Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star (34 page)

He had been commanding officer of the Tactical Training Squadron at Yuma as a lieutenant colonel, the only person to have that prestigious post at that rank. He had been born in San Francisco in 1944, but a few years later had moved to Kinsgville, Tennessee, where he had grown up.

My research hadn’t prepared me for my initial meeting with him.

Major General Fred McCorkle may have been short in stature but he was the meanest-looking man I’ve ever seen. He reminded me of a drawing in a book from my childhood, a fairy tale whose main character was a troll who lived under a bridge. He had the kind of face from which little children would run screaming.

He must have read my mind. “My number one asset is my face,” he said, staring at me intently as we sat down at the small table in his corner office. “I’ve got the meanest look of anyone I know.” He had that right. I was petrified.

“My biggest weakness,” he said, with a hint of a smile forming, “is that I’m really the nicest general in the Marine Corps.”

I did a poor job of containing my disbelief. He had a gruff voice with a Southern accent. I remembered from my research his Tennessee roots. He sounded like some country bumpkin.

As if reading my thoughts, he said, “I’ve gotten as far as I have because people underestimate me.” He stared at me some more. “I don’t ask a lot of questions in these interviews. I can tell all I need to know while looking at you while I do all the talking. I can read people’s minds through their eyes.”

I thought he was crazy but I soon discovered he was being truthful. He had that ability. He paused and his stare pierced into my skull. I began to feel him pulling thoughts out of my head. The pause was too long to be comfortable. But I didn’t break my stare. Oddly, I began to feel myself drawn to this man. Not in a sexual way, not at all; that seemed unthinkable, almost sacrilege, like sex with Jesus or something. Besides, he was quite the opposite from my preferred blond-haired, blue-eyed, buffed-out surfer boy. Maybe the connection I felt had something to do with his power? No, that wasn’t the entire reason. There was something else, some other kind of connection I felt developing between us. He was very impressed by the fact that I was a Southerner. Southerners have a bond that’s hard to describe.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Greenville, South Carolina…Piedmont, actually, General.” I had been taught that Marines don’t refer to generals by the usual “sir” rather, generals are always referred to as “General.”

“I’m from not too far away from there…Kingsville, Tennessee,” he said.

“I saw that,” I quickly responded, getting back on my prepared line of thought. “I read that your wife is also from the tri-cities area, too, I believe.”

He perked up. “Not too many people know about the ‘tri-cities’ area of Tennessee.”

“I had a friend in college from there,” I confessed. I told him I went to Clemson. General McCorkle said that he had a roommate who had gone to Bob Jones University, so he was familiar with that area.
That motherfucking school was rearing its head into my life again!

Another pause and piercing stare. I was determined to keep up with him in the game. I smiled confidently and returned his intense gaze.

“Are you religious?” he asked.

Interesting. He’s getting right to the taboo subjects.

“I’m not so much anymore, General.”

He nodded. “Do you drink?”

Damn. He really did understand my train of thought. When I was younger, in my Baptist days, I had always associated religion with not drinking. People who were religious didn’t drink; drinkers necessarily were not religious. A fellow officer in Okinawa who was a devout Catholic quickly dispelled that misconception—his priest had been a heavy drinker—and I no longer made a link between a person’s religion and their alcohol consumption. The general, however, understood that where we were from, alcohol was the primary external indicator of a person’s level of religious devotion.

“Yes, General.”

“What do you drink?”

“Beer, mostly.”

“Liquor?”

“No, I don’t like liquor. I rarely drink liquor.” I realized I had responded too emphatically.

The stare. Then he asked, “Why? Did you get a DUI?”

I froze. This man was obviously reading my mind as we sat there.

I couldn’t lie to him and I said, “Yes.”

His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his square jaw with his hand. “Any other general in the Marine Corps would kick you out of his office right now,” said Assassin, “but I’m not like any other general in the Marine Corps. But I am going to have to think about this.”

