STORY BEHIND THE PLAQUE
Service Reflections of SSgt Michael Weaver, U.S. Marine Corps (1983-1993)

I thought after high school that I might go into the Navy. However, my brother was killed in an accident in the Army, and my mother did not want me to attend, so I didn’t. I floundered around for two years, trying college, working for Transcontinental Bolt Company selling tools, nuts, and bolts door-to-door to farmers in western PA, and then working at Wendy’s. My father was a Marine during WWII. After a bad day at Wendy’s, I went home and announced that I was going to the Marine recruiting station. Dad, would you like to go with me? He did, we went, and I left for the Marines shortly thereafter.

I stayed in for 10 years and joined with the idea of retiring. I enlisted for six up front, then reenlisted for another six after that. In the early 90s, I was a staff sergeant, and they opened the promotion zones wide open, so I was in the promotion zone after only 1 year of being a staff sergeant and had not been to Staff NCO school. I was in a single billet and didn’t see myself having the opportunity to attend Staff NCO school. I was not surprised to see that I had been passed over.

Rumor had it that the promotion zones had been widened to weed folks out and reduce the size of the military. The following year, I expected to be passed over again when a message came out offering a voluntary separation incentive. Any Staff Sergeant or above could get out earlier than the end of the active service date if they agreed to the terms of the incentive.

They offered a percentage of your base pay once a year for twice the time you were in the service and an opportunity to pay into the new GI bill to help you pay for college. In return, you had to be in the Ready Reserve and agree to take MCI correspondence courses. I took the offer, and the incentive paid for my undergraduate degree and one semester of my master’s degree. It also paid me $5,000 a year for 20 years.

I liked everywhere I served, and they were all different. Probably my least favorite was serving at 2d FSSG only because most of the time, we would have roll call formation at 6 am, roll call formation at midday for chow, and then again around 5 pm for chow. Other than roll call formations, I don’t remember doing much. I was relieved to be assigned temporary duty as a military policeman on the main side of Camp Lejeune. My most vivid memory from there was as a gate guard on a late summer night. A Marine had been drinking and walking out on Lejeune Blvd., right near the base entrance. He got hit by a car, and someone rolled up to the gate and told me about it. I told the other Marine working the gate to call for assistance and to work the gate, and I ran to the scene. I was the first there, and the Marine was not breathing; he smelled terrible and was bleeding from his mouth and a few other places. I did not want to do mouth-to-mouth on him, so I did what we were trained to do; I grabbed him by the jaw, tilted his head back, and popped his jaw open. To my relief, he gurgled and started breathing. The rescue squad arrived, and I returned to my post, never knowing if he survived or what came of him.

The other time I enjoyed was when I was TAD to Wilmington, NC Port Authority with a detachment of MPs from 2d FSSG (photo attached). In the early ’80s, the idea was to position several ships around the world in various locations with a brigade worth (if I remember correctly) of supplies aboard. Then, the ships could be ordered to a location with Marine detachments mobilized to marry up with the ship at a moment’s notice. The ship crews were minimal, just enough to keep the equipment in usable condition, batteries in vehicles charged, etc. Equipment was being moved from Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point down to Wilmington ports, where the ships would be loaded. The MP detachment road, patrolled with port security personnel, sometimes sitting with the gate guards, sometimes walking around and through buildings, punching clocks with a key as evidence that the patrol was doing its duty.

There are quite a few, but one I like to talk about is the time I was working the back gate at Kaneohe Bay, HI. After hours, the gate would close to vehicle traffic and become a walking gate. One night, I heard a strange sound getting closer and closer and louder and louder. I was amazed when I saw an AmTrac come towards the gate from inside the base and crash through the gate. It took out all of the reflectors on the road as it went right through the gate and down Mokapu Blvd. I called the dispatcher, and they told me to quit playing on the phone and get back to work! The AmTrac was found abandoned at the intersection of H3 and 93 after it had been hit by a car and lost its track. The Marines in the AmTrac got out and ran, and there was an empty case of beer cans left in the AmTrac. The next morning, a pair of scruffy-looking Marines were spotted walking onto the air station through the main gate. They were identified as the Marines in the AmTrac and were taken into custody. They were interviewed, and it was discovered that they had intended to go down to Waikiki but decided that it might be fun to stop at the drive-in theater that was still there at the time before heading across the island down to Waikiki. That’s when they were hit by the car as they turned off the highway on their way to the drive-in, and that changed everything. Not sure what ever happened to them.

