Richard Remp, who was receiving hospice care in Maryland, received his diploma Friday thanks to a whirlwind effort that involved one school superintendent driving 4.5 hours to reach him in time. He died Sunday, said James Cappuccilli, second vice commander of American Legion Post 247 in Poolesville, Maryland.

“All the dominoes lined up,” said Cappuccilli, a Marine veteran. “And if one little piece was not in place, none of this would have occurred.”

During World War II, a 17-year-old Remp joined the Marine Corps, and he would go on to serve for more than 20 years, DC News Now reported in 2021.

As a gunnery sergeant, Remp served as a door gunner in the Vietnam War, according to Cappuccilli, who pointed out that he could have avoided that dangerous work but chose it anyway.

While on a reconnaissance mission in Vietnam in December 1966, Remp helped extract nine Marines who were surrounded by Viet Cong forces, DC News Now reported. With his helicopter hovering over the pickup area for more than an hour under fire, Remp fired more than 1,000 rounds at enemy forces, enabling the Marines to be saved, according to the outlet.

Despite a lifetime of proven toughness, Remp was a gentle man, “a peach,” Cappuccilli said.

“You would have never known he was a Marine, other than we talked a lot of Marine stuff,” he said.

And Remp had a mischievous sense of humor, said Cappuccilli, who said the nonagenarian was “funny, funny, funny.”

In February, Cappuccilli, a former high school guidance counselor, had the idea of honoring Remp by securing him a high school diploma. Initially believing Remp was a graduate of Sharon High School in Sharon, Pennsylvania, Cappuccilli got in touch with school officials there, he said.

Justi Glaros, superintendent of the Sharon City School District, quickly agreed to speak with with her school board and see what she could do.

Glaros learned that Pennsylvania allowed the awarding of high school diplomas to veterans who didn’t graduate from high school because they had served in World War II, the Korean War or the Vietnam War. Remp had served in all three.

“From our board, it was no question, 100%, we would like to give Mr. Remp an honorary diploma,” Glaros said.

But as she dug through yearbooks, she discovered there had been a mixup: Remp actually had attended a different high school nearby. That school board got to work on securing a diploma.

On May 14, Cappuccilli learned Remp had been diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer and was in hospice care. He called Glaros to tell her Remp was very ill and to thank her for her efforts, he said.

Glaros wasn’t giving up. She reached out to the nearby school to see if it could get the diploma to Remp in the next few days, but school officials told her they couldn’t speed up the process.

So Glaros talked to her own school board president and, on Friday morning, got Remp’s diploma printed. Fearing it wouldn’t reach Remp in time if she mailed it, she decided to make the 4.5-hour drive to Maryland herself, she said.

As Glaros stepped foot out of her car, Cappuccilli recounted, he told her, “You’re going to heaven, because this act puts you there.”

For Glaros, meeting the World War II veteran was like meeting a rockstar, she said. At first, it made her nervous.

“It was just an incredible honor to be able to give that to him,” she said. “When I was speaking with him, it was like we had been best friends forever.”

Remp told the crowd of family and friends by his bed that he was “really happy,” ABC 7 reported.

“You people just don’t know what it means to me,” Remp said, according to the outlet. “I’ll cherish this for the rest of my life.”

The next day, Saturday, Remp was speaking with pride about that diploma even as he began to fade, according to Marine veteran Julien Singh, commander of American Legion Post 247.

Glaros said she was glad she had the opportunity to give back to Remp. She said she tries to instill in her students the importance of being good to others.

“For me, it was a no-brainer,” she said. “It was just an act of kindness.”

The Criminal Investigations Division of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, arrested the pair for trespassing and notified ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, office in Washington, office spokesperson James Covington told Marine Corps Times in a statement Thursday.

Deportation officers arrested the two people, whom Covington described as “Jordanian noncitizens.”

“Both individuals will remain in ERO custody pending removal proceedings,” Covington said.

