Miramar Waterman’s Club
To the founding members of the MWC: Thomas McCann, John Hackel, Katie (Arroyo) Greeson, Brandon Barnett, Philip Giarraputo, John Dunn, and Josh Levine, Marines all; once a Marine, always a Marine. We put it together on a whim one day when we were sitting around the law center at Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, San Diego, California, and the memories — at least for me — seem to get bigger as the years go by.
It was the fall of 2006, and I was living two miles from the beach in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego. I was stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, about ten miles northeast of town. These were heady times as we were living in the San Diego area for the second time and truly loved it there. It was called America’s Finest City, and we agreed with that assessment.
I had spent my first Marine Corps tour of duty from 1999 to 2002 at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, which was tucked hard against San Diego’s Lindbergh International Airport near downtown. The weather was nearly perfect every day and we took advantage of it. For instance, we had the best physical training routine I have ever experienced, either before or since. We could run the 3-mile loop of the entire base, or we could venture outside the gates and do what we called the “Airport Run,” which went around the Naval Training Center and the entire grounds of the San Diego airport, a 7-mile gut check. Sometimes we would go over to North Island or down to Mission Beach and do a beach run. Our leaders encouraged this and sometimes even came with us. At MCRD it was all about working hard, playing hard, and adventuring hard. It was about trying and experiencing things one had never tried or done before. We ran 5Ks and 10Ks on Saturdays, and built up to half and finally full marathons. It was friendly competition between friends and colleagues with a common background.
So it was bittersweet when we had to leave in the summer of 2002, and we had to go back to the Washington, DC area; our tours in the DC area have been fine, and it certainly has its own share of adventure, but not the sheer quantity and quality of San Diego or the West in general. So when I was notified in the spring of 2005 that the Marine Corps was sending me back out to San Diego, we were elated.
On August 1, 2005, I reported to the Joint Law Center at Miramar, and I literally walked in with a guy who was also reporting the same day, Tom McCann. As was typically the case, we had never met, but we each knew of the other’s reputation. This was common within the small community of the Marine Corps judge advocate organization. Compared to the other branches of the U.S. military, the Marine Corps had only 400 or so lawyers at any given time. Word traveled pretty quickly around that community about who were good people to work with. So when you reported to a new place, your reputation had usually preceded you; if someone didn’t know you, chances were they knew someone who did know you. So as we walked in the door together, Tom and I greeted each other with the usual, “Oh yeah, do you know so in so? I think you worked with him one time. He says great stuff about you.” And so on. Hopefully, you got that kind of sentiment the first time you met a new person in the community. We quickly became good friends.
But within a short few months, McCann had to deploy for a year to Iraq. I launched myself into being the chief prosecutor on the base and tried to get in the flow of how they did stuff at the “Wing.” I was assisted in this effort by my counterpart on the defense side of the house, the Senior Defense Counsel, John Hackel. Although John was my opponent in the courtroom, he educated me on how military justice was usually handled at Miramar.
Unlike the depot or infantry bases where things tended to the draconian side with disciplinary issues, I was now “swingin’ with the wing.” Miramar was home to the Third Marine Aircraft Wing. The air wing had a different way of doing things than the rest of the Marine Corps. Hair tended to be a bit longer, and standards were a bit looser, sometimes way too loose. We had more sexual assault allegations out of the wing units than in other units. We had crazy disciplinary stories with pilots because pilots did some nutty stuff. It was the Navy and Marine Corps “wing” that had committed the “Tailhook scandal” in the early 90s.
This lais·sez-faire approach to discipline was illustrated by how wing unit commanders usually never wanted to court-martial any of their people because the offenders kept their planes flying. Unless, of course, the offender was caught using drugs whilst turning a wrench on one of those planes. Then — and usually only then — did a wing unit commander suddenly want to crush the guy.
So during that first year at Miramar, my days usually consisted of investigating and prosecuting pilots or aircraft mechanics, the occasional real criminal, and continuing what I had started at MCRD with the best physical training regimen in the country. The only problem was I was not at the depot with its monumental airport run, or close by San Diego Bay where I could kayak, or close to the beaches where we used to go on beach runs. Miramar was inland and closer to the hills and mountains east of the city, and this made for a more arid, desert-like climate. PT there consisted mostly of running a loop from our office around the base golf course (about a 4 mile run) or going to the base gym.
Eventually, I settled into this routine with Hackel. We would do the golf course run or hit the gym. McCann returned from his deployment in late 2006 and started to join us, but after time the trip around the golf course and over to the base gym started to wear thin. We needed something new to freshen things up.
One late afternoon McCann and Hackel walked into my office. It was one of those typically awesome southern California afternoons in the fall, about 75 degrees and zero humidity. It was a day when we had nothing on our docket and we were ahead at work and essentially waiting for 1700 so we could head home. That was another beautiful thing about working with the wing; it was a very manageable caseload where one seldom had to stay late for work.
