Reclaiming History (131 page)

On another occasion, McBride went to Lee’s home, where Lee showed him copies of
Das Kapital
and
The Communist Manifesto
. Although they were just library books, McBride thought Oswald was “quite proud to have them.”
²⁵⁰
Years later, when he defected to Moscow, Lee told journalist Aline Mosby, “Then we moved to New Orleans and I discovered one book in the library,
Das Kapital
. It was what I’d been looking for. It was like a very religious man opening the Bible for the first time…I read the
Manifesto
. It got me interested. I found some dusty back shelves in the New Orleans library, you know, I had to remove some front books to get at the books. I started to study Marxist economic theories. I thought the workers’ life could be better. I continued to indoctrinate myself for five years.”
²⁵¹

McBride also took Lee to a meeting of a citywide astronomy club and introduced him to the club’s president, William Wulf, a LaSalle High School student the same age as Lee. At their first meeting, Wulf was unimpressed by Oswald’s knowledge of astronomy, to the point of trying to discourage him from joining the club, since few of the members would be interested in teaching him the fundamentals.
²⁵²

Lee spoke with Wulf again, this time at Wulf’s house, where McBride took him sometime in early 1956. Wulf, who had a lively interest in history, got into a heated argument with Oswald about Communism. Lee had brought the subject up, telling Wulf he was “highly interested in Communism” and that “Communism was the only way of life for the worker,” becoming, Wulf said, “loud-mouthed, boisterous.” Wulf said Lee bemoaned the fact he could not find a Communist cell to join in New Orleans. Eventually, Wulf’s father, a merchant mariner and native of Hamburg, Germany, who had seen all he cared to see of Communism in Germany after World War I ended in 1918, took Oswald by the arm and politely ejected him from the house.
²⁵³
Wulf found Lee’s ideas alarming enough to warn his friend McBride, who hoped for a career in rocketry, that a friendship with Oswald might later be construed as a security risk. Wulf was surprised, since Oswald was only sixteen, at Oswald’s ideological vehemence over Communism, describing his attitude as “militant” and impressing him as someone “who could get violent over Communism.” Wulf told the Warren Commission that Oswald seemed to be a young man who had “very little self-identification,” someone who was “looking for something to belong to…and he just happened, I guess, to latch on to this particular area to become identified with.”
²⁵⁴

Both Wulf and McBride soon lost track of Lee when the Oswalds moved in early July 1956 back to Fort Worth.
²⁵⁵
Oswald was still only sixteen, but this was the seventeenth time he had moved in his gypsy-like existence.
²⁵⁶
Marguerite had several reasons for the latest move. She told the Warren Commission that she knew Lee was intending to join the Marine Corps on his seventeenth birthday, coming up in October, and she thought that if they lived with Robert, he might be able to dissuade Lee from enlisting. She may equally have hoped that Robert would take over some of the burden of supporting his brother and herself. “I have always been broke, and I mean broke,” she told the Commission about her move back to Fort Worth. “About a month before rent time, we had it pretty hard in order to have that rent.” In any case, Marguerite rented an apartment at 4926 Collinswood Avenue for all three of them. Robert was less than thrilled. He had his own plans—he was going to marry Vada Marie Mercer in November and intended to find their own apartment. Nevertheless, he had agreed to move in with Marguerite and Lee and to help out with the bills until then.
²⁵⁷

Robert did indeed try to talk Lee out of joining the Marine Corps before finishing high school during their brief period together at Collinswood Avenue, but Lee, after giving his older brother’s advice some serious thought, was determined to join up when he turned seventeen. Marguerite quickly found a job in a Fort Worth shoe store, and the family, minus John, was temporarily back together again, Robert working and contributing to the household expenses.
²⁵⁸

In September, Lee enrolled in the tenth grade—again—at Arlington Heights High School, which his brothers had attended some years before, but his stay there was short-lived.
²⁵⁹
One student recalled later that Lee had tried to interest him in Communism, but the temper of the times only caused the student to “shy away from him.”
²⁶⁰
Lee also went out for the football team. When it came time to run the sprint at the end of practice, Oswald announced to the coach that “this is a free country, and I don’t have to do it.” The coach told him to hang up his cleats.
²⁶¹
This incident recalled Lee’s behavior at Youth House in New York City, where a social worker said he had been a “non-participant in any activity.” Robert had noted Lee’s difficulty in taking orders from other kids—if he couldn’t be the boss, he didn’t want to play at all—a characteristic Robert thought Lee had in common with their mother. “I’ve known her to lose a good job,” he wrote, “because she was too bossy and wanted to be the manager or a partner instead of just another employee. She always felt she was somebody special and people should recognize that fact.”
²⁶²

