Back then, before it happened to the young Marine recruits, his could be such a reassuring presence, 6 feet 4 inches tall and bowlegged, walking around the base with something approaching hard-won grace.
”Sgt. McKeon was one of the more easygoing sergeants we had,” Robert Veney of Waynesboro, Va., is saying. ”If you had a personal problem, if something was bothering you, you always felt you could go to Sgt. McKeon.”
He knew them all, kids who had come by train from gritty urban towns and the wide-open spaces in the country, to a place called Yemassee, S.C., then by bus on over to Parris Island.
Twenty-five of them would come to testify about his character at his trial, and that must have meant something as he was sitting there on the stand, as a nation full of mothers and fathers wondered about the six boys who had been marched into a Carolina swamp and now were dead, not one by an enemy bullet.
The deaths grabbed the nation`s attention like little else that year. In 1956, America was relatively quiet. Suburbia was continuing its spread. The tumult that would envelop the South was a church bombing away. Then a peacetime nation awoke to six bodies pulled from the swamp and to Sgt. Matthew McKeon`s facing charges of negligent manslaughter.
It was supposed to have been a punishment march, but it had gone so awfully wrong. Congress demanded an investigation. President Eisenhower vowed there would be no cover-up. And the U.S. Marine Corps would be forced to undergo a ”sweeping reorganization” and rewrite its training policies.
When it was over, the manslaughter charges leveled against McKeon would be lessened to negligence; the nine-month sentence, which some said was too stiff and others not stiff enough, would be reduced to three months; the demotion to private, however, would remain intact.
When it was over, McKeon went home to Worcester, Mass. He drove a milk truck and he worked nights at a hotel. The hours were brutal, but his family had to be fed. Years wheezed by. Every now and then, sitting somewhere with a buddy, Matthew McKeon would get right up to the edge of talking about that night, then he`d excuse himself.
It happened 33 years ago. And maybe 33 years of silence is enough.
”I think about the boys every day,” he says now. ”I do. Oh, God. You run these names over and over in your mind. I wonder what kinds of jobs they would have, if they`d be married, if they`d have kids.”
Norman Wood, Chuck Reilly, Donald O`Shea, Jerry Thomas, Thomas Hardeman and Leroy Thompson.
Just a little after 7 p.m. on April 8, 1956, McKeon lined up his platoon outside their Parris Island barracks. There was to be a march because they had been caught lazing in back of the barracks, joking, smoking cigarettes. So McKeon marched them down a slope, past the rifle range, cutting through the weeds, on into a swamp called Ribbon Creek, fed by the Atlantic Ocean.
The water was about chest-high, darkness everywhere because no one had been allowed to bring a flashlight, when the tide came whooshing in, washing over them, quickly and cleanly. Sounds whipped from their throats, like the echo of birds startled by buckshot. The sergeant went under. When he came up everything was quiet, too quiet.
Every now and then someone will see Matthew McKeon around town in Worcester and do a double-take. ”Hey, aren`t you that Marine who . . . ” and he`ll say ”yep” before they can finish. They know not to press any further. ”So we part,” he says. ”I won`t deny who I am. And I won`t run from anyone.”
There isn`t a hair on his face. The sharp crewcut looks as if it might have been trimmed yesterday. He is sitting at a Formica-topped table in a restaurant near his hometown.
”The court was right. They convicted me. I got no problem with that. No, sir. I got no problem with that.” It`s still a hard voice, and one can imagine it being blown into the ear of a recruit and having quite an effect. But right now it`s low. ”I took a drink down there.” It had come out at the trial that he upended a bottle of vodka before the march. ”Everybody drank down there.” He says he hasn`t had a drop since.
Roll-call of the dead
Matthew McKeon joined the Marines when he was 17. He, too, received his basic training at Parris Island. ”It was tough training,” he says in a way that lets you know he could take whatever they dished out. He served on the aircraft carrier Essex during World War II. He was based at Quantico, Va., for five years. He was going to make the Marines a career and retire after 20 years. In January 1956, McKeon was graduated from drill instructor school. The next month, at Parris Island, McKeon, then 31, took command of his first group of recruits, Platoon 71.
Some of the men in Platoon 71 had joined the Marines for the possibility of adventure, because in 1956, there were no American tanks climbing enemy hills; there was just Cold War peace. A lot more had joined because they came from poverty-stricken families, and figured one less dinner plate to fill at home might make a difference. Every one of them was from east of the Mississippi.
Thomas Hardeman, dead, had come from Vidalia, Ga. ”Hardeman I remember as a small little guy, full of hell and wiry,” McKeon recalls. ”Small in stature, full of heart. He had guts. You could tell he had guts.”
