Humble Beginnings

Humble Beginnings

I’m going to try to fly past these years as quickly as possible, mainly because they mean so little to the life I now enjoy. As I am fond of remembering, “Bill is a story I used to tell myself.”

I didn’t have a happy childhood. But I don’t think it’s necessary to go into all the grim details. I didn’t get any cigarette burns and I wasn’t sexually molested, so I’m probably ahead of the game. In fact, to most of you, my childhood was probably fairly ordinary. I don’t think many of us made it through those years unscathed.

It took me many years to realize that all that happened was necessary to my journey. All that happened over the first twelve or fourteen years of my life is exactly what was required to make me into who I was…or who I am. If I had had a healthy, happy childhood then I never would have found myself on the path to self-discovery.

What might be important or significant about my formative years? I was the oldest of six children born to fairly poor parents. My father was a laborer and later a delivery driver.

I was a strong reader from an early age. Books were an escape mechanism. I devoured books like Robin Hood, Black Beauty, Little Women, Little Men and a slew of similar stories. My first adult book was Hawaii when I was in the fifth grade. (I mention this for the irony...as I'm dying in a military hospice on Oahu.)

I attended Catholic grade school; St. Joseph’s in La Puente, California. I was an altar boy back in the time when we still did Mass in Latin. In class, I was a bit of a class clown…and a bit of a discipline problem. I kept hearing the refrain about “wasted potential”. On the whole, my Catholic education was excellent (except for the lack of any sciences).

Coincidentally, part of what I learned from the Catholic school system was that sex was nasty. It’s hard to overcome the imprinting that if it wasn’t nasty, then it really wasn’t sexy.

After the rigid structure of Catholic grade school, the transfer to public high school was intoxicating. Truth is that I got so involved with so many activities that I never had time for study or homework. There was too much fun to be had doing other things.

I was a member of a fringe-pack of semi-nerds. As a group, we pretty much ran the school newspaper and most of the yearbook and drama department. I was on the Varsity football team as a freshman. (Mostly they just used me as someone to knock down in practice.) But still, my Varsity status did give me a certain degree of distinction. If I wasn’t such a social klutz, I probably could have cashed this status in for something.

But I didn’t really find my niche until my football coach enrolled me in his wrestling squad in my sophomore year. I won the Valley Championship several times and got myself a bit of a reputation. My win/loss record was fairly impressive. (Something like 48 wins and 2 losses?)

La Puente High had four divisions of students. Above “College Prep” was a more elite crew called “Puente Recommended”…based on IQ scores and entrance exams. I managed to capture the achievement of having the lowest grade point average of anyone in “Puente Recommended”. I just didn’t have any interest in studying. But I was having one hell of a good time.

Early in my sophomore year or perhaps early in my junior year, my relationship at home deteriorated. My father and I had a fist fight and I decided to leave. I moved out and found a night job and managed to rent an apartment. Of course, I stayed in school; still played on the football team…still starred in a few school plays.

I was a bus boy on the night shift at Bob’s Big Boy. Being a Varsity football player, it was easy to lie about my age. I was 15 and passed for 18. I was about 6’2” and weighed 175 in wrestling season and 210 in football season. I was in excellent physical condition. The year was 1962. I was in the Class of ’64.

It was somewhere around this time that I started playing guitar and singing a bit of Kingston Trio songs. Some Peter, Paul and Mary…Bob Dylan…even Johnny Cash or two. (Thanks for the pointers, Denny.)

Early in my senior year, I had a roommate that ran away with the rent money. The only thing I could think to do was to hitch-hike to San Francisco and borrow money from my Grand Aunt. I got picked up by a guy headed north and we were driving through the downtown Los Angeles freeway system when we heard the news on the radio that John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. For some unknown reason, this guy pulled over to the side of the freeway and had me get out. It’s against the law to be walking on the freeway and I quickly got picked up by the cops. It was, of course, November 22, 1963.

The police demanded ID which I failed to provide. I was booked and finger-printed. I was afraid they’d send me back to live with my parents and so I didn’t tell them who I was. Even though I was 17 at the time, they put me in an adult “lockdown” facility. There were four cells down each side of the room; two men to a cell. My cell-mate had stabbed his mother to death.

For the next several days I sat in that cell and we all watched the story of Kennedy’s assassination unfold on TV. (There was one TV in the middle of the room where it could be seen by all eight cells.) I still wouldn’t tell the cops who I was. I saw Jack Ruby shoot and kill Harvey Lee Oswald on live national TV.