The pair had driven up to a gate of the base in a box truck and, when questioned by military sentries, claimed to be Amazon subcontractors making a delivery to the town of Quantico, Virginia, which is accessed through the base, Marine spokesman Capt. Michael Curtis told Marine Corps Times on Tuesday.

When military police directed the two to go to a holding area to undergo standard vetting procedures, the driver instead went past that area and attempted to drive onto the base, Curtis said. The base’s law enforcement put up the vehicle denial barriers, blocking the truck from getting farther onto the base, and detained the pair.

Potomac Local News first reported the attempted breach.

The Virginia base is home to Marine Corps Combat Development Command, which is dedicated to modernizing the force, along with some of the service’s training schools and other elements. Other Defense Department components and federal law enforcement agencies also have a presence on the base.

Cpl. Gage Barbieri, now 21, received the Meritorious Service Medal on Friday from Col. Damon Burrows, commanding officer of 2nd Marine Division’s Headquarters Battalion. Barbieri is only the second Marine corporal to receive the Meritorious Service Medal since at least 2008, Burrows wrote on LinkedIn.

While serving as the Marine Corps’ representative to Oshkosh Defense as it revised its technical manuals for the joint light tactical vehicle, Barbieri pointed out flaws in the manuals, including one issue that could lead to rollovers.

Barbieri’s engineering acumen would save more than 900,000 hours of maintenance production time and more than $140 million throughout the entire life cycle of the platform, the Corps calculated.

“This was one hell of a catch by this young Marine,” said Jason Wolfe, Marine Corps production support manager to the vehicle’s program executive officer at Oshkosh, in a Marine Corps news release. “His work on this work package could possibly prevent loss of life.”

Barbieri, a native of Loxahatchee, Florida, always has been interested in the way things worked, he recounted Thursday in an interview with Marine Corps Times.

As a little kid, he would take apart his toys. Then, remembering where each screw had been, he would reassemble them, or try to build something that looked a little different.

Even then, he found it easy to retain information, Barbieri said.

“Once I’ve done it once, it’ll feel like I’ve done it a hundred times, and I can find the easiest way to do it,” he said.

At 14, he started drag racing through the International Hot Rod Association. He learned how to check over his car before getting onto the track.

But most of his background in mechanical engineering was theoretical knowledge — about aspects of systems like wiring and resistance — he gleaned from reading technical manuals, he said.

Having skipped fourth grade, Barbieri graduated from high school in 2019 at only 16. He spent two semesters studying mechanical engineering, first at Palm Beach State College in Florida and second at the University of California at Berkeley, but he didn’t love it.

Then a Marine recruiter approached him at a career fair.

“I’d tried everything else out, and I couldn’t find anything wrong with joining the Marine Corps,” Barbieri said.

He arrived at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, in June 2020. After his initial training, he attended the Automotive Maintenance Technician Basic Course, where he was an honor graduate, according to the news release.

Barbieri checked into Truck Company, Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in April 2021. When he arrived, the joint light tactical vehicles also were new to the unit.

“As they started breaking, there was more and more different aspects we had to fix and not a lot of people with the experience that had already worked on them,” Barbieri said.

When Barbieri was about six months into working at the unit, he faced a problem that didn’t have an easy solution: how to replace hoses that ran from the vehicles’ engine bay to the back end.

It took him two weeks, but he figured it out, he said.

After that, his leaders tasked him with repairing more and more vehicles with thorny problems. Barbieri repaired more than 75 trucks, keeping the battalions’ readiness above 90%, according to the news release.

His leaders took notice.

“He could diagnose issues that most Marines couldn’t find and was able to make the repairs that civilian engineers from external organizations couldn’t,” said Master Sgt. Kenneth Byxbee Jr., Barbieri’s former motor transport maintenance chief, in the news release.

Later in 2021, while Barbieri was still a 19-year-old lance corporal, his command selected him to spend months working with Oshkosh’s tech writing team in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on the technical manuals for the joint light tactical vehicle.

