Carabine Served In Two Wars, Raised Two Marines

Brian Carabine enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1965 — at a time before the draft was forcing young men to join the growing military presence in Vietnam, but when enlisting all but ensured deployment there.

He was in college at the time, but not enamored of it.

“I decided I needed to do something different for a while,” Carabine said. Being sent to Vietnam was nearly a foregone conclusion, but that didn’t worry the young would-be soldier. “I wanted to go. I believed in what we were doing there.”

Carabine was assigned to a communications unit of Marine Air Group 36, a helicopter squadron that shuttled Marines to forward bases and landing zones near areas where American forces were fighting the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong insurgents.

He would spend some 22 months from 1966 to 1968 in Vietnam.

The communications section that Carabine was assigned to was in charge of maintaining the radio. Carabine and his comrades would be sent to landing zones — LZs as they were called — to help coordinate the inbound helicopters packed with infantry soldiers ready to advance into the jungles in search of North Vietnamese insurgents.

Carabine also trained on the language encryption machines that coded messages between American commanders, provided security for medical teams that went into Vietnamese villages to help civilians and worked with psychological warfare teams that were trying to swing the support of citizens in the jungle villages to cooperate with the Americans.

He was stationed for most of his time in country in two places: Chu Lai, south of Da Nang, and Phu Bai, to the north.

“Phu Bai was interesting because we had an [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] boot camp next door and [the Viet Cong] would mortar them during the day,” Carabine recalled. “We’d be walking to lunch and we’d see mortars falling into the boot camp. They would mortar them during the day and us at night. I think they knew that if they’d mortared us during the day we’d have sent the gunships after them.”

Carabine said he supported America’s involvement in Vietnam when he deployed, supported it when he returned home, and still thinks it was a worthwhile, if ill-fated, effort.

“I didn’t get to talk to a lot of local Vietnamese, but when I was in Saigon, many of the locals there spoke English fairly well and they would often say they were happy we were there, because they were extremely concerned about the North Vietnamese,” he said.

He returned to the United States in June 1968, and was stationed at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, where he maintained the towers that provided communications to the White House and for the Marine Corps’ officer candidates school.

Carabine had been born in the Bronx, but his family had moved to Southampton when he was starting high school. In 1969, his parents were in a bad car accident and Carabine returned to Southampton to visit them in the hospital, where he met his future wife, Prudence. They were married the next year.

Carabine finished his active duty at Camp Legune in North Carolina, where he ran communications for the air station there.

After his discharge, he returned to the South Fork, settling in East Hampton, where he and his wife raised three children, Sean, Conlon and Brigid, and worked in construction engineering.

Carabine remained in the Marine Corps Reserves, where he served as operations chief for the 6th Communication Battalion from 1972 to 1993.

In 1990, he was called back to active duty as the U.S. prepared for what would become known as Operation Desert Storm.

“I had just turned 49 — we deployed on Christmas Day, 1990,” Carabine recalled. “I was a master gunnery sergeant and the systems control chief for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Saudi Arabia.”

Stationed in Saudi Arabia, Carabine’s unit was in charge of setting up and maintaining the communications systems at the Marines headquarters. They were prepared to move the entire headquarters into Kuwait as the invading infantry advanced — but the speed with which the combat portion of the fight came to a halt meant that a move was never required.

“Compared to Vietnam, it was almost a vacation,” Carabine said. “The infantry were way out in front and we didn’t even really see much until it was all over. A few Scud missiles that passed over us, that was all. We did have to fill a lot of sandbags and we had to carry around our [chemical warfare] suits all the time.”

Carabine would later travel into Kuwait, amid the pillars of black smoke from the oil wells set ablaze by retreating Iraqi soldiers.

Carabine returned to the United States in May 1991. He would remain in the reserves for another two years.

Both of the Carabines’ two sons also served in the Marines.

The older, Sean, was in boot camp at Paris Island, South Carolina, when his father was called to duty in Saudi Arabia. He had expected to be deployed as part of Operation Desert Shield — the military’s name for the mobilization that preceded Operation Desert Storm — but he was injured during his training and given a medical discharge. After more than four years of rehabilitation, Sean Carabine applied for and was granted a medical clearance to be re-enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1995. In 1998, he was diagnosed with a brain stem glioma and retired from the military. He was working as a contractor for the National Security Agency until a few months before he died in April 2007.

Conlon, the Carabines’ younger son, was a sophomore in high school when his dad deployed to Saudi Arabia. After attending Penn State on an ROTC scholarship, he joined the Marines in 1997 and served for 20 years, retiring in 2017 with the rank of major. He was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq with the 3rd Battalion 6th Marines as an infantry company commander and then returned to be embedded in the Iraqi Army as a part of a training mission. He concluded his service as the commanding officer of the Fleet Anti-Terrorism Company in Bahrain, Iraq.

Conlon Carabine will be one of the featured speakers at the East Hampton Village veterans appreciation event this Saturday, November 13.

Since leaving the reserves, Carabine has served the commander of VFW’s Everit Albert Herter Post 550, and is now the post’s quartermaster. He volunteered his engineering and construction expertise to Habitat for Humanity for 12 years and volunteered as a driver and host for Maureen’s Haven. He is also the secretary of the East Hampton Historical Farm Museum and is a Eucharistic minister at Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church.