I guess it would be the Crime Prevention SOP that I created for MCAS Kaneohe Bay while I was the Crime Prevention specialist for the air station. After creating it, we duplicated it and distributed it to all the commands on Kaneohe Bay. It’s one of the main reasons for my Navy Achievement Medal.

My Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.

I would say Major Greg Bates. He was Captain Bates then, and he and two staff sergeants were in an office as the intel component at SOTG II MEF. He was a very driven individual with lots of initiative, so much so that it was contagious. I loved working for him, and he and I are still friends.

One of the Marines I most wanted to make contact with was Ron Howell. He was a Marine’s Marine and a good friend. He and I were sergeants together at the 11th Counterintelligence Team when I received orders to the 3rd CIT in Okinawa. My then-wife asked for a divorce while I was serving my time on an unaccompanied tour, and Ron was a tremendous help to me during that time. I was heartbroken to find his service plaque in TogetherWeServed and discovered that he was deceased. There’s no photo of him, but there’s enough information for me to track down his obituary, where they have a picture of Ron in uniform. Sure enough, it was him. He was medically retired in 2005 as a CWO-4 after being shot for the third time in Afghanistan and passed away in 2016 after a long bout with cancer. Ron’s obituary is here:

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/sturgisjournal/name/ronald-howell-obituary?id=16053222.

Others I’d like to contact include Ron Tibbs and Oscar Mareno; both were MPs from MCAS Kaneohe Bay. As mentioned in an earlier reflection, I am still in touch with Major Greg Bates, retired USMC.

The incident with the AmTrac from an earlier reflection. Another one is after my divorce, I was back on the East Coast, and I decided that I’d like to get my life back together. I went home and picked up my violin, which I hadn’t played in 7 years! Thinking no one was around, I was practicing after hours one day in my SOTG office. One of the GySgts came in and said something to me about playing the violin. I was the youngest of 6 and the smallest of the four boys in the family and had plenty of ribbing about being a sissy because I was into art and playing classical music. (They wondered about me.) So, when Gunny came in and said something, I thought he was getting ready to give me a hard time, and I didn’t want anything to do with that. He said something like, “Weaver, I didn’t know you played the violin.” I retorted somewhat forcefully with, “Yeah, Gunny, and what of it?” He responded with, “You’re f***ing crazy,” and walked away. I still wonder if he was honestly interested in what I was doing and if I missed an opportunity for a friendship.

Something else that is related to this and is sort of humorous is that I would go out on Monday evenings to Dr. Maurice Shepherd’s house to meet with the Onslow String Ensemble. It was a small group of folks who enjoyed getting together and playing classical string ensemble music. I was 27 when I joined the group, but the average age of its members was somewhere in the 70s, and that’s after I joined! Dr. Shepherd was the cellist, Victor Meltz, Iris Faby, and I played violin, and Harry Elzzey (USMC Maj, Ret. WWII pilot) played viola. We would occasionally have a few young visitors, as we did the evening the attached photo was taken. Dr. Shepherd was a retired scientist who had worked at the Navy Hospital on Camp Lejeune and specialized in venereal diseases (on a Marine Corps base – go figure). Victor ran a dry cleaning business. Iris was the wife of a deceased USMC CWO4 Retired.

Iris would frequently show up, get her folder of music out, then look around for her violin, which she had left at home again. We would chuckle, and she would go in her car a few blocks over and retrieve it, returning without a care in the world that she had forgotten her instrument again. It was Dr. Shepherd who encouraged me to start taking lessons again with Nancy McAllister in Wilmington. So, I started taking lessons, considering that I might get out and go to college for music. At my first lesson with her, she asked me what I wanted to do, and I told her to get good enough to teach music in public schools. She said, “OK, play something for me.” I hadn’t really played or practiced in 7 years! I played a few bars, and she yelled at the top of her lungs, “Wait! Wait! Stop!! You want to do what?” I told her again, and she said, “You have a lot of work to do. Are you willing to do that?”

