Baseball Maverick Page 5

  Alderson was gung ho to get to Vietnam, but instead found out he was being sent to Monterey, California, for eight months of intensive study of Vietnamese, six hours a day, taught by native speakers. “I took a test during Basic School at Quantico and made the mistake of scoring too high,” Alderson says.

  Before reporting to Monterey on January 1, Sandy and Linda were married on December 20, 1969, in Falls Church, Virginia, spending one night there and then hitting the road. They did all their Christmas shopping in two days and celebrated the holiday in Florida. They spent one night in New Orleans and saw the damage that Hurricane Camille had inflicted along the coast a few months earlier. “We went the southern route and did it in four days,” Linda recalls. “I remember driving through L.A. and saying, ‘Oh my god, I know all these streets. Here’s Hollywood and Vine.’ We drove up to Monterey and had dinner at our first Denny’s ever.”

  Zorkers remembers a banquet late in his and Alderson’s time studying in Monterey where the guest speaker was a general. Zorkers and Alderson wrote their names and serial numbers on a napkin, with a note begging to be sent to Vietnam, and handed that to the general. They were both Ivy Leaguers, the best in their class at Vietnamese. “Sandy and I were both of the same mind: We’re here, so let’s not waste this opportunity,” Zorkers remembers. “Sandy at the time was probably more conservative and more supportive of a very unpopular war. I, on the other hand, objected quite a bit to the war. But if there were going to be any more Marine officers left in Vietnam, we thought we would like to be among them, because we thought we could do the best job.”

  “The whole time I was in Monterey it was like: ‘Shit, I’m not going to get to Vietnam! I’ve done all this training and I’m not ­going!’” Alderson says. “I was totally pissed off. So I was constantly calling people to say, ‘Hey, don’t forget about me.’”

  In Monterey Alderson was forever trying to tune in California Angels night games, which would come in and out, since by then his high school friend Tom Bradley was pitching in the big leagues, compiling a 4.13 ERA for the Halos that summer. Alderson would drag Zorkers up to San Francisco, a two-hour drive, to watch the Giants play at Candlestick Park. That was the summer that Willie Mays had his last good season, bouncing back at age thirty-nine to hit .291 with twenty-eight homers, but the Giants sputtered to a third-place finish. “I never got excited about baseball,” Zorkers remembers. “Sandy was in love with the sport. He was just a baseball junkie.”

  Finally their orders came through. Alderson, sent to WestPac in Okinawa, was out of his mind with frustration. He called a gunnery sergeant in Hawaii to plead his case. “This is bullshit!” Alderson recalls yelling. “I’ve taken Vietnamese for eight months! And you’re going to send me to frigging Okinawa?” His appeal was successful. “The gunnery sergeant said, ‘Screw it! Send the guy south.’ That’s how I got to Vietnam.”

  John Alderson, when he heard the news, decided he had to get out to California to see his son before he deployed. He was stationed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and somehow talked his way into clearance to fly a B-57 cross-country. Along the way Alderson and his friend Don Graham stopped off at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas to refuel. A young crew chief tried to ground them, since red hydraulic fluid was leaking out of the landing gear, rendering it inoperable. Alderson ripped up the official forms grounding the plane.

  “We weren’t here,” John Alderson told him. “You didn’t see us. You didn’t talk to us.”

  By that night they were in Monterey.

  “That was my dad,” Sandy Alderson says. “He was so different from me. It’s one of the things I admire. I didn’t try to emulate him necessarily, but I really admired him for who he was.”

  Sandy Alderson was named a platoon commander in 2nd Battalion, First Marines within days of arriving in Vietnam on September 21, 1970, and deployed to a base in the Marble Mountain area just south of Da Nang. The landscape was not the jungle most Americans associate with Vietnam, but a mixture of low scrub grass and sandy dirt near My Khe beach, dubbed “China Beach” by the Americans. You don’t have to have come any closer to serving in the military than binging on war movies like Platoon to know that the new lieutenant is always going to be viewed with blunt, open skepticism by his men. Alderson understood all too well the need to earn their respect. On his second day out on patrol, they came across a box mine and he personally took care of exploding the thing with a C-4 charge and fuse. He lit the fuse and hurried away to watch it blow.

  “Nothing happened,” Alderson recalls. “If you were the one that set the charge and it didn’t blow, you were the one who had to go fix it.”

  The problem was: What if the fuse was still smoldering? What if you went back to check on it and it exploded? “I was on all fours crawling up to this thing and pulling the fuse out of the blasting cap,” he says. “That was testimony to my incompetence, but that’s what happens with people who first get there: Crazy stuff happens.”

  Typically the platoon would move out at night and be out on patrol one or two days, establishing a camp, if necessary, with observation posts. They searched for small VC units looking to set up a rocket launcher near the helicopter base at Marble Mountain. “We never saw any big units,” recalls John Grinalds, operations officer of the battalion at the time. “Most of them were smaller Viet Cong units, local militia who had been in the area for a while, trying to control the nighttime hours while we controlled the daytime hours. This was a shadow government that worked at night. It was almost like flipping the shades on a window, they flip one way and then flip the other; one way it’s VC in control, one way we were in control. Viet Cong would set out booby traps: box mines, with artillery mines in them that would go off, or dynamite in them, all kinds of different explosives. The explosion would kill anyone in a ten-to fifteen-meter radius. It was very, very tough on the Marines. It was nothing you could put your arms around like a unit. You couldn’t capture them or kill them.”

