I sat down with a former Grunt Sergeant, Jake Stone, on a calm, sunny Saturday morning in November, to ask him about his experience in the Marine Corps. Mr. Stone is a rather frail-looking man in a wheelchair, who could be said to have been a powerful man despite his age, which was nearing the end of his seventies. I learned a lot from him. For example, Mr. Stone was a training officer during the Vietnam War. He was stationed in California teaching hand-to-hand combat, bayonets, pistols, rifles, hand grenades, flamethrowers, a wide assortment of deadly weapons. He led ninety men in an attack team ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. They had to be ready to pack up and leave in an hour. It is not because he was not deployed that he did not see his part of the action, he simply did not have the opportunity to see the enemy fire, he saw many horrors that would terrify many people. He also had access to a lot of classified information that has since been declassified. One of them is an attack team tactic that seems quite dangerous. A plane originally designed to drop bombs was equipped with four marines instead. A few planes would fly at very low altitude, and just before the targets, the pilots would cut the engines so that their flight would be almost limited, opening the bay doors, the pilots would drop the payload of the marines, instead of the bombs, which would come down by parachute. on the enemy from above. This was a strategy designed to confuse and overwhelm the enemy. This idea was abandoned after too many people broke their legs and dislocated ankles while training. I also heard about a training accident that killed twenty-one people. His men were practicing a beach style invasion, everyone was fully equipped and had landing vehicles, boarding craft, b...... middle of paper ......e of his accidents and of the nature of the officers above him. I may have even asked for more details about his involvement in the security services, I got a lot of varied details but no precise description. I don't know the details on which I largely base my writing. I take the details and make it clear to the reader, I didn't get the visual detail I would have liked to write about. I would have asked him more about what his daily life was like and what he was feeling at any given moment. I expect anxiety, but it's not something I can just assume. I will search the archives for others with similar stories. Perhaps I would ask about his involvement with the Commandant, a four-star general in the Marine Corps. I would ask what it feels like to be in close proximity to the most powerful man in the marines and be able to secure him and protect him from danger..