What makes this so funny today is that Nancy probably stood about 5’6″ and was very petite, and I’m 6’4″ and was in the best shape of my life, coming to Lejeune from Okinawa, where I spent a good deal of time lifting weights and doing PT. She yelled loud enough that it startled me, and I jumped! I told her I was willing to work, and she took me on. I practiced in Harry’s garage, which he had turned into an instrument repair workshop, usually practicing between 7 pm and 10 pm on nights when I was not with the ensemble or in Wilmington. After I had practiced, Harry and I would sit around and talk for an hour or so before I went back to the barracks for the night. Nancy taught me well, and I joined the Wilmington Symphony, which rehearsed on Tuesday evenings. That’s where I met my current wife, as stand partners playing in the second violin section.

I used the voluntary separation incentive to get a Bachelor of Music degree in music education. I had enough left over to pay for a semester of a master’s degree in music performance. I received a fellowship to study at Florida State University for a Doctor of Music degree in performance. That all took 10 years to complete, and I started teaching music at the college level in the fall of 2003. I played with the NC Symphony as an intern during my master’s degree and with the Tallahassee Symphony during my doctoral studies. I currently play for local and regional symphony orchestras, the Spartanburg Philharmonic, and the Hendersonville Symphony. I’ve played with the other nearby regional orchestras, the Asheville Symphony, the Greenville Symphony, and once with the Brevard Symphony. I’m also the choir director for Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Greer, SC. I currently teach at North Greenville University, a small Christian college in the Upstate of SC. I teach violin, viola, and music theory, conduct the university orchestra, and am the coordinator for the university’s performing arts and lecture series. My brothers no longer tease me about playing the violin or, now, mostly the viola.

I am in the VA because I was at Camp Lejeune during the time they had contaminated water. I have enjoyed the medical benefits of being in the VA, especially with their community healthcare plan, which allows you to see community doctors if you have to drive a long way for the same services at a VA facility, which for me is two hours away.

Serving in the military has given me the burden of recognizing those who gave themselves for the freedoms that many take for granted. As an orchestra conductor, I have put together programs that honor veterans. In Elizabeth City, we did the Fourth of July programs. Veterans Day is always a good time for the university orchestra to do a veterans’ concert. The last one we did at NGU in 2021 had music from war movies – Themes from Schindler’s List, Hymn to the Fallen from Saving Private Ryan, etc.

We started with the ROTC posting the colors and playing the Star-Spangled Banner while the audience stood and sang. It was a commemorative concert for the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the 20th anniversary of 9/11. A colleague in the mass comm department, a veteran’s daughter, put together a slideshow of photos she pulled from the various military services’ various public relations offices and the Library of Congress. After the Star-Spangled Banner, the university ROTC commander gave an introduction to the evening, talking a bit about Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Then, as we played various music pieces, the photo slide show was shown. Between pieces, we had ROTC cadets read Medal of Honor recipient citations from both Pearl Harbor and the War on Terror. We played the Armed Forces Salute to recognize all of the vets in the audience, after which we ended with the orchestra and choir performing Dan Forrest’s setting of “His Robes for Mine,” the epitome of One who gave His life for all. There was not a dry eye in the house.

Stay out of the bars and go to the service schools that will assist you in promotion and reenlistment so you can keep your options open. Never hesitate to take on an assignment or a deployment. (They still had NATO floats while I was in, and I regret the day I turned down the only opportunity I had to go on one.) Get to know the Marines you serve with and be a friend.

It’s pulling up old memories and names I had forgotten. It’s a great way to honor those who served, and I am excited to dig through my family’s history of those who served. It’s also a great place that acts as a repository for my records, reflections, photographs, and documents that will live on after I am gone. I had forgotten many of the things I did and the service schools I attended. I created a page for my brother, who died in an accident at Fort Hunter Liggett in 1973. A retired Army first sergeant wrote me a message letting me know he remembered my brother as they were roommates at the time of my brother’s death. It’s a great way for us to remember each other, get to know others, and honor those who went before us.

Semper Fi