My Memories of General Al Gray
When I was in boot camp in the early part of 1988, I first heard about how the current CMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) is a real hard ass. He was a Marine’s Marine and change was in the air. I knew nothing about how things were done in the past, but we saw subtle changes in training as our Drill Instructors told us, and we saw subtle changes in uniforms as well, gone were the “V” neck t-shirts (a General P.X. Kelly thing) and gone were ranks worn on the cammie covers.
While at my A school (SIGINT or Signals Intelligence), I learned that General Gray was a former SIGINT Marine, with the same MOS that I was learning at the time.
The first time I got to meet General Gray, was when he was on his “Al Gray Roadshow” where he visited every Marine Corps base and where Marines are stationed around the world. He was very down-to-earth and straight forward and you could tell that he had a soft spot in his heart for SIGINT Marines.
I was on a mid-watch (10 p.m. to 6 a.m.) at a SCIF in Florida when he came into our spaces and talked with us briefly. I particularly “felt” his presence as he came in unannounced and I had my back to him, and he came up behind me and slammed his hard down on my shoulder. This was something that he was known for, but it was new to me.
The second time I met him was when I was in “C” school (Advanced SIGINT), and he was in town, meeting Marines. He had a very off-script heart-to-heart talk with about 150 of us SIGINT Marines. He spent over an hour with Q&A and then toured all of our work and class spaces followed by the barracks. He wasn’t a big fan of having the room stand at attention and sometimes, would have someone go before him and tell the room to not stand at attention.
The third time I met him, was when he was a civilian and I was in California for training, and he was on the board of directors for one of the companies that I was working with and he was just hanging out, so to speak.
General Gray believed that the Corps was getting soft and some MOSs were being stuffed with Marines, he also noticed that some MOSs didn’t train as Marines often (Weapons training field training, things like that), they didn’t go to the field, they didn’t go to the range. I was in one of the MOSs. He reminded everyone that “Every Marine is a Rifleman“.
It’s difficult to go to the field or range when you are in a small unit of 50-75 Marines on an Air Force base. We did our best, but the gear we needed wasn’t always available. Sure Marines at Camp Lejeune had a million ALICE packs, while the Marines in the MARSPTBN (Marine Support Battalion) didn’t have a single one. We would go on forced marches, around the runway, in fact, our PT course was 1.5 miles along the runway, turn around and come back. It’s difficult to go to the rifle range when there isn’t one in the area. And if there is a range for another service, it wasn’t the KD course that Marines train on. Pistol qualifications were much easier as most military installations had a pistol course, but obtaining the pistols often proved challenging. This seemed to be the theme throughout my time in the Corps. It isn’t that non-FMF (Fleet Marine Force) Marines don’t want to train, it is that often we simply just don’t have the equipment or facilities to train.
Read Grayisms (a book of compiled General Gray, thoughts, sayings, and comments) and other thoughts on leadership. From General Al Gray, USMC (Retired) 29th Commandant of the Marine Corps
