry in 1983 while we were deployed on the USS Juneau LPD 10. After bumming a few dips of Copenhagen here and there, we became fast friends. Shortly after, we found ourselves touring the orient and enjoying what our beloved Corps had in store for us. After our extended tour, to make a second deployment to Okinawa, we received our discharge papers. From there, we moved his belongings back to Montana where is family would welcome me as one of the family.
After staying and enjoying Montana for a while, Larry went back into the Corps and rose to the rank of Master Gunnery Sergeant after 32 years for faithful service. It was an honor to have spend 40 years of my life with him. Thank you for the great times brother, Love and Miss you more than you can know!”
Semper Fi and Esprit De Corps – Cpl. John “Hank” Polyzos Suicide Charley 1982-1985
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]]>Like many veterans, there’s two sides to Frank Olivares’ life.
The Olivares many know now is a follower of Jesus, a humble, patient soul that wouldn’t hurt even the most persistently pesky fly. He’s a person that picks up hitchhikers without worry, that knows all of his customers’ names by heart and whose generosity of kindness knows no limits.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine a version of him before the Gulf War, or even in it. From a brawler through high school that feared where his life was turning, to a scrappy machine gunner looking for his next mark, it’s all a part of what makes him the beloved community member that he is today.
A sharp bell strikes out as a family leaves his Riverside restaurant, signifying another happy customer come and gone. Olivares thanks them for coming with the familiarity of old friends, inquiring about their families, while the restaurant’s eyes watch with curiosity.
He’s built a life for himself here among a community that will support him through any hardship, and vice versa, but life was not always so easy.
Who was Frank Olivares before he was a beloved community member, a successful entrepreneur with a bid for county judge? Before he served as a machine gunner in the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, also known as the Suicide Charley Marine Company, embodying the pride of never stopping, no matter how bad the circumstances, and leaving it all on the battle field?
Olivares was and always will be a home town boy, a Walker County native aspiring for more.
To Read More Click Here Copyright Michelle Wulfson | The Item Nov 11, 2021
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]]>LENA, Wis. (WBAY) – Normally, veteran memorials are found in parks or cemeteries. But for Marine veteran Mike Vizer, who served from 1989 to 1993, you can find one in his front yard in Lena, WI.
With the help of a GoFundMe, he built a one-of-a-kind memorial to honor marines from his unit, Suicide Charley, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.
Each dog tag on the display has the name of every Suicide Charley Marine killed in action, from WWII to present.
“Suicide Charley was one of the, is one of the most storied Marine Corp Infantry companies that has had numerous medal of honor winners. Some of the greatest heroes of the Marine Corp have been associated with Suicide Charley,” said Vizer.
Next to the display, Vizer built a recreation of the iconic flag-raising photo taken during the Battle of Iwo Jima that sits in Washington D.C.
“Just seeing the people and react to the monument, react to the dog tags, it really hit home, for me emotionally as well. I just think it was such a blessing to have everybody here, just be apart of that is very special, something I’ll never forget,” said Vizer.
Two years ago, the United States Marine Corps announced that for 74 years they had misidentified another one of the six fighting men in the photo.
It was actually Corporal Harold Keller in the photo that remains one of the most famous of all time, not Pfc. Rene Gagnon.
“There’s a lot more to him than just, he was the second man on the flag, he was a wonderful human being,” said Steve Maurer, son-in-law of Cpl. Harold Keller.
Harold Keller’s daughter, Kay Maurer, and his son-in-law, Steve, drove from Iowa to be at this dedication ceremony on Saturday morning.
“Growing up, once in awhile people would come up and say ‘I heard from my parents that your dad was on the Flag Raising,’ and I would go ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, he never talks about it,’” said Kay.
“Never told a soul that this ever happened, and we just discovered two years ago. But the amazing thing about the whole deal that I just cannot get past, is that how somebody can go to this war and see the terrible things that he saw four four years, come home, raise a family, the guy was as normal as anybody you’d see on the street,” said Steve.
