Seth Rosen

Seth Rosen was born in March 1953 in Brooklyn, New York. Prior to entering the service, he was a biology student at the University of Miami. Rosen wasn’t a good student, so he dropped out in 1976 and enlisted in the Marine Corps. He wanted to become a Navy SEAL, but the Navy wouldn’t offer a contract that would guarantee an opportunity to go to SEAL school. There was a Marine Corps recruiter in the next office; Rosen thought the Marines were a pretty good outfit, so he signed up. His father had served in World War II, had fought in the Pacific against the Japanese, and did not talk much about his combat experience, except for a few humorous anecdotes.

Rosen went to Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp, which he described as “thirteen fun-filled weeks of rigorous activity”. He said of his adjustment, “going from civilian life, I was a typical teenager of the 70s, and you go into an environment where everything is rigidly controlled, rigidly scheduled; you can’t speak unless you’re given permission to; you can do nothing without permission…so it’s a big change”. Rosen thought boot camp was not designed to teach you how to be a Marine as much as it was to weed out people who shouldn’t or couldn’t be Marines. A notable aspect of boot camp, he recalled, was that if the platoon was assigned a task and someone messed up, the whole platoon shared the blame. Rosen said, “when you go through intense things with other people and they’re doing the same things, you make bonds,” adding that it was easy to make friends.

After he graduated from boot camp, Rosen was transferred to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where he was assigned to the 3^rd Battalion, 6^th Marine Regiment. The unit spent a summer month in the Mojave Desert training on the 29 Palms Marine Corps base. Following that, the battalion deployed to the Mediterranean for six months, visiting countries around the rim of the sea and training with NATO forces, including the Turkish and Italian armies and the British marines. The battalion was part of the regional “quick reaction force,” accompanied by an air wing squadron of mostly medium and heavy helicopters, with a total force of somewhere around 3,000 Marines. Rosen was an infantryman with L Company 3-6, and his company was the leading element of the battalion landing team. In his training, he learned to rappel out of helicopters, using nylon rope and a snap-link to slide down to the ground. If things flared up between Israel and one of its neighbors, there would be Marines with a full helicopter squadron available to be there within hours. The motto of Marine training was to always be ready to go.

Rosen’s unit returned to Camp Lejeune in March 1978, where he was selected to be assigned to the STA (Surveillance and Target Acquisition) platoon to train as a sniper. He graduated first in the sniper class, and then attended a training class on interrogation and resistance to interrogation techniques, was the top graduate of that class, and was promoted to corporal.

Rosen said, “one of my unhappy memories was when Jimmy Carter was President. One of the things which we trained as a battalion the most on was having a mission of flying into somewhere, securing an airfield, and then creating a corridor from that airfield to a location within a foreign country to rescue hostages, and then bring them back through that same corridor to the airfield and extract them. When the Iranians stormed the US Embassy and took hostages, we were thinking, we’ve literally been training for this for months and months to do this exact job.”  They were never deployed to do it.

When Rosen entered the Marine Corps, there were still signs of the trauma the Vietnam War had inflicted on the Corps. Recruiting standards were lowered to maintain manpower levels, and a lot of people completed boot camp who might not have otherwise. There were also problems in the general society, including racial tensions, reflected in the military when he arrived at Camp Lejeune. There were a lot of Black Marines who had decided to have a career in the Marine Corps, and they were staff sergeants and above, so they were not only in positions of authority, but were in positions where they could influence how people behaved in a truly integrated force.

After two years at Camp Lejeune, Rosen was briefly deployed to Camp Drum in New York for winter training. In January 1979, after being promoted to sergeant, he entered OCS (Officer Candidate School) training at Quantico. Rosen noted that OCS was “a similar sort of circumstance to boot camp, and for people who weren’t previously in the service, it’s a lot like boot camp in its disorientation from civilian society.”  He added that “Quantico was a very nice base that’s about 30 miles south of DC, so there’s lots to do if you have time off”.

Rosen felt that OCS, more than boot camp, was strictly designed to be a filtering process where they teach enough for you to get by as a Marine, but it is also designed to test individuals and see whether they have what it takes to be a Marine officer. He bonded with the men in his class who were former enlisted Marines, but most of the class were college graduates with no prior military experience who wanted to become Marine officers. After OCS, Rosen was commissioned as a second lieutenant and went through six months of “basic school” where he learned the specific duties of a Marine officer, and the technical information, tactics, and leadership techniques of the position. Lastly, he went to infantry officer school courses which lasted 8-9 weeks and was a very intensive, physically demanding, and high-paced course.

