In the mid and late 1960s the Marine Corps was training people hard to kill people in Vietnam. We were mostly teenagers and were doing hills and mountains and long humps & hauls at Camp Pendleton. I was a 19-year-old sergeant with two-years service with 6th Marines on the east coast as an infantryman and some tight guard duty in Kansas City as a heavily-armed trooper for some secret stuff that nobody anywhere on the planet cared about. I even got a detail with the Secret Sevice once in civvies to the Hotel Muehlebach with a .45 stuffed down my suit trousers to help provide security for Vice President Hubert Humphrey. I had a round chambered with "safe on" and I was just so happy to not blow my dick off and to meet the Vice President that evening.

That's not the story.

There are cliffs at Torrey Pines and some of them go up a long way. One time a bunch of Marines get into a cove under the cliffs with a boatload of beer and no women. There were about 7 of us and nobody is going to find us. We guzzled beer and booze all day and cooked with a driftwood and charcoal fire. We lay out after dark.

The tide comes in and the surf is up.

Everybody is drunk and getting wet. We are in a bad spot with the cove wrapped around us and no way to get off the beach under a cliff without the ability to fly. We can't save the beer and the booze but figure it's not a tough swim if we travel light, only about half a mile. Lots of good stuff got left on that beach - beer, booze, pistols, knives, coolers and clothes.

Huggy Grubby Shepard from Northport, Long Island and I took up the rear as the two strongest swimmers. The cops that got us in our drawers around the cove couldn't stop laughing but got us back to base. They were swell once they heard our tale.

More than 40 years later I only try to swim to my bed now with wet Depends but that's a true story about Torrey Pines near Del Mar.