After Keller survived he war, him and his wife, Ruby, had three children and raised them in Brooklyn, Iowa where Keller was born and lived his whole life.
“He was a tremendous father, he was very, very active, very involved in our lives, patience beyond a saint, and very involved in the community,” said Kay.
Keller died in 1979 from a heart attack, but his legacy will always live on.
“I love this, and I’m so honored that people want to recognize his war efforts. What Mike has done here is amazing. I hope the whole world comes and sees it, because it’s well done” said Kay.
Mike and with the help of his family, have built a beautiful memorial in their yard located at 6348 Logtown Rd. in Lena, WI.
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]]>The post The Doom Patrol: Eight Marines on a Suicide Mission in Vietnam appeared first on Suicide Charley.
]]>Orignal Story Posted: Historynet.com
After 32 casualties during the first 30 hours of Operation Pursuit, initiated in mid-February 1968 by the 1st Marine Division to search for enemy rocket caches in the mountains west of Da Nang,Lt. Col. Bill Davis ordered Charlie and Delta companies of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, to get off Hills 270 and 310 and return to their base camps in the flatlands to the east.
A little later that morning of Feb. 16, the acting commander of Charlie Company, 1st Lt. Dana F.MacCormack, whose men were descending from Hill 270, radioed Davis: “Here come the NVA, colonel! I’ve got one more KIA that the last helo did not have room for. We are having a hell of a time carrying this body, and the bones are cutting up the body bag.” Davis, on Hill 310 with the battalion command group, told MacCormack to get Charlie Company off the mountain immediately to avoid any more casualties. And that meant leaving the body behind.
Thousands of North Vietnamese Army troops had trekked down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in eastern Laos and moved through South Vietnam’s A Shau Valley before making their way to high ground, including Hills 270 and 310, overlooking an area known as Happy Valley and the Marine positions to the east.
Units from the 31st NVA Regiment and the 368B Artillery Regiment operated frequently out of Happy Valley before moving into the “Rocket Belt,” an arc running north to south around the western side of Da Nang at the ideal range for NVA forces firing Soviet-made 122 mm and 140 mm rockets at Da Nang Air Base, Marble Mountain Air Facility and vital ammunition dumps and fuel depots. The inner edge of arc’s belt was about 5 miles from the Da Nang installations; the outer edge of the belt was about 7½ miles away. If NVA rocket squads were outside that belt on the western side, their rockets would likely fall short. But if they were too close to Da Nang on the inner side of the belt, they might overshoot their targets.
Wounded Marines in the saddle area near Hill 310 are moved to an evacuation area. The terrain was so rough that medevac helicopters could not land and had to hoist the wounded up in slings. (Bob Bayer)
Each battalion of the 7th Marines was responsible for a section of the belt, making sure no enemy rockets got inside the arc and within firing range. The 1st Battalion’s headquarters was on Hill 10, inside the belt. Its 72-square-mile area of responsibility extended westward toward the high ground that included Hills 270 and 310, about 3 miles from Hill 10 (the designations reflected hill elevations in meters).
On Feb. 13, the day before the start of Operation Pursuit, Davis met with Col. Paul Graham, the 1st Marine Division operations officer. A few days earlier, a large secondary explosion was observed on the saddle-shaped area connecting Hills 270 and 310. The explosion indicated the presence of NVA rocket caches, and Graham relayed an order from the division commander, Maj. Gen. Donn J. Robertson, to conduct a search of that area—one of the toughest jungle/mountain terrains in the battalion’s assigned territory.
Operation Pursuit beganat 11 a.m. on Feb. 14 as Charlie Company crossed the western end of Hill 10 while Delta Company departed from Hill 41, about 2 miles to the southeast. Accompanying them were 1st Division combat correspondent Sgt. Robert Bayer and photographer Cpl. R.J. Del Vecchio.