My fifth or sixth day in jail, the cops hauled me into an interrogation and said, “Well, we figured out who you are. You are John Preston and you escaped from the Arizona State Prison where you are serving 25 to life for murder. We’re going to send you back to Arizona to serve out your time.”

Of course I quickly blurted out, “No I’m not. I’m Bill Costello and you can call my Mommy!!” Notice how cool I was under pressure?

(Not fair that they should trick a kid like that.)

My parent arrived later that night or the following day. But they couldn’t take me home because it seems I had to sign myself over to their custody and I refused to do so. So I stayed in jail. I spent the next three days thinking about it. I finally agreed to turn myself over to my parent’s custody if they would sign the papers for me to join the Marine Corps at 17.

I went back to high school to say my goodbyes and check out. There’s a bit of a complicated sub-plot here where if I hadn’t gotten arrested and signed papers for the Marine Corps, I might have landed a four-year wrestling scholarship to UCLA. But that’s another story.

I hung around for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I still don’t really understand why I didn’t actually end up getting on the bus for boot camp until March 17th. (Imagine a fine Irishman like myself joining the Marine Corps on St. Paddy’s Day.)

Marine Corps Boot Camp was just as brutal (or maybe twice as brutal) as you may have heard. There were more than a few grim moments. As a squad leader, I was made to be an “enforcer”. Drill Instructors who were not allowed to physically assault recruits would count on me to inflict punishment. Any recruit who let down the performance stats of our unit would end up answering to me. Yes. I beat people up for the good of my unit. I would run behind the pack on long-distance runs and make sure there were no stragglers. Every man in the company knew that they couldn’t fall out of the pack with finding me waiting for them. I was still 17.

I did get my butt whipped once. I made the mistake of getting angry (NEVER fight angry) and started trying to box (instead of wrestle) a Golden Gloves champion who outclassed me by 50 pounds and three or four inches. He was pretty good size and got me good. But the next time he stepped out of line I took him down easily (calmly, without anger) and made an example out of him before the rest of the company. He was crying for me not to mess up his face. He never came back to test me again. But then, very few did. My wrestling skills made me superior to any other type of fighter.

I am sharing this to let you understand that I wasn’t born privileged and I didn’t live a sheltered life. I was a man in a man’s world. I did what men do. I did my share of time as a Neanderthal.

During boot camp they also had us take a series of tests and go through a number of interviews to determine exactly how the Marine Corps could best utilize out respective skills. On the basis of my test scores, they pulled me out of my company and had me take an additional set of tests.

Remember “Puente Recommended”? Well, they would have us take a year of math in one semester. So I had already taken Algebra I, II and III, Geometry I and II and a bit of Trig.

The Marine Corps told me that my test scores, particularly math scores, were so high that they were going to pull me from boot camp and send me to Officer’s Candidate School. After which, they would train me to be a helicopter pilot. Of course, when they discovered my color-blindness, they dumped me back into my squad.

Based on my interviews, the Marine Corps made me a reporter. My high school newspaper was ranked very well for high school news and I had held an editor’s position once or twice.

After graduating boot camp, I spent an additional month of Infantry Training at Camp Pendleton. A month after that, I boarded the USS Mann bound for Okinawa. (The ship experience was one I’d rather forget. Thirty-five hundred Marines on a ship designed for fifteen hundred.)

We did stop in Hawaii and all Marines got about 12 hours of “liberty”. I actually found my way to Waikiki. I fell in love with Hawaii all over again.

My grandmother loved Hawaii and spent about half her time there away from her home in San Francisco. My cousin Clark and I were the oldest of her many grandchildren…and when we graduated from the 8th grade, she gave us both a ten-day vacation to Waikiki. It was (and is) paradise.

We all got another liberty when we stopped at the Port of Yokohama near Tokyo. It was an exotic, interesting and invigorating place. I ended up in a bar where I got conned into spending about $80 on two cokes. Still, I had spent most of the day in Japan.

On Okinawa I was assigned as base reporter for Camp Sukiran, which housed a Marine artillery regiment. I wrote stories about promotions, military exercises, military charity programs, etc. I wrote a story about a Marine who delivered the mail to various units while riding his unicycle. The story was picked up by Navy Times. They even gave me a by-line (put my name with the story).

What kind of a guy was I? I spent a lot of time on the barracks pool tables until I defeated the barracks champ. I also spent a lot of time in the cement stairwells singing and practicing my guitar. (The acoustics in cement stairwells is incredible; sort of a personal sound chamber.) I also went snorkeling regularly in the South China Sea.