“Anytime I would find something that felt like it was out of order or would mess with the flow of things, we’d write that down,” Barbieri said.

Based on those issues, Barbieri and the rest of the team would pile into a conference room and suggest changes to the technical manuals.

One day, Barbieri noticed a problem with a manual’s instructions for replacing the steering column. Installing the replacement part that way would have stopped the steering wheel from moving, he said.

“If that happened while you were in a turn or on a highway, that could cause a rollover,” he said.

Oshkosh was receptive to what he had to say and worked with him to change the instructions, Barbieri said.

That wasn’t the only change Barbieri suggested.

Barbieri “stunned their engineers with his brilliance and change proposals for both fabrication of new vehicle components and for updating the electronic maintenance manuals that are now published and being fielded by the program office across all military branches of service,” Burrows wrote on LinkedIn.

On Friday, Barbieri received the Meritorious Service Medal, which is awarded to service members who distinguish themselves through “outstanding meritorious achievement or service.”

Barbieri celebrated later that day by ordering himself a buffalo-chicken pizza, he said.

He is set to leave the Marine Corps in June. The next step is college at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where he plans to study mechanical engineering. He hopes of becoming a tech writer, who writes manuals himself, he said.

For now, though, he is an instructor at the course that teaches lance corporals leadership skills as they prepare for the promotion to corporal.

Barbieri said he loves the job.

“I just like getting in front of Marines and talking to them, making sure they know more than I did,” he said.

Former Cpl. Lawrence “Larry” Diggs received early birthday wishes on May 4 from President Joe Biden, Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith and Commander of Africa Command Gen. Michael Langley — the Corps’ first Black four-star general.

“All Marines — myself included — are better for having such fine examples of selflessness to learn from and emulate,” Langley wrote in his letter. “We are a better Corps for everything you’ve done.”

Diggs was one of the more than 19,000 Black Marines who trained at Montford Point, North Carolina, between 1942 and 1949. Although the Montford Point Marines in recent years have received recognition from Congress and the Marine Corps for their trailblazing service, it was a different story during their time in the then-segregated Marine Corps.

For example: Although Diggs served honorably with 1st Marine Division during World War II and participated in the Battle of Peleliu, he left the Marine Corps in 1946 without any awards on his record, according to his friend, Marine veteran Keith Widaman.

After his service in the Corps, Larry Diggs worked for the United States Steel Corporation and then for the U.S. Post Office, according to Widaman.

His son David Diggs, 54, knew since childhood that his father had been in the Marines in World War II. But Larry Diggs didn’t provide many details about his service.

He would share occasional anecdotes about encountering wildlife like crabs or spiders in his foxholes on Pacific Islands, and having to remain quiet as they crawled around, but not about the fighting itself, David Diggs said.

Larry Diggs always was the peacemaker of the household, his son said. He taught David Diggs discipline, such as the importance of wiping the sink after you brush your teeth so you leave it clean for others. He expounded a philosophy of enjoying life’s journeys rather than getting wrapped up in the destination.

But there is one destination Larry Diggs has been excited about for a long time.

“My dad has been talking about looking forward to turning 100 since he turned 80,” David Diggs said.

Widaman, 40, got to know Diggs while a member of the Mizzou Student Veterans Association at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Diggs, who lived nearby, was a fixture at local veterans’ events, Widaman said, and student veterans would help him with his lawn and shrubs.

The first time Widaman, who left the Marine Corps in 2009, came to Diggs’ house, the older veteran looked out at the sky nervously, Widaman recalled. When it began to rain, Diggs excused himself and went outside to take the American flag down from his flagpole.

“You just don’t see that sort of respect for the flag and that level of patriotism anymore,” Widaman said.

In 2019, Widaman reached out to Marine Corps officials to get Diggs, then 95, invited to the commandant’s Marine Corps birthday ball in Washington, D.C.