Before the month of September was out, and after receiving four Ds and a C on tests, Lee dropped out of Arlington altogether.
²⁶³
A few days later, on October 3, 1956, he wrote to the Socialist Party of America in New York City:

Dear Sirs:

I am sixteen years of age and would like more information about your youth League, I would like to know if there is a branch in my area, how to join, ect., I am a Marxist, and have been studying socialist principles for well over fifteen months I am very interested in your Y.P.S.L. [Young People’s Socialist League]

Sincerely

Lee Oswald

He enclosed an advertisement coupon that had three boxes for checking off items—one for a three-dollar subscription to the
Socialist Call
, another to get information about the Socialist Party, and another to join the party—but Lee checked only the box requesting information.
²⁶⁴
Mostly, he was waiting to turn seventeen and realize the dream he had nurtured since he was twelve, to join the Marine Corps. Clearly, the young Lee never found—or perhaps never gave a thought to—the incompatibility between his nascent Communism, whose goal was to end capitalism, and the U.S. Marines, the corps whose gallantry on the battlefield was intended to preserve America’s way of life—capitalism.

Lee’s brother Robert told the Warren Commission, “I believe that the reason Lee joined the United States Marine Corps was to follow in my footsteps in that same service,” adding he felt his younger brother was always closer to him than his mother or half-brother, and he “looked up to me” and wanted to emulate Robert not only in the Marine Corps but in other respects.
²⁶⁵
Indeed, Oswald told reporter Aline Mosby in Moscow in 1959, “I joined the Marine Corps because I had a brother in the Marines.”
²⁶⁶
In Robert’s book, however, he writes that “after John left for the Coast Guard and I decided to join the Marines, he [Lee] talked of nothing else. He had seen us escape from mother that way. To him, military service meant freedom [from Marguerite].”
²⁶⁷
Lee’s other brother, John, agreed. While not addressing himself to the Marines as an issue, he simply said that Lee joined the service “for the same reasons that I did it and Robert did it, I assume, to get from out and under” the “yoke of oppression from my mother.”
²⁶⁸

Perhaps the even greater incongruity was someone like Oswald, who was fiercely independent and resisted any type of authority, joining an organization whose trademark and way of life was authority and regimentation. But what was probably more important to Lee, at least for the moment, was that consistent with his adventuresome nature, as manifested by his exploration, as a child, of the streets of New York, he was going to be exploring another world, and it couldn’t be worse than the very unhappy one he was leaving behind. Also, the young man who even his youthful peers noticed was in search of an identity had now found a brand-spanking new and impressive one, a marine, as discordant as it was with his Marxist ideology. But all that could be sorted out later.

On the eighteenth of that month, October, Lee reached his seventeenth birthday, and on October 24 he enlisted for a six-year military obligation (three active duty, the remaining three in the reserve) and was now a marine. That same day he boarded a bus to Dallas, where he was given a physical examination and sworn in, then flown to San Diego for recruit training. For the first time in his life, he was on his own.
²⁶⁹

H
e arrived at the San Diego Recruit Depot on October 26, 1956, and was assigned to the Second Recruit Training Battalion. He had now grown to five feet eight inches tall, but still weighed 135 pounds, and had no physical defects. He scored above the Marine Corps average on tests for reading and vocabulary, below average on arithmetic and pattern analysis. His composite general classification score (GCT) for the battery of six tests was 105, two points below the corps average. He scored near the bottom of the lowest group on a radio code test and failed to qualify as a swimmer. He gave as his preference for duty “aircraft maintenance and repair”—his brother Robert’s specialty—and he was recommended for such training. He also managed to get a satisfactory—but not distinguished—score on a test of general educational development.
²⁷⁰
His starting basic pay as a private was a grand spanking $78 per month, not a princely wage. On the other hand, he got free room and board.
²⁷¹
(By the time Oswald was discharged from the military in September of 1959, he was a private first class and his basic pay was $108 per month.)
²⁷²