What do Marines do on Okinawa? They go into town, get drunk and buy women to sleep with. Since I didn’t drink, this gave me a lot more to spend on women. I was still 17. The third girl I ever slept with was an Okinawan prostitute….and the next 20 or 30 women after that as well.

I pretty much know that you’re not going to accept this, but prostitution on Okinawa was fairly refined. In a way it was almost acceptable.

I’m still trying to make the point that I was a fairly ordinary guy. I had a flair for writing (I’m trying to figure out if I’ve lost that flair) and a fairly high IQ. Of course, I felt myself vastly superior to my peers. I didn’t feel like there was a single Marine that I knew who wasn’t beneath me. I should have been at UCLA; I should have been at Officer’s Candidate School. (I was more than a bit of an asshole in that way and over the years, I didn’t change all that much.)

A few months passed and a couple of NCO’s came through on their way to Vietnam where they were going to be setting up the Marine Press Office in Da Nang. As a reporter, I knew where the stories were…and it wasn’t on Okinawa. I talked to the Gunnery Sergeant and told him that if he’d pull the strings for me to get to Vietnam, I’d extend my tour.

A Marine’s tour of duty in the Pacific at that time was 13 months. I’d already been on Okinawa for 8 months or so. If the Gunny got me transferred, he could only use me for a couple more months before I’d be automatically rotated back to the States. But if I volunteered to extend my tour? He’d have me for ten or eleven months. Based on that promise, my orders came through to go to Vietnam within a week or so.

I don’t remember when I actually landed in Vietnam, but I had turned 18 a month or so earlier. I figure it was roughly April or May, 1965.

Was I afraid? Not in the slightest. I was a reporter now assigned to the biggest story on the planet. I was charged with excitement. It was such a different world. Vietnam was such a backward and beautiful place…poor incredibly poor. At the time, average salary across the countryside was roughly $50 a year.

Very close by the Headquarters Bunker in Da Nang was a community of tin shacks and sheds that made up a little area called “Dogpatch”. You could sit and drink cokes, buy prostitutes, relax a bit if you weren’t scared out of your skin already. (Some guys never stopped being afraid.)

I sat and drank cokes and got the children to teach me to speak Vietnamese. It was just a little Vietnamese at a time, but it was a start. As time went by, I had a vocabulary of almost 200 words. I could actually carry on simple conversations. Most Marines learned just enough to insult a woman in the streets. But I liked the Vietnamese people (and none of my fellow Marines would ever share that sentiment). I would sneak away and eat in their houses. Slowly, I got the reputation among the Vietnamese as being a good person. I’d accept one dinner invitation and have to turn down four others.

This is difficult to explain, but I always kept my distance from other people by sort of enforcing my intellectual superiority. This is almost subliminal, but the way that I went about talking to people always came to be a way of being superior and distancing myself at the same time.

But…when you only speak 200 words in a language? It is impossible to use language to set yourself up as being superior to anyone. Any child could speak better than I could. And so I was child-like. And my acceptance of the state of being child-like, I think went a long way towards endearing me to the Vietnamese people.

I don’t remember much about the first few months; except that I volunteered for every patrol I could hook up with. Within a few months, I started “walking point”. That is, during a patrol I would move up to the very front of the column to be among the four or five guys who “walked point”. This was the most dangerous position in the column…where your odds of getting killed were roughly quadrupled. You had to watch extremely carefully that you weren’t the one to snag a tripwire. And you had to make sure that there WAS no tripwire left for someone else to snag. You also had to be careful about punji traps. The Vietcong would dig small holes in the ground and fill them with rigid bamboo spears about 8 inches long. These bamboo stakes were sharpened to a fine point and smeared with cow dung to be sure your wound would get infected.

Why would I be crazy enough to “walk point”? I wanted to feel the tension. I had to experience what it was that I was writing about. I learned to move through the jungle with minimum impact. I slowly became combat seasoned.

I was assigned to Headquarters Battalion, 3rd Marine Division in Da Nang. But as a reporter, I could assign myself to whatever unit I chose. I picked whatever unit was seeing the most “action”. I would join a regiment and go out on patrol with Company A. We would come back from patrol and Company A would rest and I’d go out with Company B. And then come back and go out with Company C and then again with Company D…and then start all over again the next time Company A went out.

