Seven decades later – almost – and Tom Hellyer still looks back with a chuckle and knowing nod.
He’d been had, you see.
“Yeah, that Marine knew what he was doing,” he said.
On that afternoon back in 1956, Hellyer knew what he should have been doing – which was sitting in class.
He was milling about at the recruiting station, instead.
“I never got along with school,” he remembered, “so I was gonna join the Navy.”
The recruiter for that particular branch had stepped out for the moment, though, but the recruiter for the U.S. Marines Corps was there, at his desk.
When a 17-year-old kid and newly mustered high school dropout from Cassville told him his intentions, said recruiter eyed him up and down, with a little smirk.
“Good thing.”
“What?”
“Good thing you’re going in the Navy, ‘cause you’d never make it in the Marines.”
“Wait – what did you say?”
“I said you’d never make it in the Marines.”
“Yeah, I could.”
Sixty minutes later, Hellyer’s dad signed the papers – even though he’d just consigned his son to the basement for refusing to go to school.
And a week after that, Hellyer was on a bus churning through the Lowlands of South Carolina in the pre-dawn.
Parris Island.
Boot camp.
Lots of bellowing.
“My God, they’re nose-to-nose with you the whole time,” he remembered. “But I stayed with it.”
Of mortar rounds and monsoons
Hellyer was working through his first tour as President Eisenhower was committing America’s military efforts to Southeast Asia.
When President Kennedy brought in that same philosophy to go with his new frontier, the kid from Cassville had a strong inkling of what was coming next.
Hellyer never got over how Vietnam could turn – just like that.
Sudden flashes of light from the tree line meant holes in backs and bellies.
An out-of-nowhere whistling overhead and accompanying cry of “Incoming!” meant a mortar round, and its scary potential of missing limbs or sudden death.
If you were lucky, you got a Million-Dollar Wound and a recovery at Clark Air Base Hospital before your honorable discharge.
Taps, that 24-note elegy of loss, would mournfully waft over your hometown cemetery if you weren’t.
Hellyer, like the guys who were in combat, doesn’t tell war stories in detail. Mortar rounds always scared him, he isn’t shy to say. Monsoons, he allowed, can make even a Marine weary.
And he still can’t get over the accounting of carnage after that one intense fire fight, over that one particular hill.
The sun came up – and everyone saw what had really happened.
‘You still think you can whup a guy from Cassville?’
After his combat tour, his new posting was at the place where it all began.
He became a drill instructor at Parris Island.
“And all my guys were going to Vietnam,” he said. “I had to get ‘em ready.”
Which meant doing exactly to them – what was done to a certain 17-year-old from Cassville back in 1956.
“You have to tear them down completely, so you can build them back up into Marines.”
He gave a geographic order one day on the drill field: “Anybody here from West Virginia, step forward.”
The recruit who did wasn’t just from Hellyer’s home state. Amazingly, he was from Monongalia County, too. He grew up right down the road from his sergeant, in fact.
“Where you from?”
“Sir! Bertha Hill, sir!”
“You think you can whup a guy from Cassville?”
“Sir! Yes sir!”
The D.I. responded with a strong forearm that set the recruit, who was a big guy, back on his heels.
“You still think you can whup a guy from Cassville?”
“Sir! No sir!”
Later in his quarters, Hellyer grinned. “Yes sir,” was the wrong answer for boot camp – but it was the perfect response for a Marine, in general.
“I knew exactly where these guys were going,” he said. “They were gonna need that toughness to stay alive.”
Always faithful
In 1976, after 20 years in, Hellyer retired and came right back home to West Virginia.
He and Irene are still together and couldn’t be more proud of their son and grandchildren these days.
Meanwhile, the old sergeant couldn’t have been more surprised when he was asked to serve as parade marshal of Morgantown’s 2025 Veterans Day Parade, which steps off at 6 p.m. Tuesday on High Street.
“I thought that was for ‘distinguished’ people,” he said – and he isn’t joking or being sarcastic.
His friends and fellow veterans, many of them Marines, gave a response just as perfect.
They couldn’t think of anyone more distinguished in rank and service, they said.
They couldn’t think of anyone more deserving of the honor, they said.
Hellyer, who is still active in veterans affairs and causes, can also still fit into his dress blues – though maybe not as well as he used to, he admitted with another chuckle.
He’s still in touch with some of the old recruits from the Parris Island days. He’s grateful they made it back from Vietnam, and he’s proud of how they turned out, as Marines and men.
Should he talk on the phone with one, he doesn’t say “Goodbye,” at the end. He signs off with “Semper Fi.”
Always Faithful.
His branch’s motto, in Latin.
Hellyer may be nearing 90 – but he’s still making it in the Marines.
If he could hit the rewind button, would he do it again, with the misspent high school years, the subterfuge of the recruiter and the fighting in the jungle?
“Wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “I was honored to serve. And I was in with a lot of good people.”