Widaman said he raised approximately $9,000 online for plane tickets, a hotel, dress blues (Diggs’ own pair was stolen in the 1940s), a noncommissioned officer sword and a tuxedo. The next step was figuring out which medals Diggs had received as a Marine, so the older veteran could wear them to the birthday event, where he was honored as the oldest Marine in attendance.

But the only award Diggs had was the Congressional Gold Medal replica he and other Montford Point Marines had received in 2012.

Widaman told Marine Corps Times he worked with the Marine Corps to secure the awards Diggs’ service merited: the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with 1 bronze star, the World War II Victory Medal, the Navy Occupation Service Medal and a Combat Action Ribbon. None of these were listed on his service record.

Widaman presented the medals to Diggs at the African American History and Culture Museum in Washington, D.C., before the Marine Corps birthday festivities.

“How many men of Montford Point have lived their whole lives and passed away and they never knew that they earned medals from their actions or service in World War II, and their families still don’t know?” Widaman said.

In 2022, when Larry Diggs and his wife, Margie, were staying with David Diggs in Tacoma, Washington, the family read an article about Gen. Michael Langley becoming the first Black four-star general in the Marine Corps.

Margie Diggs suggested to David Diggs, “Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to get a letter from Gen. Langley to recognize your father at his 100th birthday?”

David Diggs decided he would try, but wasn’t sure how, he said. Then he had the idea of getting Widaman involved.

Widaman — a Defense Department civilian who emphasized he acted entirely in a personal capacity — reached out on LinkedIn to retired Gen. Gary Thomas, the former assistant Marine commandant, who pointed him in the right direction. One of Widaman’s friends, who worked in the Pentagon, helped too.

Other people chipped in. Marines from the recruiting station in Chicago volunteered to present the letters from Smith and Langley. The Bolingbrook Golf Club, in the Chicago suburb where Larry and Margie Diggs are living, agreed to host the Diggs family in its event space for free, Widaman said.

In addition to the official letter from Langley was a photo of the general with handwritten birthday wishes.

“You and the rest of the Montford Point Marines plowed the way,” Langley wrote. “Thank you for your service to God, Corps, and Country.”

The letters came as a surprise to Larry Diggs, David Diggs said.

“The combination of hearing it and then being presented with the letter and being able to actually see it and see who it was from was really quite a moment for him,” David Diggs said. “I think he was like, ‘Wow, I never thought or dreamed or even considered that I would be recognized for my 100th birthday by these people.’”

Since the May 4 event, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has sent a letter of his own to honor the Marine veteran’s milestone birthday, which is on Saturday.

Handwritten at the bottom of Brown’s typed letter are five words: “Thanks for paving a way.”

Former Pfc. Joshua Cobb, 23, of Trenton, New Jersey, was charged via complaint with one count of transmitting a threat in interstate and foreign commerce, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey said in a news release.

Records of the alleged threats start in December 2022, when a social media user with an IP address linked to Cobb’s residence in New Jersey declared he was planning to “erase” white people in a shooting, according to the complaint.

“I want to cause mayhem on the white community,” the user wrote. “The reason i specifically want to target white people is because as a black male, they will NEVER understand my struggles.”

On another social platform, a user who went by the name “1dayUsuffer” posted in spring 2023 of his hope of becoming a serial killer.

The user made several posts expressing a desire to commit mass violence, and said the posts would serve as “evidence” and “clues” for “when im done.”

“I’d probably (overdose) on my own adrenaline after the 10th body goes down,” he wrote in one post.

In another post, the user said he had killed his cat with a crossbow.

“Very bloody scene and I loved it,” he wrote.

The user described a family history of schizophrenia but said he refused to get evaluated lest he lose his firearms license.

FBI agents later used IP addresses and other clues to link Cobb to the account, the complaint said.

In June 2023, Cobb started boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, Marine spokeswoman 2nd Lt. Giselle Cancino said in an emailed statement to Marine Corps Times on Tuesday. He became a private first class in September 2023.