In my tour of Vietnam, I had a total of 56 patrols and seven major operations. One operation had us march through jungle and rice paddies for more than 200 miles. The patrol lasted 28 days without a hot meal or a change of socks. No, I don’t remember it accomplishing anything, but it was an experience.

I volunteered to spend three months with Force Recon…the Marine Corps’ toughest unit. It is similar to the Army’s Green Berets or Navy Seals…except of course they were vastly superior fighting men. With Force Recon, I was dropped with a Recon company 80 to 100 miles behind enemy lines. We’d go check out traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail. On one such patrol, I took picture of some dead Vietcong that one Lieutenant said he planned to send out on Christmas cards.

Some of these guys were into cutting off the ears of Vietcong dead to make a necklace of ears to wear around their necks. Some were into collecting gold teeth.

One of the most chilling memories I have is watching an amphibious vehicle roll through camp with a dozen Vietcong bodies tied with rope to the back. There was something very… what word? …very profound? Profoundly eerie? About the way that the bodies bounced along the ruts and bumps. All those bodies and all so lifeless. It was the way they bounced that got to me. They were so very dead.

Soon I became a man with a reputation for knowing my way around the country. Add to this my knowledge of Vietnamese and the Vietnamese people and I was a pretty good asset.

My bosses would have me take foreign journalists into the jungle…show then a little action if I could…and bring them back alive. I only lost one.

I can remember being around a morning campfire out in a fairly open area. We were in a bit of a foxhole. My companion had only been “In Country” for three or four days. He was another Marine reporter and I was supposed to be showing him the ropes. A couple of rounds of gunfire went off and he scrambled for the bottom of the foxhole.

I hadn’t moved a muscle.

I started to explain to him that when bullets were actually being fired in your direction, that you could hear the whistle and snap of them breaking the sound barrier around you. And just as I was explaining this, suddenly there was a “ping!”, “ping”….and I was scrambling for the bottom of the foxhole. The bullets were passing just a few feet from our position.

Time went by and soon it was time for me to rotate back home. But they wanted me to go on one last patrol. I was down in Chu Lai with the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines. Headquarters even sent down a photographer from Da Nang to go out on patrol with me. The guy they sent was Les Weisigan. (I hope that I spelled that correctly, Les.) I had worked with Les several times before and he was okay as far as most Marines went.

We were actually camped with the Battalion in the jungle about a mile or so from the city of Chu Lai. Les arrived in the morning and we were not going to go on patrol until the next day, so I invited Les to go with me into Chu Lai. We sat in a tin shack bar and drank cokes and beer and just chatted the time away.

Les had scored himself a nice brand-new pair of camouflaged jungle boots…barely a speck of dust on them. It’s hard not to notice new jungle boots.

We boarded the choppers about 5am the next morning. Flew to the landing area in fifteen, twenty minutes and scrambled for cover. The noise of those choppers will attract any VC in the area to your position.

Then we marched; mostly through open fields. This was not a jungle area. A lot of rice paddies. We patrolled for several hours.

We were crossing an open field and I was about forty yards back from “point”. I know, I usually walk point, but I didn’t happen to think walking point was very interesting in open fields. (If we had been in the jungle, I’d probably felt differently….and if I’d been walking point that day I’d probably be dead.)

All of a sudden there were several bursts of machine gun and small arms fire. The point of our column had already advanced about 20 or 30 yards into a very large rice paddy. The majority of that front column and about a third of the men around me died in those first few minutes.

There was a hump of earth just before the rice paddy and those of us left hustled to get some cover behind that stretch of dirt. Over to the left just a bit was a well. Machine gun fire continued.

Several Marines in the rice paddy were still alive and screaming in pain. Marines would run to pull them out and get dead or wounded themselves. And more Marines would dash out to save them and get killed in the process. There should have been a dozen Medals of Honor passed out for that day, but it didn’t happen.

Within a half hour or so we were surrounded. The medic was dead. Most of the officers were dead. We were getting slowly picked off. I pretty much figured that I’d either be dead or captured within the next few hours…and I was afraid of being captured. I accepted the fact that I was going to die and then did things that I probably wouldn’t have done under other circumstances.