Jerry Thomas, dead, was an Alexandria, Va., kid. ”Kid who you wouldn`t notice much in a crowd,” McKeon says. ”A quiet young man. I think Thomas, of all of them, thought deep. You could tell his thoughts were deep. I don`t remember Thomas smiling much. Little Thomas. Jesus.”
Chuck Reilly, dead, was from upstate New York. ”He`d have you looking one way, and he was going the other. Not much weight on him. I don`t think he`d have taken any Mr. America title. So many Marines are just skinny kids.” Donald O`Shea, dead, arrived at Parris Island from Brooklyn. ”Very shy boy. He didn`t look like a kid from Brooklyn. I don`t mean to sound prejudiced or anything. But he looked like an altar boy.”
Norman Wood, dead, big tall recruit, the first to find out the sergeant planned to take them on a march through the swamps, grew up on Long Island.
”Handsome boy. Of all the boys in the platoon I believe he could have been whatever he wanted to be.”
Leroy Thompson, dead, of Queens, ”was a leader. He wasn`t a follower.”
A last resort to discipline
Most days down there were hard, but there were breaks. ”We had our days,” McKeon says. ”There was laughter.” He`ll mention the football games. ”Fifteen on one side, fifteen on the other. We liked to see them get rough and tough.”
Platoon 71 was not the first unit to be taken on a march through the swamps; other drill instructors had taken their units, always as a last resort to discipline. McKeon had pulled a muscle in his leg days earlier and had to lean on a broomstick during the march.
It was April, the water chilly. ”I went down, came up,” McKeon recalls over a cup of black coffee. ”Water up to my neck. Someone grabbed me and I went down again. We both went down. I was the only one to come up. I looked around and couldn`t see a thing. I knew I had lost some men.”
That night, after he had been arrested, a head count was taken. Six Marines were missing. Slow-moving boats began combing the backwaters; five Marines were found dead. A couple of officers were dispatched to summon McKeon, to have him ID the bodies. ”They didn`t have to have me do that,” he says. One recruit was missing. ”I think they couldn`t find Hardeman.”
He had been watching a baseball game when his sentence was handed down. McKeon was let out once to be with his family. His wife, Betty, pregnant at the time, had received some threatening phone calls and ugly letters. She never wavered in her support, he says. ”Wonderful woman.”
”The only satisfaction is that they`re in the hands of God,” he says about the boys. ”The parents have to live with one dead boy; I have to live with six.”
McKeon is right on the lip of retiring from a civil service job. His children are all grown now, four girls and one boy. Summers are his best time of year. He`s crazy about baseball, which he umpires. He has seen that look in a kid`s eye, a kid who has struck out twice and wants to get on base so bad he can see himself flying down the baseline. There`s the third strike coming, only Matthew McKeon calls it a ball, and the next pitch, ”Ball four!” And there the kid is, on base, at last.
Joked about alligators
On Saturday nights at boot camp, if you wanted to go to church the next morning, you put a towel at the foot of your bunk, and the Marine on duty would call out your name.
”I went to church that Sunday morning,” recalls Robert Veney, who lives in Waynesboro, Va., and works the night shift at Du Pont, near his house. When he returned from church that Sunday, he says about the early afternoon of April 8, 1956, he was told to join the rest of the platoon in scrubbing down the barracks. Then things got slow, evening came on, and he decided to go back to church.
When he returned this time it was dusk. ”The platoon was already lined up in front of the barracks,” Veney says. ”Sgt. McKeon told us to fall in with the rest of the platoon. He told us we were going to the swamps. And he said, `Now, the ones who can`t swim will drown. The ones who can swim, well, the alligators will get you. So it won`t make a damn bit of difference.` ”
”We marched toward the rifle range,” Veney says. ”I remember there was a water sprinkler. The sergeant said: `Don`t go around it. You`ll get wetter than that anyway.` ”
Just before they stepped into the swamp, McKeon stopped his platoon on the edge. Some members of the platoon, interviewed for this story, thought that what he said then seemed both odd and sensitive: ”I know you sons of bitches got cigarettes. Put `em under your lids so they won`t get wet.”
Cigarettes were not allowed on disciplinary marches.
Hid behind trees
When the platoon got a fair distance out, where they could smell the ocean, Veney, who still hadn`t passed his boot camp swimming test, the water now to his chest, eased out of formation. He hid behind some trees.
He`s not particularly proud of the story, but he knew he couldn`t swim.
