The Reunion of 85 Marines

I'm getting to this after the fact for a lot of it because they have kept us so busy! The reunion started on Wednesday night with a barbecue and it was a very tentative evening for a lot of folks. As I had agreed with one of the guys, when you go to a high school reunion etc, you are seeing people you spent years with most likely. These guys were the first class going through officer training to have their training time shortened from 26 weeks to 5 months, so they really had not been together very long at all. Now 43 years had passed and imagine the challenge of identifying people who have morphed into senior citizen faces and bodies. So, there was a lot of nervous conversation around tables as people tried to get their bearings. Of course there were some who had kept up with one another over the years, but they were definitely in the minority. The evening came to a close with instructions for tomorrow: Be at the buses at 8:30 to head to The Basic School and later to the new Marine Corps Museum.