He checked into Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California, in February, as a rifleman with 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, according to Cancino.

FBI agents seized Cobb’s phone and interviewed him on the California base April 2, according to the complaint.

During the interview, Cobb admitted he had written the posts, and he specified the gym and grocery store he had considered as targets for an attack, the complaint said. He told the FBI agents he had access to guns through people he knew, including a relative who legally owned firearms.

When FBI agents informed him that his cellphone was being seized, Cobb became irate and said, “These are the things that make someone want to do the things we talked about,” according to the complaint.

On his phone were notes from April 2023 and May 2023 expressing his desire to kill and detailing how to bring guns into New Jersey, according to the complaint.

The Marine Corps discharged Cobb on Friday, according to Cancino, who did not specify the nature of the discharge. During his brief time in the Marine Corps, Cobb received a Certificate of Commendation but no personal awards, and he did not deploy, the spokeswoman said.

Cobb has been in federal custody since his arrest Monday, according to court records. His bail hearing is set to occur this Friday.

He faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, according to the news release.

Saverio Viggiano, a federal public defender with the District of New Jersey who is representing Cobb, said the public defender office doesn’t comment on cases.

The two people drove up to the Fuller Road Gate of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, in a box truck and were stopped by military sentries, Capt. Michael Curtis, a spokesman for the base, said in a statement to Marine Corps Times on Tuesday.

“When asked, the operator of the truck informed the military police officers they worked for a company subcontracted by Amazon and were making a delivery to the U.S. Post Office located in the Town of Quantico,” Curtis said in the statement.

Because the two had no affiliation with the Marine base and no credentials to enter it, military police officers directed them to go to a holding area to undergo standard vetting procedures, according to Curtis. But the driver blew past the holding area and attempted to drive onto the base.

Officers put up the vehicle denial barriers, blocking the truck from getting any farther onto the base, and detained the pair.

No one was injured, according to Curtis.

The Marine Corps later turned the pair over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That agency did not respond by time of publication to a Marine Corps Times request for more information about the two people who were detained.

“When any vehicle and its occupants fail to comply with the clear direction of the on-duty Police Officers, specific steps are taken by those officers to restrict any further access,” Curtis said in the statement. “Those actions by our on-duty Police officers helped maintain the safety and security of all who live and work on Marine Corps Base Quantico.”

Potomac Local News, which first reported the attempted breach, reported hearing from multiple unnamed sources that one of the truck’s occupants was a Jordanian national who had recently crossed the southern border into the United States and that one occupant was on the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list.

Located in northern Virginia, Marine Corps Base Quantico is less than an hour’s drive from Washington. To enter the town of Quantico, Virginia, where the pair claimed to be heading, vehicles have to drive through the Marine installation.

The installation is home to the Corps’ Combat Development Command, which is dedicated to modernizing the force, plus a smattering of Marine schools and other elements. It also hosts some activities of the FBI, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies.

In January 2023, a car caught fire after coming into contact with vehicle denial barriers when its driver tried to gain unauthorized access to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California.

Military police in September 2023 shot at and ultimately detained a driver who had gained unauthorized access to Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California. In March, military law enforcement at the same base nabbed a Chinese national who had tried to get onto the same base.

Chinese nationals have accessed military installations and other sensitive facilities in the United States around 100 times in recent years, sometimes by posing as tourists, The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2023.

“I have to say, I am not from your tribe — I’m from a different tribe,” Assistant Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney told a crowd that included dozens of Marine grunts at the Marine Corps Association’s Ground Awards Dinner on Thursday in Arlington, Virginia. “I grew up in a tribe that had one purpose, and that was to support your tribe.”

“There is no other excuse for my tribe,” he continued. “There never has been.”

In a service that prides itself on its tough infantry, most top leaders have themselves been career infantry officers. Now-retired Gen. James Amos, the Corps’ first aviator commandant, was unpopular among some Marines who bristled at being led by a general from outside the infantry community.