Boot camp, ten grueling weeks starting at five every morning under a barking drill sergeant, is a living hell for all recruits—it is specifically designed to be—but Oswald somehow managed to survive it. The recruits were trained on the standard American military rifle of the period, the Garand M-1, a .30 caliber weapon with iron sights. Lee, per a fellow recruit, Sherman Cooley, had difficulty firing the M-1 accurately during training.
²⁷³
However, on December 21, when his company fired for the record, Lee not only qualified, but managed a score of 212, two points above the threshold for a “sharpshooter,” the middle of three Marine Corps qualification classifications, twelve points better than “marksman,” and eight points below the level of “expert.”
*

His overall marks as a recruit were 4.4 for both conduct and proficiency—5.0 was the highest mark possible, and 4.0 was required for an honorable discharge.
²⁷⁴

After ten weeks of basic training, in January of 1957 Oswald was transferred to an Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Pendleton outside of San Diego, sort of an advanced boot camp that concentrated on the basic skills of combat and the amphibious techniques and methods all marines must know.
²⁷⁵
One of the men in Oswald’s squad, Allen R. Felde, mostly remembered Oswald’s mouth. Lee railed against the American intervention in Korea and blamed “one million” useless deaths on President Eisenhower—in spite of the fact that Truman was president for all but the last six months of that war. Felde said that such political talk did not endear Oswald to his fellow marines, who had little interest in politics at all, much less in Lee’s view of politics. Felde said he also wasn’t popular because he was very “argumentative,” seemingly taking an opposite side of an argument “just for the sake of a debate.” And although he would share a cab to Tijuana with his squad mates when they went on liberty, Lee would part from them when they arrived and rejoin them only back at Pendleton. The same thing happened when they went several times to Los Angeles—Oswald rode with them on the bus but went off on his own as soon as they got there. Felde, who considered Oswald a “good talker” with an “excellent vocabulary,” said that Oswald, whom he described as “left-winged,” expressed a dislike for people with wealth, championed the cause of the “workingman,” and spent much of his time reading in quarters or in the base library.
²⁷⁶

Lee completed the course at Pendleton with a 4.2 in conduct and 4.0 in proficiency, and on February 27 he went on leave for two weeks, visiting his mother and brother in Fort Worth.
²⁷⁷

The two brothers had a lot to talk about. Robert was married and anxious for Lee to get to know Vada, and he had a job at Condar, where he was testing and working on fuel component systems for the B-58 bomber. Lee was full of enthusiasm for the Marines and eagerly looking forward to his next training assignment. One weekend they went out to the dairy farm operated by Vada’s parents, where Lee got a very rough ride from a palomino mare that belonged to Vada’s brother and had a mind of its own. He managed to hang on and seemed proud of that fact, but he didn’t try any more rides. He had more success when the brothers went hunting. They found no squirrels at all, but Lee shot a strange animal they couldn’t identify, one with a sharp snout, a long, thin body, and a bushy tail like a coon. Vada’s father told them it was a ring-tailed cat—the first he had seen in fifteen or twenty years. Lee was delighted with his rare bag.
²⁷⁸

Although Lee was staying with his mother, he spent most of his time with Robert and Vada. Robert saw little of Marguerite. They had had a falling out over the fact that the young couple refused to live in a house with a garage apartment for Marguerite, but Robert knew that they would never have a life of their own with Marguerite nearby, and he was pleased to keep a safe distance from her.
²⁷⁹

On March 18, 1957, Lee reported to the Naval Air Technical Training Center at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida.
²⁸⁰
His training detachment there was schooled in the work of the air wing of the Marine Corps, including courses in the security of classified matter, missions and systems, navy plotting symbols, basic theory of radar, air traffic control procedures, map reading, and weather and aircraft recognition.
²⁸¹
At the conclusion of the training on May 3, he was given clearance to deal with “confidential” materials—the lowest grade of security clearance but a necessary one for the next step of his training, one requiring a “careful records check.”
²⁸²
He did fairly well at Jacksonville. Although he ranked forty-sixth in a class of fifty-four, his scores of 4.7 for conduct and 4.5 for proficiency were the highest he would ever attain.
²⁸³
He was also promoted to private first class, effective back to May 1.
²⁸⁴