The two companies linked up on the approach to Hills 270 and 310. The dense jungle growth at the base of Hill 270 channeled the Marines into a single-file column during the slow, exhausting climb that forced the men to hack out a trail with machetes. By 6:30 p.m., Delta Company had secured Objective 1, the saddle between Hills 270 and 310. Charlie Company had secured Objective 2, the top of Hill 270.
The commander of Charlie’s 2nd Platoon, 2nd Lt. Mark Whittier, later wrote a letter to his wife describing evidence of the enemy that this men discovered: “We got to the top of Hill 270 and found a bunker and communication system that the [NVA] had been using. Also we uncovered a log that we translated. This bunker had a perfect view of the entire Da Nang area and the diary had accounts of when units left our hill and where they were going….The last entry in the diary was that ‘there were beaucoup Marines leaving Hill 10 for this position.’” The bunker had been vacated in haste, and the radio was still on.
Charlie Company used the bunker as an overnight command post and blew it up the next morning, Feb. 15. Around that same time, an enemy ambush wounded four Marines of Delta Company in the saddle area. Charlie Company, with Whittier’s platoon in the lead, moved quickly down the south side of Hill 270 to reinforce the ambushed Delta squad.
Pfc. Michael Kelly had been killed on a mountain that was still teeming with NVA soldiers when a squad of volunteers went on a mission to recover his body. (Michael Kelly Family)
Suddenly, Whittier’s point squad, which had reached the saddle, was also ambushed by NVA soldiers concealed in bunkers and “spider holes,” foxholes hidden underneath a camouflaged lid. Three Charlie Marines were killed immediately, and several were wounded.
Pfc. Michael J. Kelly, a member of the point squad who had been with the company for only two months, was hit by an enemy bullet that struck a grenade on his cartridge belt. The detonation killed Kelly, severing a leg in the process.
The point squad’s machine gun team leader, Lance Cpl. Russell Naugle, ran down the trail toward one of the wounded Marines while firing his M60 machine gun from the hip. As the corporal pulled his comrade to safety, he was wounded four times. Naugle died later that day from his wounds and posthumously received the Silver Star.
Medevac helicopters flew in to evacuate the casualties, but the side of Hill 310 above the saddle was covered with such dense jungle undergrowth that the choppers had to lower extraction harnesses for the pickups, often while under fire from NVA rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault rifles and 12.7 mm machine guns. Finally, after five hours of battle and medevac efforts, Charlie Company got out all its casualties except Kelly. When the day ended, Charlie and Delta companies had suffered five killed and 27 wounded.
The next day, Feb. 16, around 7:30 a.m., after Davis issued the order for Charlie and Delta companies to return to their base camps, his 1st Battalion command group and Delta Company were preparing to move down to the valley floor when Charlie Company commander MacCormack radioed. The lieutenant reported that his men, still in the saddle area, were taking gunfire from bunkers concealed in thick vegetation above them on the north side of Hill 310. Six NVA soldiers were firing at them—so close that MacCormack’s Marines could make out their uniforms, flak jackets and helmets.
A Marine reconnaissance team to the west, on Hill 502, advised Davis that a large NVA force was headed toward the Charlie Marines. The colonel alerted MacCormack, who soon announced that he could see the NVA coming and added that his men were having “a hell of a time” carrying Kelly’s body.
As the company continued its descent, MacCormack again radioed Davis: “I’ve got five WIA being helped down Hill 270, which is slowing us down, so I had to leave our KIA [Kelly] in a bomb crater on the saddle. We can come back out and get his body later.”
In early afternoon, out of food and water and low on ammunition, the weary, battle-shocked Marines of Charlie Company arrived at Hill 10 and were met by the actual company commander, Capt. Karl Ripplemeyer, who had been on leave and just returned. Delta Company, meanwhile, had reached its base camp on Hill 41.