My citation for the Silver Star reads as follows:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against insurgent communist (Viet Cong) forces while attached to and serving with Company F, Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, Third Marine Division on 4 March 1966. During Operation Utah, Company F became engaged in an intense fire fight with a well organized, well entrenched enemy force. As the Company advanced, they came under vicious machine gun and automatic weapons fire. Lance Corporal Costello, serving as an Informational Service representative, could easily have reported the action from a covered position. Instead, he courageously chose to subject himself to the ferocious enemy fire and calmly helped Marines load magazines. As the Company began to sustain casualties, Lance Corporal Costello, seeing a wounded Marine, unhesitatingly defied the grave personal danger, rushing to his aid. Still ignoring the devastating hostile fire, Lance Corporal Costello went to the aid of a man who was severely burned with white phosphorous. Exposing himself to the hostile fire and completely disregarding his own safety, Lance Corporal Costello made a mud pack and applied it to the man’s burns. In so doing, he undoubtedly saved his fellow Marine’s life. By his courage, selfless devotion to his comrades and aplomb under fire, Lance Corporal Costello upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

Impossibly…we were rescued. We who still survived? We were going to live!!

As well as I can remember, I went out that morning with roughly 120 men. About 70 of them died. Many were wounded. Only twelve of us got out without a scratch. I was one of the twelve…although I did have a hole in my shirt where a bullet passed through it a few inches from my chest.

An hour or so later, at twilight, I identified the body of Les, my photographer. He had very distinctive red-brown hair that was still in place around one ear. His face and most of his skull were gone. But he had those beautiful new boots. The red-brown hair and those boots were all I needed to identify him.

The next day I caught a chopper for Da Nang to wrap things up and fly out. I went down to Dogpatch to say goodbye to the girls who had first taught me Vietnamese, but it was “Off Limits”. I stopped to chat with a couple of Vietnamese and asked about the two girls…but some MP’s overheard my (seemingly) fluent Vietnamese and arrested me as a spy.

You see, there was this rumor floating around the war about this guy called “The White Russian”. He was this multi-skilled, dangerous spy who pretended to be a Marine and spoke fluent Vietnamese. They actually thought I was the White Russian. I had them call my boss and clear it all up.

I could tell about my getting drunk on Okinawa for the first time, but what would be the point? My friends and I celebrated our survival and they thought it fitting to get me very drunk…just because none of them had ever known me to drink. Of course I got really snockered.

It took a few months at my next duty station in San Diego (at the same Recruit Depot where I went through boot camp) before my Silver Star caught up with me. They had everyone on the depot out for a parade in my honor so that the general could pin the medal on my chest and the local papers could take pictures. A month or so later, the mayor gave me the Key to the City.

I never felt like any sort of hero. I was just afraid of being captured. Too many good men died trying to save others for me to feel like I was particularly heroic. I know for a fact, that several men ran into machine gun fire to pull their friend’s from danger…only to be killed by enemy fire. There should have been dozens of citations for medals much higher than mine.

The Silver Star was harder to wear than it was to win. Remember I’m still 18 years old and I have a total of fourteen or fifteen different medals. I’d go in the mess hall for lunch and men many years older would stand back and create a path for me. Guys would hold their hands over their mouths and whisper about me….like I was a real super-hero. It was weird.

As usual, I spent my time remaining at MCRD differently than most Marines. I got a job as a cook working nights after my Marine Corps duties were finished. Working nights, I could afford a 1958 MGA Roadster Convertible. I also got to meet dozens of waitresses whose faces were always changing. Of course, these waitresses didn’t think of me as a Marine so I managed to end up in a lot of their beds. I could even afford a studio apartment in Pacific Beach about a block from the ocean. Life was pretty good.

I got an early release from the Marine Corps to attend college at San Diego State. I worked in the cafeteria for about $5.50 an hour and one free meal a day (which is all I ate that first semester). I majored in Political Science and minored in Journalism.

My college experience wasn’t all that defining. I was Freshman Class President. I was Vice President of my fraternity, Lambda Chi. In my sophomore year, the college hired me as Student News Director…a PAID position.

I did take a summer off and flew to Europe with a knapsack and my guitar. Spent most of my time in Paris, but visited Nice, Cannes, Monte Carlo, Amsterdam, parts of German, The Rhine Valley, London, Wales, and Ireland. It was a marvelous adventure.

About this time I also started singing in local restaurants.

I had a fairly high GPA, but mostly I spent a good deal of time chasing women. I was obsessed. I would often sleep with two or three new women each week. After all the waitresses, college girls were like shooting ducks in a barrel.

I needed to be loved…but it was never enough. There was a hole in my chest that couldn’t be filled. Of course…I didn’t realize any of this at the time. I was just jumping as many women as I could and discarding them just as quickly.

Life was good. I had no idea how deeply unhappy I was. Ignorance is such bliss.