I had a strong feeling at that point that he wanted me to be his aide. Yet he had this whole issue of my DUI to deal with. He asked me if it had been reported and I said, “Yes, it’s on my fitness reports.”

“You were augmented anyway?” he asked.

“Yes, General, I was.”

“Let me see your fitreps.” I handed them to him and he glanced over my entire career in a moment. The interview continued, but I could tell the general was weighing my revelation against my stellar record. I was still a little shocked that he hadn’t he kicked me out of his office. Was he really that serious about choosing me? He had five other captains to choose from, most of them pilots like himself. Why was I still in his office?

“Do you know your GCT score?” he asked.

“Yes.”

In boot camp, when the senior drill instructor had made me the platoon scribe, I hadn’t known the first thing about the GCT. Now I understood. The GCT was a test given to everyone entering the military. Essentially, it’s the granddaddy of IQ tests. A low GCT score meant a recruit was restricted from certain occupations in the military. Officers had to have a GCT of at least 110, I think. My score was 149. It had been something of a sore spot with me. In Okinawa, I had told an acquaintance my score. He then told everyone I always bragged about it. Perception becomes reality. Maybe I
had
always bragged about it, it’s hard to be objective about oneself. Regardless, just like at boot camp, my GCT score was about to land me a special job, this time as a general’s aide.

“I figured you did. Someone with a score as high as yours would know it.” He shot me a rare grin. “Your score is almost as high as mine.”

I started to understand this man a little better. He went through his life short of stature, with a crusty face, funny voice, and a Southern accent. Yet, he wore two stars on his collars and would later pick up a third. People
had
always underestimated him. They looked at him and thought, “Who is this? What is this little troll with a Southern accent, a country bumpkin?” Later I would discover he was brilliant. He was energetic—not with a bubbly type of energy, but he had a drive like no other man I’ve ever met, like a tank that just keeps plowing forward over anything in its way.

“Most people who want to be a general’s aide want to be a general someday. Most generals were at one time somebody’s aide. I was never anyone’s aide. I was never godfathered.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, other than he was trying to tell me he was a self-made general. I recalled the chief’s comment that a general is looking for someone who will someday be an air group commander.

Then it hit me. The voice shouted loudly and clearly inside my head.
You stupid motherfucker! You’re a goddamned porn star. What the fuck are you doing here?

Since the general had the ability to read my mind, I quickly drove the thought from my head.

He continued talking—the topic had turned to one of his favorite subjects—money.

“I never had any money growing up,” he said. “These people who claim to be poor…they don’t know what they’re talking about. I was poor. That’s why money is very important to me. Do you collect things, Captain Merritt?”

What an odd question. “Books and CDs.”

“I mean collectibles…things that go up in value,” he said. “I collect Lladros. I have over two hundred of them at home. Probably stupid of me here in earthquake country.”

I had no idea what a Lladro was. Obviously something valuable and breakable. I looked around his office and saw his items there.

“I like your Remingtons,” I said. “Are those originals?”

“Heh, heh,” he said, “Not likely. An original would be worth over a million dollars.”

Still, I knew the four or five replicas crowded around his small newly decorated office were worth tens of thousands of dollars.

“I like to collect these things because I never had anything nice growing up.”

Strange. I felt like we were already beginning to bond. The chief had said that was important between a general and an aide. General McCorkle revealing personal things about his childhood. Never in my life had I imagined I’d be sitting here in private with a general discussing his troubled childhood.

“My father died when I was four and left my mother penniless.”

I recalled my initial assumptions based on his biography. “I saw that you were born in San Francisco. Was your father in the military?”

Without explaining why, the General laughed quietly. “No, he was very old when I was born. I was about four years old, though, when I realized that San Francisco was full of queers, so I got out of there.”

BAM! There it was. Back to reality. I bristled. I was a queer in a world where it was okay, even expected, to hate queers. I immediately put on my frozen smile. All my fences went up. I was not going to let him read my mind now. I also numbed my feelings and emotions. As long as I didn’t feel anger, hurt or despair, then he couldn’t read it in me.

