Retired Sergeant Loves Marine Corps, Despite Prejudice

He arrived in style at Long Beach VA Medical Center on April 11, his 85th birthday, helped from his metallic red Cadillac SUV onto his matching red electric scooter. 

Retired U.S. Marine Sgt. Mitchell Key, his bad knee keeping him on his scooter, was decked out with 24 U.S. Marine Corps pins adorning his red suspenders.

 Here was a man clearly proud of his 25 years, six months and eight days' service in a military branch once  bitterly opposed to integration.

 The Marine Hymn celebrates the military branch’s famous history, “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli,” but their deeds of derring-do in the old days were only achieved by white men.
 According to Key, the Corps was not brave when it came to enlisting black men.    People should know this, for millions of U.S.  citizens are blissfully unaware of this distasteful bit of history.

Despite his crippled knee, Key stands tall morally and is still devoted to a service that didn't want him. Key was only one of thousands treated like second-class citizens nearly 70 years ago.
"I was a part of an organization that was very, very prejudiced." said Key.

But the trials and tribulations of the earliest black Marines, first sworn into the ranks in 1942 , did not embitter him, he said. 
"There were thousands of us in combat, but they wouldn't let us fight," said Key, whose near-perfect rifle range score of 246 hits on 250 targets got him assigned as a marksmanship instructor.

Still, black Marines were deployed as common laborers, not infantry troops, even under hostile fire.
 "We delivered the bullets and the beans and brought the bodies back out," said Key, noting another subtle technique the Corps used to keep black Marines from achieving higher status.

 If there were no advanced schools for black Marines, that was too bad, but there was a war on, and white Marines already had the specialized schools filled to capacity. It was segregation, carried out with a wink from uppermost ranks.

  "But I still  love the ground the U.S, Marine Corps marches on, despite the hardships," said Key, a longtime Long Beach resident who following his retirement became assistant transportation foreman at McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft.

 He craved learning and had an enterprising spirit as far back as the 1930s, when a person of color receiving higher education was still an anomaly.

  "I kind of got into my specialty through the back door," Key explained.

  He'd been classified as an armorer of infantry weapons, from .45-caliber semiautomatic pistols and rifles to machine guns and light artillery, but armorer training schools were for white Marines only.

 Key was sent to an ordnance unit in 1948 as a marksmanship instructor, after that near-perfect rifle range performance.
 With access to all firearm-repair manuals, Key studied them on his own time and eventually mastered the gunsmith trade.

He requested permission to take the qualification test and passed it but Key found doors still locked, shunned by white Marines working side by side in ordnance repair.
 "I was in the First Marine Division most of my career. I went to Guam in 1949-50 as a newly qualified gunsmith/armorer and for 18 months, not a white fellow Marine spoke to me in the shop."
  Key served in the Korean War and at many duty stations here and abroad before the Vietnam War, where he did see real combat action, though he was never wounded. By now a master sergeant, he was occasionally designated First Sergeant in the hierarchy of a military unit's headquarters company.
  "When they got shot at  (Marines in the field), you got shot at," he explained, so all members of the unit were eligible for retaliatory forays to engage Viet Cong or North Vietnamese. Key's awards include the Navy Commendation Medal for Vietnam, with six Battle Stars for combat operations. 
 Following the Vietnam tour, the aging master sergeant had enough.
  He went directly from fields of combat to the USMC Supply Depot in Philadelphia, working side-by-side with Government Service (GS) personnel who had no military pride and traditions. Key was also stung by the hostility toward America's returning Vietnam  vets.
  "I had planned to put in 30 years, but I wasn't ready for this," he recalled.

Key remained with the Corps for 25 years, six months and eight days, which qualified him for a 26-year pension and left the Corps for a second career in transportation for Douglas Aircraft. He spent 10 years in Hawaii, but settled back in Long Beach.   
 Serious Health issues brought him to the VA Medical Center to determine his eligibility for benefits resulting from Agent Orange exposure.and was determined to be 100 percent disabled by the herbicide once touted as safe for humans to handle. Other chemicals such as a gun-cleaning solvent, also harmed him.
Key is grateful for VAMC care but still believes there are politics involved with medical care for those of color, as opposed to white veterans,  just as in the Marine Corps.

He had arthroscopic surgery on his arthritic knee April 13.

Doctors offered him crutches and a wheelchair, neither useful at this stage of recuperation, so he asked about an electric scooter to get around. "You get a scooter and you'll put on 50 lbs. in six months," the male doctor said disapprovingly.

  "See Dr.--------- and have him put you on oxygen." another physician suggested. ""Then they'll give you a scooter."   
  Key laughed to himself.
  "I don' t need this, I ain't rich, but I 've  got a bucketful of money. I'll just go down and buy my own scooter. And that's what I did."