In December 1979, second lieutenant Rosen was assigned to Camp Pendleton, California as an infantry platoon leader. The regimental commander of the 1^st Marine Regiment, Colonel Hoar, called Quantico as each infantry officer class graduated, asking for information about the lieutenants who were coming to Camp Pendleton. Rosen was originally slated to go to the 7^th Marines, but Hoar had him switched to the 2^nd Battalion, 1^st Marines. Rosen spent six months in Okinawa, Japan, and the Western Pacific Region around the Philippines, where his unit acted as a quick reaction force in the region. They did a lot of training on different mission scenarios, including desert training, amphibious training, and cross-training with the SEALs. On one occasion, they flew to a location Rosen described as a “beautiful, tropical paradise island.” He recalled the Filipinos as “very friendly, very accommodating to us.” On another occasion, his platoon came across a water buffalo, and he got up on it to get a photo of him sitting atop it to match a photo of his father in World War II. His father was not particularly enthralled with the idea of him dropping out of college to enlist in the Marines, but ultimately came around, although it took a while.

Rosen grew up in the 60s during the Vietnam War, and says of politicians, “I think once Kennedy was shot, I never really believed a politician again, and nothing since that time has changed my mind”. He was in boot camp when Carter was elected president, and the Drill Instructors came in the next day and said that “in the 20^th century, there had never been a Democratic president who hadn’t taken us to war.”

Rosen also believed that in the 1970s, morale was relatively low compared to now, and many civilians were far from friendly.  If they went into town, soldiers were often openly shunned. When Rosen was stationed at Pendleton, he and a group of friends used to bar hop around town. He said the experience, “was like we were in quarantine”. Rosen vividly remembered going to a bar in Laguna Beach, and a waitress told them to find someplace else, because they wouldn’t have any luck with girls there. In San Clemente, he shared an apartment with two other lieutenants, and if they walked into town, it was clear that people realized they were Marines and were not particularly happy about that, which was common at the time.

Rosen’s battalion was deactivated, and his unit was now the 1^st Battalion, 9^th Marines, which had the unofficial nickname of the “Walking Dead” because they were once stationed in a region of South Vietnam that the North Vietnamese Army controlled, and they had good success in pushing the North Vietnamese out. The North Vietnamese then started targeting them, sending a regiment to fight the battalion, and they suffered high casualties. Ultimately, they were successful at clearing the enemy out of the area, and they took that moniker as a badge of honor. With that battalion, Rosen was back at Camp Pendleton for training against the Soviets due to the Cold War. Everything they did was to counter Soviet tactics and weaponry, and, to a lesser degree, Communist Chinese forces.

Rosen left active duty as a captain with the Marines in 1982 and returned to college to get a degree, but remained in the Reserves, initially in a unit located in New Hampshire, and subsequently in an “individual ready reserve” unit in New Jersey that met monthly in Trenton.

While Rosen was working for Bear Stearns on Wall Street, he was ordered by telegram to report to Camp Lejeune for active service. The Marines took preparation training seriously, but this time, they were targeting the Iraqi Army in what would become the Gulf War. The CEO of Bear Stearns announced that a reservist employee called to active duty would get paid the difference between their military pay and their pay at the company, and their job would be secure until they returned. That made a huge difference to Rosen, because a captain’s pay was $36,000 a year. His mortgage company was based in San Diego, and they offered to suspend mortgage payments during the time he was in the service. Rosen was a bit surprised that people were treating him nicely because he was serving in the military.

When the reservists arrived at Camp Lejeune, the first thing they did with the Marines was have them get a Panorex X-ray of their teeth, so that they could be identified if killed in action. The unit he was assigned to was mostly composed of officers known as a “casualty replacement” regiment. Most of the time, they trained in chemical warfare suits, because it was expected that Iraqis would use chemical weapons. Rosen had orders for the State of Qatar, and the day before he and his fellow officers were scheduled to board a plane, their trip was cancelled, since casualties were lighter than expected, and there was no longer a need for replacement captains. The actual land war lasted for 4 days; so, after about a month, they released the officers from active duty for home. After he was home for about a month, Rosen received a letter informing him that the injuries to his back made him ineligible for further active duty service. He received the National Defense Service Medal for service to his country.