Mahoney — who served as acting commandant for four months while Commandant Gen. Eric Smith (an infantry officer) recovered from a cardiac arrest — is another aviator. He has amassed more than 5,000 hours of flight time in the A-6, F-5, F-18 and F-35, according to his official bio.

But he also is a graduate of the infantry officer course. And, on Thursday, he had some fiery words of praise for the Marines who train to fight on land.

“You, as the ground combat element, are the purveyors of constitutional violence,” Mahoney said. “You are the righteous destroyers. If 2,500 years of military history points us in a direction, you are the deciders. You are the finishers.”

Corps leaders have said the war in Ukraine demonstrates Marines should be prepared to knock out ships with long-range fires, surveil adversaries in all domains and work to avoid detection themselves. Although Mahoney reiterated those points on Thursday, he also pointed out that the bloody, protracted fighting in Ukraine has taken place primarily on the ground.

At the same event, Mahoney honored the winners of the Corps’ best squad competition: 1st Squad, 1st Platoon, Charlie Company, 3rd Littoral Combat Team, 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment.

Mahoney gave each Marine in the squad, and one Navy corpsman, a handshake and a hearty punch on the arm. Then the general posed for a group photo with the young infantrymen.

He positioned himself at the very edge of the group.

Each year, a portion of Marine noncommissioned officers are given special duty assignments, which take them out of their regular jobs for a few years to perform other duties on behalf of the Corps. Now, the combat instructor job, which entails training Marines in combat skills, counts as a special duty assignment.

“It’s an extremely rewarding duty because you actually get to affect and to teach the warfighting skills that all Marines learn through the entry-level training pipeline, and it’s really critical for the operational readiness of the force,” Gunnery Sgt. Tyler Stokes, the enlisted assignments monitor for the combat instructor community, said in a video the Marine Corps recently posted to LinkedIn.

Marines get plucked from their regular jobs and placed into special duty assignments through the annual Headquarters Marine Corps Special Duty Assignment Screening Team screening process, often called HSST for short.

The Marine Corps itself said in an administrative message in 2023, “A successful SDA tour is a hallmark of a competitive Marine and makes him or her exceptionally qualified for promotion.”

The other special duty assignments are recruiter, drill instructor and Marine security guard detachment commander. Before a rule change that was announced in 2017, combat instructor and Marine security guard watchstander also counted as special duty assignments.

After that change, those two jobs became Type 1 screenable billets, a category that also includes Marine Corps security forces guards, staff noncommissioned officer academy faculty advisors and curriculum developers, and Marine special operators, among others, according to Marine spokeswoman Capt. Sarah Eason.

“Designation as a Special Duty Assignment increases the staffing priority of this duty, ensuring maximum fill of available billets,” Eason said of the recent redesignation of the combat instructor role via email May 3.

A 2019 analysis by the Marine Corps of the impact of special duty assignments — which at the time didn’t include combat instructor — on Marines’ lives found they were correlated with better promotion chances but also with higher rates of divorce, addiction and suicide attempts.

“Due to increased responsibilities and duties outside of one’s normal occupational field, SDA tours are often viewed as a Marine’s most stressful noncombat tour,” the analysis stated.

Now that being a combat instructor is a special duty assignment again, Marines who complete that role won’t end up on future HSST lists, according to Eason.

For the next special duty assignment season, fiscal year 2026, combat instructor may be an option for Marines who end up on the list “but will be subject to availability after the volunteer period,” Eason said.

“Unlike other SDAs, there are a limited number of Combat Instructor billets open to any primary military occupational specialty, and these routinely fill with volunteers,” the spokeswoman added. “The preponderance of Combat Instructor billets requires an infantry primary (military occupational specialty), so Marines in this field will likely be able to request Combat Instructor duty during the HSST.”

As a special duty assignment, the combat instructor role will come with incentives that include easier promotions and choice over a next duty station, according to Eason. Combat instructors will continue to receive special pay.