Davis radioed the regimental commander, Col. Ross R. Miner, and told him that the Marines were back at the command posts, but added that a dead Marine had to be left behind. A few hours later, Miner told Davis that a B-52 bombing mission was scheduled to strike Hills 270 and 310 and ordered him to send a team to recover Kelly’s body before the bombing started. Davis, however, did not want to risk any more lives in those mountains before the bombing runs were completed and argued against an immediate recovery mission, but Miner wouldn’t rescind his order.
Davis discussed Miner’s order with Ripplemeyer, as well as the battalion operations officer and the officer who coordinated air support for the battalion. Davis decided to use Charlie Company volunteers for the recovery since they knew the location of Kelly’s body.
“It was 100% a suicide mission,” Whittier, the 2nd Platoon lieutenant, would write to his wife on Feb. 17. “This is a point I can’t too heavily emphasize.”
“Suicide mission” was an unintentionally appropriate term, given Charlie Company’s longstanding nickname: “Suicide Charley.” The unit had earned its nickname during the October 1942 Japanese assault on Guadalcanal, when 1st Battalion was led by Lt. Col. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, who later became the Corps’ most decorated Marine and finished his career as a lieutenant general. During that battle, Charlie Company held its line against a far larger Japanese force despite suffering heavy losses. The day after the fight, a white flag of parachute cloth with a picture of a skull and crossbones rose over the company’s position. Emblazoned on the flag was “Suicide Charley.”
The patrol to recover Kelly’s body had only a few hours to prepare for its departure. A runner was sent to Charlie Company seeking the volunteers, including an experienced squad leader. John D. McCreless, then a 20-year-old sergeant, recalled: “When the decision came down to use a squad of volunteers, I got crazy and raised my hand and said I’d lead it.”
Lance Cpl. Stephen B. McCashin responded similarly: “When I heard they were asking for volunteers, I said anyone who would go back into those mountains again would have to be crazy. I thought it was a suicide mission, but since I’m on my second tour here, I must be crazy, so I decided to go.”
Pfc. Joseph A. Hamrick signed up because, he said, “I was the only one of the volunteers who knew exactly where the body was, so even though I had only been in the ‘Nam’ for a month and had never walked point, I figured I could go right to it.”
The other Marines on the eight-man patrol were Pfc. Thomas M. Adamson, Lance Cpl. Tyree Albert Chamberlain, Pfc. Alfred P. Granados, Cpl. Billy R. Ranes and Pfc. Pedro A. Rodriguez. Someone—no one can remember exactly who—dubbed the volunteers the “Doom Patrol.”
Granados, the radio operator, remembers their preparations. “Our equipment was light for a short recon patrol—no helmets, flak jackets or cartridge belts, and all but one of the men of the Doom Patrol asked to trade their M16s for the more reliable M14, and permission was granted,” he said. “We were to make no enemy contact, travel by stealth in the dark, get the body and return. If we ran into a superior enemy force, we were to abort, split up and get back any way we could.”
Before the men departed, a senior staff sergeant told McCreless: “None of you will probably return alive, but to increase your chances, if things get hairy you can just bring back the leg.” The eight Marines weren’t totally on their own for the mission. The battalion air officer had arranged for continuous air support for the patrol.
At 2 a.m. on Feb. 17, McCreless’ squad left Hill 10. A little more than an hour later, near the abandoned village of Phuoc Ninh (5)—military maps distinguished villages with the same name by numbering them—the Marines spotted NVA soldiers moving toward their position. Chamberlain opened fire and killed one of them, but the patrol was now compromised. McCreless faced a difficult decision: abort the mission or stay the course. He spoke to the battalion command center and was told to proceed. No one wanted an empty casket sent to Kelly’s family, and the men on the mission knew the odds when they volunteered.
On the move again toward the base of Hill 270, the Marines observed another enemy patrol, and McCreless stopped for an hour near another abandoned village, Phuoc Ninh (7), a precautionary pause in the dark to make sure there was no other NVA activity in the area before continuing their journey.