”I wasn`t going no further,” he says. ”Norman Wood passed by. I just stepped out of rank. They couldn`t see me.” He stayed there, frozen. Then he heard something and couldn`t quite figure what it was. ”It sounded like maybe they were just laughing and cutting up. It didn`t sound like they were hollering for help.”
Carl Whitmore, another recruit, turned to his right, angling for land.
”Everybody went crazy,” Whitmore recalls. ”Myself, I knew where the bank was. I headed back for the bank. On the way back, Wood was floundering around. We stood him up. When we left him he was standing in water up to his knees.” When Whitmore and others came back, looking for Norman Wood, he was floating, dead. ”I can`t understand that to this day,” Whitmore says.
Platoon member Clarence Cox felt the water get deep ”in a hurry.” Cox is sitting in his living room in Lenoir, N.C., the Blue Ridge Mountains rising from beyond the windows. ”People were holding on to each other,” he recalls of that night. ”Some fella climbed up and put his feet on my shoulders. I knew that wouldn`t work. I turned over and started swimming on my back.
”While I was swimming on my back I didn`t know which direction I was going. I said with my luck I`ll probably swim right out to the ocean.” He swam about 75 yards and spotted a piece of land that looked secure enough to crawl up on. Then he just waited.
More than half an hour passed. Then searchlights began swooping along the water. Cox was spotted. An officer yelled to him through a bullhorn. ”We can send a boat to get you.” Cox didn`t want to wait. ”I told them I`d swim over, just keep the lights on me.” Swimming over, he got stuck in mud. They had to send the boat anyway.
When Cox reached the bank and climbed out of the boat, he saw a Catholic priest, who had rushed down from the base. He was praying, his back to the sky. Cox and others were taken by ambulance to the infirmary. He asked for a cigarette, and the ambulance attendant told him no, that he was in shock.
Some of the recruits had reported-that night, and later at the court-martial-that they saw Thomas Hardeman pull two boys to shore, then head back out toward another voice. His body would be found days later.
Life-saving discipline
Carl Whitmore, a beefy ex-Marine in Brunswick, Ga., recalls the swimming test at boot camp. Halfway down the pool his arms began to tire and give out. If your arms touched the side of the pool you automatically failed the swimming test. When Carl Whitmore began to reach for the side of the pool, Sgt. McKeon bent down and said, ”If you let your arms touch the side of the pool, I`ll break `em.” Carl Whitmore kept swimming. He passed the test. On the night of the drownings, Whitmore made it out of that swamp.
Emil (Zuke) Berman had been working insurance cases up in New York City when a colleague told him about Sgt. Matthew McKeon sitting in a cell at Parris Island awaiting trial. Berman had made a name for himself, once winning a $350,000 judgment from the City of New York in a negligence case after a woman had been hit by a police cruiser. But he was tiring of such cases and longed for other challenges. When Berman heard that Matthew McKeon needed a lawyer, he hopped a plane for South Carolina.
”Berman was the best trial strategist I`ve ever seen,” says Howard Lester, who served on the defense team with Berman, now deceased. Lester, right out of Yale, had lucked into a summer job with Berman`s law firm; now he was in the South, interviewing Marines, about to become involved in a huge court-martial.
”No one thought we could win the case. Everyone thought McKeon was going to the penitentiary,” Lester remembers.
Swamps off-limits now
Berman`s defense was that Sgt. Matthew McKeon`s platoon was not the most disciplined platoon at Parris Island. He argued that discipline was needed or soldiers would surely be killed in combat. One day during the trial Berman asked for and received permission to adjourn the trial for a couple of days. He had to take a trip.
He returned to the trial with Lt. Gen. Chester Puller, a shrapnel-filled Marine war hero, who was retired and living on a Virginia farm. Puller, in full uniform, testified that what McKeon did was done for reasons of discipline, that he very well might have done the same thing, that it was not wrong, that it was tragic the boys lost their lives, but that the perils of combat training were obvious.
Maggie Meeks, the mother of Thomas Hardeman, was the only parent to attend the court-martial proceedings. Every now and then, during a recess, she would look around the courtroom, her eyes roving for McKeon, and she`d see his back, going out into the hallway, and would go after him. Some Marine officers were assigned to keep a watch on her.
”I hope you get your judgment right here on this earth,” she said to McKeon one day.
”Matty McKeon wasn`t a sadist,” Lester says.
”I suppose you could say it was an error of judgment because of the end result.”
The swamps down at Parris Island are off limits to marches now.
The sergeant who walked up out of them 33 years ago, six of his men left behind, says he is not an especially religious man. Yet he says: ”I believe in God. There`ll come a Judgment Day. I`ll have to answer.
”Sometimes,” he adds, ”the living have it harder than the dead.”