A plan to make the combat instructor job a special duty assignment again has been in the works since at least 2021, as the Corps planned to lengthen the infantry course from nine to 14 weeks, creating a demand for more instructors. Training Command did not respond by time of publication to a Marine Corps Times question about the current length of the course.

But the student froze with fear. In between three seconds and five seconds, the grenade would have exploded in the young Marine’s hand.

Meil yanked the student out of the training pit and swatted the grenade out of his hand. Unfortunately, it bounced off a wall and landed near the two of them.

So Meil covered the student with his body and prepared to die. He was sad for his wife, whom he had married 11 days prior.

Meil, 26, who survived the blast with extensive injuries, said in an interview with Marine Corps Times he acted out of a sense of obligation to his students.

“I look at these students as like my little brothers,” said Meil, who now is a staff sergeant.

Brotherhood was what drove Meil to enlist in the Marine Corps in the first place. He grew up in Texas, where football “is basically a religion,” and had the importance of camaraderie drilled into him as he played the sport, he said.

As a high school senior in 2016, Meil got a call from a Marine recruiter soon after he’d heard that a college scholarship wouldn’t pan out.

They got lunch. Meil completed the enlistment process within 72 hours, he said.

After attending boot camp in 2016, Meil became a rifleman, spending time in Hawaii, Japan and California, as well as deployed with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

In October 2022, he started Marine combat instructor school at Camp Pendleton, California.

A few days before his graduation, his own instructors took him and the other soon-to-be combat instructors on a steep sunrise hike up one of the base’s big hills, Old Smokey.

At the top of the hill, Marines in the school received “halos,” elastic helmet bands with their names on them.

One of the school’s instructors told the Marines, These halos don’t put you before the students — they represent your role as their guardian angels, who must put the students first.

“That could have been hogwash, but I kind of took it to heart,” Meil said.

His goal as a combat instructor at California’s School of Infantry–West is to train young Marines to be ready should they have to go to combat, he said. He also serves as a mentor who models what a squad leader would be like in the fleet.

June 13, 2023, was supposed to be a typical day for him and his students on the grenade range, Meil said.

But one of Meil’s students messed up the order of the steps he was supposed to take before throwing the grenade, Meil said. The grenade’s safety lever dislodged.

After shielding his student from the blast, Meil awakened to his friends tending to him. He was taken to a hospital in the same ambulance as the student whose error could have cost him his life.

At first, Meil said, he was furious at the student, who had sustained only minor injuries. Then Meil, who is Catholic, felt “the peace of God” come over him.

“I was like, ‘You’re alive, I’m alive — we’re good, man,’” Meil recounted.

Meil said the care he received at the civilian hospital was so lacking — for instance, providers refused him pain meds — that he left after four hours, and ended up embarking on his recovery on his own couch.

He had 20 pieces of shrapnel throughout his body, including two in his nostrils, and a severe traumatic brain injury, he said. It should have taken him about a year to recover.

But with support from his wife and his leaders, and with an array of therapies, Meil was back training infantry students within six months.

Meil said the student whose life he saved was dropped from his class but completed infantry training with another class. Before he graduated, Meil told him: Your life was saved, and you need to be better for it. You need to be the most squared-away Marine you can be.

Meil said he hasn’t heard from the young Marine since.

Immediately after the incident that injured Meil, Marine Corps Training Command halted all live grenade training to allow for a safety investigation and review of standard operating procedures, according to Marine Corps Training Command spokesman Maj. Joshua Pena. The training resumed in January, Pena said.

There were no other mishaps involving live grenades in 2023 within Training Command, according to Pena.

In March, the United Service Organizations named Meil its Marine of the year.

“Brett’s unwavering courage and decisive actions in the face of personal risk exemplify the highest standards of conduct expected of Marines,” the USO wrote in a post about its service members of the year.

Meil said his command also has put him forward for a Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the Corps’ top award for noncombat heroism. Pena told Marine Corps Times he couldn’t comment on pending awards.

