1st Lt Kent Steen, USMCR

In basic school, the newly commissioned Second Lieutenants were housed in quarters that were much like a college dormitory. As I recall, there were two to four men to a room; I'm not certain now who my roommates were, but Kent may have been one of them. I am certain that he was the best friend I had in basic school.

I thought Kent was a humorous person, and I thought he was real. He had trouble, as I amply did as well, with many of the physical aspects of our indoctrination program. So I felt a kindred spirit I suppose.

Kent owned a white Austin-Healey and he was most proud of it. It was probably his nice sports car that convinced me to trade in my reliable 1956 Ford for a brand new 1965 Valiant. No comparison with the Austin-Healey, you say? My Valiant was candy apple (or is it candied apple?) red with a black interior. It had a 225 cid, slant six with a Hurst 4-speed shifter. Hey, I thought it was a real big deal!

As much as I liked Kent, I was always giving him a hard time about being a slob. In retrospect, I think he just happened to have a posture that made clothes tend to hang poorly. In my youth and naivete, I used to chide him, telling him that he would never make it in the Marine Corps.

In the mid-eighties, I chanced to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. As I mention in Images in the Otherland, that placed always consumed me when I would visit. On this particular visit, I was standing a short distance from the bronze statue of the soldiers overlooking the wall. It was noon and the place was filled with people loose on their lunch hour. Joggers were everywhere.

A man in jogging clothes near the statues seemed familiar to me. As I approached, I realized that it was Kent. He recognized me immediately. And one of the first things he mentioned was how I had given him such a hard time in basic school about the slim possibility of him succeeding in the Marine Corps. He was stationed in Washington at that time, quite obviously proving me very wrong. And the fact that he had never forgotten what I had said to him then made me feel like the lowest form of life.

We exchanged cards. And the following Christmas I sent him a card. The following year I tried calling his home phone number in Triangle, Virginia, a little town near Quantico. The number was no longer any good. I had lost him again. Then a few years ago, I tried an internet search and retrieved the results of a race (5K, I think). There was Kent's name. Located again, we now exchange e-mail now and again.