Home Front: Dennis Rasmussen

MARSHFIELD/AUBURNDALE – Dennis Rasmussen was born in Greenwood, one of seven children.

“My mother and dad are gone, and three of my sisters are gone now,” Rasmussen said,
“When I got out of high school, I had no real plan. It cost a lot of money to go to college and stuff. A family with seven kids didn’t have money to go to college. And, back then, if you didn’t go in, you would be drafted. We don’t have a draft now, but it may come back someday. So they’d either draft you maybe when you were anywhere around 20 years old or 22, you’d get notice and you were drafted.

“I had in my mind I was going to go into the Marines. So after I graduated from high school, I did get a job at a place where they made motor homes. Oh, I hated that job. My job was on the side walls, putting in first the insulation and it was sticky, you know, all of that fiberglass all day.

“I worked there one month, and I said to my mom, ‘I’m quitting, and I’m going to go in the Marines.’ She said, ‘No, you aren’t.’ She woke me up on the last morning I worked there, and instead of going to work, I went [to] the park down by Marshfield. We lived up by the hospital, so I drove down to the park, slept for a few hours in my car, and then I went and joined the Marines. A month later, I was gone.”

Rasmussen said that he then spent four months at boot camp.

“Four months was a long time, and that was just before Vietnam, and later on they cut the boot camp down to eight weeks. They cut it down because they needed men so bad to ship over to Vietnam,” he explained.

Rasmussen then served in the Marine Corps from 1961 to 1964.

“I was stationed as soon as I got out of boot camp. I was on a ship and went to Okinawa, and I was there 13 months; but, we also then went to the Philippine islands in a show of force, and that’s what it was called,” he recalled. “It was all the naval ships, about half of all the naval ships in the Pacific on this exercise. We went down the coast of Vietnam and down around Thailand, and then we ended up in the Philippines.

“We built a big airstrip out of forms.

“Then big jets would come sweeping down, and they’d land, then there was a wire that would catch them on the ship. And if they overshot that wire, they had to kick down in gear in the after burners to shoot up, or they’d hit the big hill right behind it.

“I was a magnet for mess duty, even on the ships. ‘Rasmussen, report to the mess hall.’ I knew right away that the whole trip I’d be in the mess hall. It was 30 days, you were on mess duty for 30 days every day, and you had to be down there maybe 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and not done until everything was done and cleaned up at night for 30 days.

“I was stationed on Okinawa, then the time in the Philippines, and when I came back, 13 months later, then I was stationed at Barstow, Calif., in the desert. Everybody put in for Palm Springs, because everybody heard that it’s really nice. Marines had a base right there. No, they sent us to Barstow.”

Editor’s Note: Thank you to Joren Anderson and the students of Auburndale High School for making these veterans columns possible.