A few Good Men Want Out of the Military
Christian Conscience Meets the Marine Corps

Louise Harris: Maurice, what attracted you to the military in the first place?

Maurice Park: I guess I can go way back to when I was maybe four or five years old. I can remember watching television, seeing all these early John Wayne individual types dying bravely for their country, killing all the dirty Japs. I thought that was a really neat thing to do. The whole thing grabbed me — hook, line and sinker. From about five years old, I was very interested in the military (not one particular branch at that time), and then I developed a specific interest in the Air Force. It was with me all through my childhood: I wanted to be in the military.

Later on, I decided that the military was not the place for me. I had a kind of reversal in my thinking at about seventeen. I remember saying once to a girlfriend of mine that had suggested to me the possibility of going into the military, "I don’t want to kill people for a living." It hadn’t really caught on yet, but somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that I would be killing people for a living.

Right after high school I got into some jobs managing bicycle shops in southern California. I had been involved in athletics — cycling in particular — for a long time and, well, it started to get old. I was pretty bored, actually. I wanted to get involved with something else. I wanted to go to school, but I didn’t know what to study, so I thought that would be a waste of time. I decided to wait awhile until I found out what I did want to study. I worked at a few odd jobs, cooking in a restaurant and things like that.

Then lo and behold, your friendly Marine recruiter came on the scene and presented his whole idea of adventurism and pride. I was cooking in a restaurant in Oregon, and the recruiting office was right around the corner. We were the closest place to eat that was any good, and the recruiters came in every day. I would stand there and watch them come in. They were all sharp-looking and squared-away; they looked like the perfect John Wayne image of somebody who would represent the United States government.

They dated a lot of the waitresses that I was working with, so I sort of knew them. One day when my mother was having lunch there, the recruiter sat down at her table. He was a very friendly individual. She mentioned that I was working there. Later that evening, he contacted me, introduced himself, and asked me if I would like to cook for the Marine Corps.

My initial response was, "NO WAY! I don’t want to have anything to do with the Marine Corps." But we got to talking; he was a good conversationalist. He asked me what my interests were, and at that time my interests were, well, up in the clouds. I wanted to fly; I wanted to get involved with the aerospace industry somehow, aircraft and the technological side. He said that the Marine Corps could give me that training, the skills and job opportunities. Along with that I would get a $1500 bonus if I enlisted NOW. Well, that sounded pretty attractive to me.

LH: You mean they actually give you a bonus for enlisting instead of.. . Well [I guess they can’t draft you. .]

MP: The particular program I was interested in was very specialized and very technical. The recruiter could offer the special bonus to people who qualified. That was the big thing, IF YOU QUALIFY. Well the pride that was within me at the time said, "What do you mean, IF I QUALIFY? Are you telling me that I’m not GOOD enough to get into this? So I tried even harder to get into something that was sucking at me already. You really get your foot stuck in things like that.

LH: Real good psychology.

MP: It was brilliant. The problem was that I had no idea, no knowledge of psychology at the time. But I learned.

LH: How old were you when you went in?

MP: I was nineteen. I enlisted under a delayed-entry program in September, 1976, and I went into the military in April, 1977. In the meantime, I ran across a book in a bookstore entitled Should A Christian Go To War? Between the time when I had enlisted and the time I was supposed to report to boot camp, I had never questioned that. I had never questioned whether or not I, as one who had dedicated his life to following Christ, should have any kind of responsibility, whether or not I should participate in war. I read through the book. It was written by an ex-Marine and presented the Mennonite theology that, no, a Christian should not go to war. A week later I was in boot camp, thinking to myself, "Wow, I don’t belong here. This is not right, what I’m doing."

LH: Did you have any particular religious background, or~ were you attending any religious services?

MP: Yeah. I had decided to follow Christ probably three or four years before that and had been a very regular attender at a number of specific churches in California and in Oregon. So I had a good, solid background as to how I should conduct my life as a Christian — the dos and don’ts. But whether I should go to war was a question that had never been posed to me before, and I had no answer for it. I realized that I was leaning toward the NO side and that it was wrong for me, morally and spiritually, to participate in an organization whose job it is to kill people.

LH: How did you take boot camp?

MP: It was horrible. (Laughs) Worse.

Next >>

<< Home