Marines...from a Five-Year-Old's Perspective

2010 Mayfield Family Reunion, Georgia

The brain processes of a five-year-old are an intricate thing. I have had opportunities to observe this since I give tours to five-year-olds around the National Museum of the Marine Corps. This is a challenging job, especially since most twenty-year-olds aren’t even interested in history. To keep the kids attention, you must give them jobs which help them feel very important and involved in finding historical data. For instance, count the buttons on the Marine’s coat. Then tell your tour guide the color of the ribbon in the eagle’s mouth. Can you count the red stripes of the flag? Who can be the first to answer THE QUESTION?

For these kids, the most exciting part of the tour is not answering THE QUESTION. It is being chosen to answer THE QUESTION. For five seconds, they have everyone’s attention. Mathematically, it is not possible to have everyone’s attention for more than five seconds, because no child can think about one thing for more than five seconds, unless it is in a movie.

When the child doesn’t answer the question, it is okay, because everyone’s answer is a good try, even when they don’t have an answer. The chosen one then decides to wrap himself/herself around the tour guide’s legs, in an attempt to hang on to the source of attention.

For some of the five-year-olds, history can be quite real. The “soldiers” (they haven’t yet figured out that Marines are not soldiers) in the displays are very lifelike. They wonder if they are real people, and ask when they are coming to visit.

To them, history is also quite traumatic. In the early 1900s display, we have a model T ambulance that was used in the Philippines. In the back of the ambulance is a man with a gaping bloody wound on his knee. When the children see this, they look at their tour guide with horror, and ask, “Teacher!!! If he is hurt, then WHY is he SMOKING???”
Well, maybe he thought it would help him feel better. No, you’re right, smoking is bad for you. Okay, next display.

Speaking of children…
If you ever lock your keys in your car on Quantico base, make sure you lock your child in, too, or some prescription medicine. You will want to do this because base security will only unlock your car for you if you have locked your child or medicine in the car. As it turned out, our roadside assistance didn’t go into effect for seven more days. Oh well. And all this after drilling into the kids at the museum that Marines are here to HELP you. But only if you lock your kid in the car.

A Moment in an MP’s Life
Imagine you are a Military Policeman doing gate check one night. You have the late shift (early, depending on how you look at it), and most of the people who come through are officers getting back from an evening in town. And then all of a sudden a female civilian comes through the gate with a plate of food on her lap. You groan and roll your eyes. Eating and driving? How dumb can you get? Then she insists that she wasn’t eating, and that the food is for her husband. You take her ID card, and identify the smart looking woman on the front of the card with the tired, wilting girl inside the car. You graciously remove a piece of rice from the card, and hand it back to her. Somehow, you can just see her in ten years… coming through the gate, grabbing the card out of a teething infant’s mouth, and handing it to you. No wonder they require you to get all those immunizations every few years.

Mayfield Family Reunion
Tim and I got special permission to leave our 300 mile travel radius to go to a family reunion at Unicoi State Park in Georgia. The USMC, which cares very much about our safety, had us fill out a form which stated when we would leave, when we would take a break, where we would be, and at what time we would return. Tim was also limited to driving four hours at a time, and both of us could not drive more than twelve hours in the day.
After Tim got over the initial shock of sleeping in a tent (as opposed to under the stars), the surprise of having showers and restrooms (as opposed to having just the great outdoors), we had quite a great time with the family. One highlight was our hike to Anna Ruby Falls. Instead of driving in to see it, and paying two dollars a person, we saw it the free way – we hiked five miles to it from another direction.

The actual reunion was on Sunday, and we had a picnic at the beach house. Tim got to meet a lot of the family that wasn’t able to come to our wedding, and we had fun catching up. One interesting part of the reunion was when the all the adults sat down to discuss methods to keep unity in the family. Both Tim and I are blessed to come from stable families with loving extended family.

Coming back from beautiful, cool, mountainous, Georgia to Quantico, VA was a leap from paradise to not-paradise, especially for Tim, but I’ll let him tell about that.