  I asked Alderson how many men he lost as a platoon commander.

  “When I was a platoon commander I didn’t lose a single one,” he said.

  Alderson was not fired at much in Vietnam. He did earn a Bronze Star for his actions during a flare-up that occurred when helicopters were called in to evacuate his platoon, but downplayed the medal. “It really wasn’t a big deal,” Alderson says now. “It’s not like bullets were whizzing by or anything.” His first reaction, in fact, had been that some jackass in one of the helicopters had fired off a rocket by mistake. However, it became clear that Vietnamese along a nearby tree line were firing their way. “I carried a .45, and at that point I grabbed somebody’s M16 and started firing,” he says. “That was pretty much it.”

  The tide was ebbing, the war shifting toward an end game with the Marines about to be pulled out. Plotting an orderly retreat takes organization and discipline, and by that point in the war both were fraying. Alderson found himself disappointed in much that he saw. As his friend Walt Zorkers pointed out, young Marine officers were prepared to lead and Alderson wanted that opportunity. Instead, he found the organization of the battalion slipping toward the absurd, even by the standards of men at war. Within weeks of Alderson’s appointment as platoon commander, everything changed. Through one of the frequent rotations, as more experienced men were sent home, the company was often devoid of experienced officers, so Alderson was promoted from platoon commander to company executive officer, the number two man of the entire company, since his eight months of language training in Monterey made him more senior than any other officer other than the CO. Three weeks later, the game of musical chairs continued. A more senior officer rotated in to become XO, and Alderson went back to being a platoon commander. Soon he was moved back to XO and then yet another rotation ensued—you can almost hear the ­music playing and stopping abruptly—and this time, First Lieutenant Alderson suddenly became company commander. Establishing his authority was no easy task, given the certainty that another rotation
would come before long. It came in less than two weeks—Alderson, just like that, was told to go back to commanding a platoon.

  Not so fast, he said. Alderson hadn’t wound up first in his class at officer-training school by tilting at windmills. He believed in the Marine Corps and its mission. But he had been around the military most of his life and knew weak leadership when he saw it; the constant shifts in leadership were hurting unit effectiveness and morale. Most officers in Alderson’s position would have swallowed their objection to the ongoing farce; go along to get along is the mantra of anyone looking to make a career in the military. That was not Alderson’s mind-set. Something welled up in him from down deep, an anger, an outrage, whenever he saw someone doing things by the book with no common sense.

  “Look, you can’t keep changing platoon commanders every two weeks,” Alderson told his commanding officer. “Without any continuity, there’s no leadership. There’s no training. There’s no readiness and there’s no effectiveness.”

  Speaking out in this way was not something one did as an officer in the Marine Corps, but Alderson’s CO told him it would not be held against him. “I appreciate you making this point,” Alderson was told. “It won’t affect your future.”

  Alderson was naive enough to believe him. Instead of commanding a platoon, he was made a civil affairs officer, where he could use his Vietnamese-language proficiency. He went about his duties and tried to put the episode behind him—and then he received his fitness report. The gung ho former “honor man” was given a report that was critical and cited Alderson’s outspoken remarks. It was a rebuke, and Alderson was not about to take it without putting up a fight. He invoked a seldom-used Marine tradition, at least for officers, dating back to its origins as part of the Navy, and “requested mast,” that is, he demanded the right to go over the head of his commanding officer and tell his story to the regimental commander.

  Colonel P. X. Kelley, commander of the First Marines, was a formidable figure. As a battalion commander in Vietnam, he’d earned the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star. Later he would rise to be commandant of the Marine Corps. He was a Marine’s Marine, tough but fair. Alderson made his case. Kelley heard him out.

  “You know what?” Kelley finally said. “I agree with you, Lieutenant. You’re absolutely right.”

  How often did a Marine officer request mast? “On a scale of one to ten, that would be probably a one,” Kelley told me in early 2013. “Most would not do that, unless they felt it was for the good of the Corps and the good of the unit.”

  Kelley did more than back Alderson up. He became his energetic advocate. “He was an extraordinarily good platoon commander,” Kelley told me. “His leadership skills were absolutely perfect. He could lead anyone anywhere.”

  Alderson was given the plum job of working with the regiment’s intelligence officer, John Grinalds, a former all-state high school football player who grew up in Georgia and graduated with honors from West Point as salutatorian. “He was my alter ego,” Grinalds told me. “When I wasn’t doing something, he was doing it. When he wasn’t doing something, I was doing it. He was obviously a very, very talented officer.”

  Alderson remembers feeling out of the loop. “I was in the dark half the time,” he says now. “As an assistant regimental intelligence officer, I was basically nobody.”