Mercifully, the interview ended shortly after that. The general stated simply that he would have to think about the DUI issue. “My aide is a representative of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing,” he said.

DUI? Big deal!
the voice screamed again as I left his office.
You’re a freaking porn star!

But that was still well hidden. For now, though, my DUI was the serious issue. My brief connection I felt with General McCorkle wasn’t strong enough for him to immediately overlook it.

Although I was still in the running, the chief was furious with me.

He called me in and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about the DUI? If you had just told me about it I could have paved over it. But now it’s an issue.”

I thought,
You’re full of shit. If I had told you about the DUI, I would have never made it to the general’s office
. And I realized that the chief was lying about it.

General McCorkle got a few more captains from his subordinate unit commanders and he interviewed a few more. Finally he made a decision. “Well, I’m going to pick Rich. Rich is going to be my aide.” Major General Fred McCorkle picked me to be his personal aide-de-camp from among about twelve captains.

I couldn’t help but think how ironic it was that both generals at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro had simultaneously picked gay men as their personal assistants. General McCorkle, of course, had no idea of that. At least not that I realized. He smiled and shook my hand, welcoming me to his staff. I realized that my entire year had just changed. Because it’s a yearlong job. A burnout job.

“Amazed,” “honored,” “terrified,” “curious,” “proud,” these were but a few of the emotions running wildly through me.
Holy shit
, was the only coherent thought I could manage.
What the fuck had I gotten myself into now?

The
Navy Times
also asked me to write a column. Several other writers and I would rotate writing an opinion piece they called “Backtalk” on the last page of the newspaper. They preferred that I use a pseudonym so that I could express my opinions more freely. I used the name “Buster Pittman” which was also the name of Brandon’s Jack Russell Terrier.

My first column was titled “Marine Corps Logic Isn’t Logical.” It was a tongue-in-cheek piece about some of the oddities of the language and practices that are second nature to Marines. My editor and I hit it off and we chatted via e-mail almost daily. Soon I was writing every other week, trading off with a major. Unintentionally we mimicked the “column right/column left” feature I’d seen in the LA
Times
. I became the “column left.”

I wrote an article about all the military jet pilots that were getting huge bonuses to stay in the military. This created a lot of resentment among the ground officers and helicopter pilots. My article, or rather “Buster Pittman’s” article caught the attention of General McCorkle. The general was a helicopter pilot and he laughed along with the article and showed it to one of his colonels who was also a helicopter pilot. “Captain Merritt, when we get back to the office I want you to make me some copies of this article so I can give it out to people.”

General McCorkle had one “boss” on the West Coast and that was General Zinni at Camp Pendleton. General Zinni would later become President George W. Bush’s envoy to the Middle East. My job as aide was to make sure my general was prepared when he and General Zinni got together. If General Zinni’s aide wasn’t around, it fell to me to refill General Zinni’s coffee mug, which had to be refilled a lot. Being an aide involved a lot of gofer work, but there was also a lot of face time with very important people. If I ever needed a favor down the road, this was the time to earn it.

“General Zinni is the most brilliant man you’ll ever hear speak,” said General McCorkle to one of his colonels as we rode across Camp Pendleton for a meeting with the man who would soon take over General Schwarzkopf’s job.

“Smarter than General Hearney?” asked the colonel, referring to General McCorkle’s former boss on the East Coast. General Hearney had risen to the rank of four-star general and was the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps—the number two Marine. He was universally feared and despised.

General McCorkle laughed. “Heh-heh,
no one
is smarter than General Hearney, at least not in General Hearney’s world!”

I agreed with General McCorkle’s assessment of General Zinni. General Zinni’s grasp of world history and current events, military tactics, changing strategies, and new ideas and approaches left everyone else in the dust. He understood sociology, economics, traditional trading patterns, and many other minute details. He understood explicitly how these factors could affect the outcome of a military conflict. It came as no surprise years later when General Zinni became an outspoken critic of George W. Bush’s deeply flawed wars in the Middle East.