KA-BAR, The Corps, a Bear, and More!
I grew up in a Marine Corps family. My father spent 26 years of his life as a Leatherneck. He did just about every cool thing possible a man could do in the Corps. He was a paratrooper, a Huey pilot, fixed wing pilot, a Desert Storm veteran, a diplomat and probably about a thousand other things I’ll hopefully get to hear all about over a beer as I get older. It wasn’t just him, however, that made us a Marine family. His father was a grunt that had just as amazing of a tenure as a Devil Dog. He served in World War II (Pacific Theatre), Korea, and somehow was still around for Vietnam. He was a decorated American hero. Even our dog (a bull dog) was in dress blues for his picture that still hangs proudly in the hallway of my parent’s house. Like I said, I grew up in a Marine Corps family.
In my formative years I became fluently bi-lingual before I could tie my own shoes. I learned the language of my home country; English as well as the language of my people; Marine. I knew it all, inside and out. I could speak in acronyms, I could understand my dad’s Drill Instructor-esque barks, and I even had a grasp of all the random Corps jargon and colloquialisms. The bathroom was “the head”, dinner was “chow”, and “go to bed” became “rack out”. All the terms were interchangeable except for one; a big-ass knife was always, always, a “Ka-Bar”. To be perfectly honest, up until recently I thought KA-BAR was just the Marine term for a knife.