By sunrise, around 5 a.m., the patrol had cleared the open rice paddy areas and started into the dense jungle on the side of the mountain—with a long march still ahead, which meant they would have to conduct their “stealth” mission in broad daylight. Three hours later, the men were in a flat area above the bomb crater where Kelly’s body lay, covered with a poncho. There they waited while pilots in O1-Bird Dog propeller-driven planes called in airstrikes.
One of the pilots radioed McCreless to tell him that napalm drops by F-4 Phantom II fighter-bombers would land just forward of the bomb crater. He instructed the patrol members to take cover, take three deep breaths, exhale and hold their next breath. The napalm struck about a 100 yards in front of the patrol. Granados still remembers the intense heat and dust being sucked past his face into the inferno. The shock waves from the blast seemed to raise him off the ground.
After the napalm flames diminished, Granados saw NVA soldiers emerging from bunkers and spider holes. McCreless, worried that the enemy troops were about to move against his seriously outnumbered men, yelled: “Get the leg, and let’s get the hell out!”
Moments later, Ranes and Adamson dashed to the crater. They grabbed the severed leg and quickly strapped it to a backpack that Chamberlain carried. The eight Marines then ran back down the trail, amid the still-smoldering napalm and the enemy fire tearing into trees and brush around them. A final strafing run by F-4 Phantoms silenced the firing.
After reaching the flatlands, the patrol came upon Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, sent to assist the squad if any of the men had been wounded or killed. The platoon escorted McCreless’ squad to base camp, and by 2 p.m. all the Marines were back on Hill 10.
Members of the Doom Patrol happily prove that they all survived their “suicide mission.” Standing from left, Thomas M. Adamson, Tyree Albert Chamberlain, John D. McCreless and Alfred P. Granados. Kneeling from left, Billy R. Ranes, Joseph A. Hamrick, Stephen B. McCashin and Pedro A. Rodriguez. (Unknown photographer)
Amid great rejoicing, Davis summoned the men to his quarters and handed them cigars and cold beer to celebrate their incredible accomplishment. (He wasn’t aware at that time that the full body had not been recovered.) As recounted in his autobiography Tet Marine, Davis told the Doom Patrol that he had been a fan of Suicide Charley since the Chosin Reservoir battle during the Korean War. “I’ve been proud of them during all these years, because they did great things at the Reservoir,” he said. “But never did they do anything greater than YOU did, as volunteers, last night and today.”
McCreless said: “The only reason I can think of why we were able to pull it off is that the NVA just couldn’t believe that we were stupid enough to go in there and do what we did. They must have thought we were bait for some kind of trap.”
After the celebration, Davis typed a letter to the commander of the 7th Marine Regiment:
“Dear Colonel Miner, I’ve never been prouder to be a Marine than at this moment! This magnificent squad [from Suicide Charley] went on what appeared to be a suicide mission. I wish you could have heard this young Marine [Pfc. Joseph Hamrick] describe why he volunteered. He just couldn’t imagine that an empty casket would go to a Marine’s parents. He knew they had to do the job, and while he was scared all the way out, and all the way back, he knew that they just had to succeed. I’ve just lived through an experience that I’ll always hold dear to me. Semper Fi.”
Within 10 hours of the patrol’s return, the B-52s from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam devastated the high ground on Hills 270 and 310. But the NVA would return to Hill 310, and many more Marines were wounded or killed there the following month during Operation Worth and in August during Operation Mameluke Thrust.
On March 8, Whittier and McCreless were wounded. Later that day, at the Navy hospital in Da Nang, Whittier died from his wounds. A few days later, McCreless was medevaced to Japan for additional surgery. During fighting on May 30, Doom Patrol volunteer Rodriguez was killed.
Men from E Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, found Kelly’s body on March 25 during Operation Worth. A medevac helicopter picked up the remains and took them to the mortuary in Da Nang. A funeral with a casket containing Kelly’s leg was held in his hometown of Findlay, Ohio, in March 1968. A second funeral, with the rest of his remains, was held in April 1968. ✯
—Jack Wells served in Vietnam during 1968-69 as an artillery forward observer with Alpha and Bravo companies, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, and later as executive officer of H Battery, 3rd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.
