The Navy recruiter was out to lunch, but the Marine recruiter next door was in. A sharp looking staff sergeant assured me that, since I had been a radio disc-jockey in Roswell and Portales, I could spend my two-year enlistment as an announcer for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. “Just sign here. And when you take that battery of tests at boot camp, be sure to slant all your answers towards radio experience. I tell ya, you’re a shew in!” I took the tests, gave the radio answers, and ended up as a field radio operator with a Marine infantry battalion, carrying a PRC-25 radio on my back with an antenna that stuck up 10 feet and shouted to the enemy, “SHOOT HERE.”

I experienced a substantial amount of combat, including a wound in the same part of my anatomy where Forrest Gump received his. Oh, how I wished I’d studied harder at ENMU!

Nearing the end of my 13-month Vietnam tour, while sitting in the mud near the DMZ, I sent a postcard from a C-ration box-top to Dean Shannon. “Dear Dean Shannon,” I wrote. “I’d really like to come back to Eastern next spring. If you would allow me to apply for readmission, would you please send me all the forms I need to fill out? Thank you. Sincerely…”

About three weeks later I received a one-page letter from Dean Shannon: “Dear Joe. Your petition for readmission has been granted. We look forward to seeing you this spring.” I did not have to fill out any other forms: just a C-rat box top. I graduated from Eastern in 1972 and was commissioned an officer of Marines in 1974. I retired from the Corps in 2004 with the rank of colonel after a total of 37 years, active and reserve.

I’m thinking that perhaps in some 50-year-old file box in the ENMU Office of Admissions there just may still be a postcard made from a C-ration box top, a card that generated an act of kindness that allowed my life to take a whole new, positive direction.

Thank you Dean Shannon and thanks ENMU.