  To this day Alderson talks about Grinalds with a certain amount of awe. Like others Alderson would admire and seek to emulate, Grinalds combined the qualities of a gifted athlete and second-in-his-class West Point smarts with a sensibility that was both tough and refined. Grinalds gave me crisp, lucid descriptions of the war and added this thought: “I remember the whole time I was there I never heard a bird sing. Not once. I don’t know why that was. It could have been the violence and gunfire scared them away. I don’t know. I did hear ducks and geese one time. But never a songbird.”

  Alderson was in Vietnam with the Marines less than eight months, from September 21, 1970, to May 10, 1971, when the First Marines were redeployed to Camp Pendleton in California. The day he left, the Associated Press moved an article on the wires about President Nixon’s troop reductions in Vietnam, noting that American forces had numbered more than 543,000 at their peak but by then had been reduced to 267,100. Also that day, the New York Times carried a short report on a young monk in Hu´ê City, near where Alderson had ridden around on a bicycle, who had set himself on fire to protest the war.

  Once Alderson’s tour ended, he wanted to go where Linda was, which was back in D.C. After graduating in 1969 from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, she landed a job with American Management Systems, gaining an early education in code writing and the power of computers.

  Alderson spent only a couple weeks at Camp Pendleton before being transferred, with the help of John Grinalds, to Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C., known in the Corps as Eighth and I. President Thomas Jefferson is said to have personally chosen the site for the Marine Barracks in March 1801. An aura of history pervaded the place, and anyone assigned there knew he had been tapped on the shoulder and marked for success. As Linda Alderson sums it up, “You had to look good in the uniform and you had to be really smart.”

  There was something in Alderson’s nature that argued against going career military, a part of him that rebelled against the idea of never being able to tell someone to go screw himself if you thought he was dead wrong. Then again, peering at pictures of the young Sandy Alderson in his Marine Corps dress uniform, an inescapable conclusion leaps out: This man belongs in that uniform. Alderson could easily have wound up as a high-ranking Marine general. That, after all, was the role to which Alderson’s contemporaries at Eighth and I ascended. Alderson arrived in May 1971 and took over the Special Ceremonial Platoon from Peter Pace, also a former platoon commander in Vietnam, who had just been promoted. Later in his time at Eighth and I, Alderson served as executive officer to another up-and-comer named James L. Jones. Pace would later rise to the military’s top post, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jones later served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, commandant of the Marine Corps, and national security adviser to President Obama.

  “He was a brilliant officer and a great leader,” Jones told me. “He really had the respect of his senior peers as well as his subordinates and was primed to do some really great things if he stayed on active duty. Through adversity and pressure, Sandy Alderson was a very cool customer.”

  As commander of the Special Ceremonial Platoon, Alderson oversaw the Marine silent drill team, a color guard unit, and a unit called the Body Bearers, and also oversaw several Marines assigned to the White House, where he regularly attended military ceremonies during the Nixon years. They were also involved in ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and traveled throughout the country, putting on displays at military bases and sporting events.

  The U.S. Marine Corps silent drill unit that Alderson commanded in 1971 represented graceful, synchronized movement of the highest order, like the balletic perfection of a Cirque du Soleil performance. “It’s as close as you can get to zero-defect performance, because they expect perfection every time you go out there,” Jones told me. “The lieutenant put in charge is very carefully picked and that’s why Sandy Alderson got the job.”

  The temptation is strong to equate “discipline” in the military sense with the laughably perverse Animal House version, namely a very young Kevin Bacon (who else?) bending over in his skivvies during initiation at the rich, stuck-up fraternity house, getting whacked hard on the ass with a paddle, and squeaking out, “Thank you, sir! May I have another?” But what about the discipline of an individual trying to relax into the calm of perfection? At Eighth and I, Alderson had men under his command who came from all corners of the country and all walks of life; some were smarter than others, some more gifted physically, some more driven. Each had weaknesses and quirks that could get in the way of the unit coming together. Yet they overcame them; the individual became more
the individual by losing itself in the whole.

  It’s intriguing to start thinking about “discipline” as simply the ability to say no to an impulse if the goal is the larger good, for example laying off an outside pitch to help the team by collecting a walk. As a Marine, Alderson internalized a deep conviction that holding back from impulsive behavior can be as important as taking action. Eighth and I was even more of a formative experience than commanding troops in Vietnam for Alderson; he was there far longer than he was in Vietnam, he points out, and the kind of crisp teamwork that he’d been disappointed not to see enough of in Vietnam was very much on display at Eighth and I.

  Consider the death of former president Lyndon B. Johnson on January 22, 1973, and its aftermath, when more than forty thousand people streamed by his coffin lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda. An honor guard of four officers stood at attention around the coffin, each stock-still, eyes locked. One of them was Sandy Alderson. “You’re only on for half an hour at a time,” he says. “The key was not blinking. That was the tough part.” Picture Alderson standing at attention next to LBJ’s body and trying not to blink, and the word “discipline” takes on new meaning. It becomes a lot easier to understand why, moving forward a few years, this man might have strong views on plate discipline.