Prologue

As a boy, Robert Francis Higginbotham was as thoroughly unremarkable as most boys think they are. He was of average height, with average features, and average intelligence. His hair was the same brown color as millions of other boys. His vision was less than perfect, but not enough to show up on the average school eye exam. Had he tried to become a pilot, it would have come out, but he didn't try to become a pilot.

He did, however, join the military.

He decided to join the Marines because he didn't know what to go to college for. Moreover, school hadn't been his favorite thing. He had pulled down solid C's, with a sprinkling of B's thrown in there, and one A in music. So going on to more schooling wasn't something he looked forward to eagerly. He chose the Marines because he had read several books about SEAL missions in Vietnam.

That's what I mean by solid C's. He believed SEALs were Marines. Close ... but no cigar.

Ironically, when he decided to join up to avoid college, it hadn't occurred to him that being in the Marines would involve going to more classes. But, at least, they were different kinds of classes. For example: None of his high school teachers had cursed or threatened anybody on a routine basis. For another, "average" wasn't good enough for the drill instructors. If you weren't in the top ten percent of the class, you weren't shit, and they made that perfectly clear.

It never occurred to any of them that the math wasn't adding up as boot camp went along. By the end, the top ten percent were "The best of the best." But that meant that the remaining 90% were still "The Best," and that seemed like it was a heck of a lot better than being number 156 out of a class of 313 in high school.

But the biggest difference in PFC Robert Francis Higginbotham, when he graduated from boot camp, was that he now knew he had the capacity to change the world. He didn't plan on changing the world. But he knew he could if he ever decided to. Of course he also knew lots of other things. He could survive in the most harsh conditions. If someone was yelling and spitting in his face, he could patiently stand fast instead of killing them. And, of course, he knew how to kill them.

What the U.S. Marine Corps had given PFC Higginbotham was self-confidence and a sense of pride in being extremely competent in a variety of things.

It is important, here, to reflect on an interesting point. Bob had been a completely average kid. Now he was a completely average Marine. But being an "average" Marine is not on the same qualitative scale as being average at just about anything else.

Say for example that an "average" golfer in St. Louis, Missouri, finds himself playing a game of golf with an "average" golfer from Somalia. Not that I'm bashing on Somalia, but they haven't placed a high priority on building golf courses. So naturally, the average Somalian golfer might not do as well as the average American golfer. It's all a matter of degree, and context.

This is a complicated way of suggesting that while Bob was an "average" Marine, he was still head and shoulders above the "average" blue collar worker. And I'm not bashing on blue collar workers either. But most of them aren't willing to work as long as the boss tells them to, even if that's a month straight, and almost none of them are willing to put their lives on the line for that boss. It's a fair argument that civilians aren't trained as well to do their jobs either, but I've built up the Corps enough, so let's just go on.

So the point of all this is that PFC Higginbotham was aware that he was now special, and he took that seriously. He tried hard to do the very best he could. He sacrificed sleep, comfort and even his leisure time to be the best Marine he could be.

And, in the end, he sacrificed some measure of his health as well.

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