“Dude, have you ever surfed before?” “No.” “Why not?” “Dude I grew up in Texas. I went to college in Arkansas. Not many opportunities to go surfing in Arkansas unless it’s in the wake of a boat on a lake, and I don’t recall too many big waves off Galveston; what I do remember is getting oil from offshore rigs caked all over me in the Gulf of Mexico.” “Well, you’re a good athlete dude. We’ll teach you.”[1] “Dude, I don’t even have a surfboard.” “That’s okay, they have them over at equipment rental.”
They brought their boards in the following day, and we went by the outdoor equipment rental place where I grabbed a long board, which McCann and Hackel told me I needed to use when starting out. We headed out to the venerable Tourmaline Surf Park in Pacific Beach, a great place to learn where the waves were very tame.
Once we got there, they showed me how to anchor the board to my ankle with the board leash. They walked me through how to position myself on the board, how to paddle out, and how to get in to the “line up” and wait for the right wave. Once we paddled out, waiting involved sitting up on the board, maneuvering the board’s direction with your feet, and watching out toward the sea so as to see when and where a wave was building. They showed me how to get into position once I had identified the wave, how to start paddling like crazy in order to catch the wave, and how to pop to my feet once on the wave.
I quickly learned that this surfing thing required mastery of three primary skills: timing, technique, and balance, preferably in that order. For instance, if you were late catching the wave you wouldn’t be able to get on the front side of it or ride it; it would just pass underneath you. On the other hand, if you were too soon and beat the wave, you risked getting too far forward on the front of the wave, which would toss you and the board end-over-end (like an endo on a bike) and you would go tumbling through the wave’s break, getting thrashed around in circles as if you were on the inside of a hamster wheel except under water, where you had no idea which way was up to the surface. The first time I did this I got hit in the head by my board, and I learned to go into a sort of fetal-like tuck, covering my head with my arms to form a kind of screen. This worked pretty well in the future.
Eventually I got pretty adept at catching some decent, if not gigantic, waves. We began to make these trips to Tourmaline or Ocean Beach a weekly ritual; we would meet at first light before work, surf for about an hour or so, and then head in to work. On the occasional off day, we might even hit the Broken Yolk for breakfast and war stories after getting thrashed by the ocean.
It’s difficult to describe the experience of surfing to the uninitiated. It takes every ounce of energy you have. Being a good athlete and being in good shape helps, but is no guarantee that it will be easy. And the temperature of the water in the Pacific-which is much colder than the Atlantic- is a battle all its own. The average temperature even in the summer is in the 60s and in the winter it dips into the 50s. We would usually wear a full-body wetsuit except maybe three months out of the year during the summer. That cold water sucks the heat out of you and drains your energy. Add the paddling and getting pounded by tons of water when you fall, and it’s one of the most demanding physical activities I have ever done. But it’s also unlike anything else I have ever done. There were days when I spent hours sitting in the line-up basking in the southern California sun, bobbing up and down on my board and just watching and listening, letting my senses soak in everything. I loved it.
The group grew until we decided we needed to name it. In August 2007, we made it official. The Miramar Waterman’s Club was founded in my office at Marine Corps Air Station, San Diego, California. A few of us got together and designed some old-fashioned ringer t-shirts. I still have mine today. It proclaims the club name, the date we founded it and it has another word we essentially made up: “Surferhunden.” It was a play on the German words teufel hunden, or “Devil Dogs,” bestowed on the Marines who fought the Germans at the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War One. We turned “Devil Dogs” into “Surf Dogs.”
As with all good things, our initial run eventually came to an end. Most of us started to receive orders to move again. We held the final get together at my house in May, 2008. Most of the founding members were there. We toasted those leaving and told war stories. As the sun slowly sunk into the Pacific and the light dwindled, we sat under the twinkling of the pergola lights on my patio and enjoyed the warmth from the fire pit. We looked out over shimmering Mission Bay, where the lights of a few boats glowed in the distance. I silently knew that I might never be part of a group of so many great people again, and I think the others felt the same way.
Now, on occasion, I will pull out and put on the shirt; it reminds me of a time when we all held the world seemingly in the palms of our hands and could write our future, and I conclude that we still can. It brings a memory or two to mind that puts a smile on my face and makes me think how good we had it and how blessed we were to be there, at that time, and with each other.
[1] “Dude,” as most readers will know, is just another term for “friend” or “buddy.” At least it was where I grew up. It’s what people who went to high school in the 80s used to refer to one another instead of “man” as used in the 60s or 70s, to wit: “Hey man,” “Groovey man, “ or “Come on, man…..” Moreover, “dude” — depending on the inflexion one uses when saying it — could mean any number of things, like surprise, criticism, praise, or annoyance, just to name a few. I have found it to be one of the most flexible words in the lexicon.