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]]>The post U.S. embassy post in Iraq meant six months with no days off appeared first on Suicide Charley.
]]>Nolan Forbes of Aurora recently spent four active-duty years in the U.S. Marine Corps, but he remembers most fondly just six months at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Forbes, 23, was a Marine from 2015 to 2019, rising to the rank of corporal.
“It’s a company-level job but we only had a platoon out there (at the embassy), so we were pretty stretched-thin with our duties,” Forbes said of his time at the embassy in Baghdad. “We did that rotation for six months with no days off or anything.”
Forbes’ platoon served as guards for the huge embassy grounds.
“We went on deployment there in the summer of ’17,” Forbes said.
“It was hot, and especially on a windy day it just felt like a furnace was blowing into the window of the post,” he said. As guards he and platoon-mates were stationed in raised “posts” along the walls around the perimeter of the embassy.
“Each post had a machine gun and a couple of rocket launchers, and one post on each side had a grenade launcher,” Forbes said, “and we also had a ‘javelin’ on every post — a missile launcher that launches a ‘smart missile’ that you can lock on at a target and then shoot it out” and it will “go at” the moving target. “It’s pretty cool.”
“We took IDF — indirect fire — a couple times. It was either ISIS or some Shia militia group that shot rockets at the embassy over the city,” he added.
Forbes and his platoon were at the embassy during the battle for Mosul, in northern Iraq, which was carried out by Iraqi forces — supported, Forbes said, by a team of U.S. forces on the ground outside the city.
“The Iraqis got pretty messed up but they ended up winning. When they won the battle of Mosul, all around Baghdad there were people shooting off fireworks — it was like the Fourth of July,” he said.
Some Iraqis set up a bazaar inside the embassy “and they would sell stuff like hats that said ‘Make Iraq Great Again,’” Forbes said.
Boot camp came first for Forbes, of course — in October 2015 in San Diego.
“I did that for three months — getting yelled at and all that,” he said. Next he served briefly as a Marine recruiter’s assistant in Grand Island.
In addition to boot camp and the position in Baghdad, Forbes spent lots of time receiving other courses of training in both general Marine infantry skills as well as preparations for specific assignments.
His training preceding the Baghdad assignment was at Twenty-Nine Palms in the Mojave Desert in California. His assignment for Iraq was in the first battalion of the 7th Marines, Company C — referred to as “Suicide Charley,” a “very old company that has history that goes back to 1942,” Forbes said.
“When we first showed up we had to memorize the history of Suicide Charley and be able to recite it from memory, otherwise they’d ‘play with you’ and it wasn’t a good time.”
Forbes also worked for six months as a gate guard at a camp in Okinawa.
Did he have opportunities to wear “dress blues,” the Marines’ distinctive dark-blue dress uniform?
“The only time we wore our dress uniforms was at the Marine Corps Ball,” he said. “We’d drink together and do whatever other shenanigans we got up to out there.”
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]]>The post The Legend of Suicide Charley appeared first on Suicide Charley.
]]>By: Major Gary Gozzens, USMCR (Retired)
The 1st Marine Division (1st MarDiv) landed on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, on 7 August 1942, and during the next four months, the division participated in an ongoing fight to prevent the Japanese from recapturing the island and Henderson Field. Yet, the official historian of the 1st MarDiv
wrote, “There are two Guadalcanals: the battle and the legend.”
One of those legends was born on the night of 24 October when the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, occupied defensive positions south of Henderson Field in a sector normally held by two infantry battalions. The under strength Company C anchored the center of the line and bore the brunt of at least six separate attacks by the Japanese that night.
Although the fighting was desperate, Company C Marines held the line. Later, on the morning of 25 October, a handmade flag appeared over the Company C line that had been made from white Japanese parachute material and showed a skull-and-crossbones crudely inscribed with “Suicide Charley, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.
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