Meanwhile, Meil is still a combat instructor, and he still loves it.

On April 3, he went with his 16 students to the grenade range, for the first time since the blast.

Meil, who said he still experiences post-traumatic stress from that day in June 2023, made a beeline for the same pit from which he had scooped the student. He felt he had to conquer it.

His heart was racing. But another instructor threw alongside him first, and then he felt fine.

Meil threw. His 16 privates threw.

“It was good for me to get back on that horse,” Meil said.

The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s amphibious combat vehicle platoon on Saturday conducted a live-fire exercise in Oyster Bay, Philippines, as the unit was deployed to the country for the massive bilateral exercise Balikatan.

Amphibious combat vehicles can emerge from an amphibious ships’ well deck, transport Marines through the waves and roll ashore. These capabilities make the vehicles a key part of how the Marine Corps, the military’s amphibious force, would launch amphibious assaults.

In the training exercise, the platoon launched the vehicles from the dock landing ship Harpers Ferry and formed into assault sections, according to a Marine Corps news release. Then the Marines approached and shot at targets ashore with their externally mounted Mk 19 40 mm grenade machine guns, controlled by remote weapons systems.

Instead of firing high-explosive grenades in the bay, the vehicles used 40 mm training rounds that mark targets with orange chalk, the release said.

After the exercise, the Marines and amphibious combat vehicles returned to the Harpers Ferry.

“The hard work and dedication of our Marines is what made today’s training successful,” Col. Sean Dynan, commanding officer of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said in the news release. “Today’s training is a proof of concept across the Marine Corps for successful ACV employment in its intended environment.”

The journey to getting the amphibious combat vehicle ready for overseas operations has been bumpy.

The amphibious combat vehicle is the replacement for the amphibious assault vehicle, the aging platform that Marines had used since the 1970s.

The newer vehicle is heavier and fitted with a V-shaped rather than flat hull to protect from underbody blasts. It is wheeled, rather than tracked, as its predecessor platform was.

In 2020, an amphibious assault vehicle sank off the coast of California, killing eight Marines and a sailor. The Corps ceased deploying amphibious assault vehicles in late 2021 amid the transition to the amphibious combat vehicle.

But from September 2021 to January 2022, the Marine Corps paused waterborne operations with the amphibious combat vehicle because of a problem with the tow rope.

After waterborne training resumed, a vehicle rollover in July 2022 prompted the Corps to suspend it again. The vehicles returned to the water in late September 2022, but a mishap a few weeks later led the service to cease most training with the vehicle in choppy waters.

The Marine Corps attributed these mishaps, in which no injuries were reported, to insufficient training on how the newer vehicle differed from its predecessor. After developing a new curriculum, it recertified operators and maintainers through a transition training unit at Camp Pendleton, California’s Assault Amphibian School.

In January, Assistant Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney announced the vehicles would deploy with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in March.

Some elements of the unit, including the amphibious combat vehicle platoon, deployed aboard the Harpers Ferry on March 19, according to the news release. The amphibious transport dock Somerset has carried other Marines from the unit to the Philippines.

A third ship that is supposed to transport the unit’s remaining Marines, the amphibious assault ship Boxer, returned to San Diego for maintenance less than two weeks after it deployed.

Marines with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit are gathering insights related to the amphibious combat vehicles’ “employment, embarkation, maintenance requirements, logistics trains, and integration with our allies and partners,” the Marine Corps said in the news release.

In the summer, Marines based in Japan will receive their first amphibious combat vehicles, Col. Tim Hough, the Corps’ program manager for advanced amphibious assault, said May 1. BAE Systems has fielded 184 amphibious combat vehicles to the Corps, all of them to Camp Pendleton, California — the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s home base.

Twelve amphibious combat vehicles will arrive at the Okinawa, Japan-based 4th Marine Regiment in July, according to Hough.

“That’s important because now we’ll be in distinct geographical locations,” Hough said.