Pete Palestina

U.S. Marine Corps forever changed his life.

By Jeff Werner, BucksLocalNews.com


“Oh my God, he’s going to get killed.”

Northampton Township resident Pete Palestina can still hear his mother’s reaction as he told his father over the phone from the North Broad Street recruiting office that he had been drafted into the U.S. Marine Corps.

It was Feb. 1, 1966 and the Vietnam War was raging.

Growing up in a heavily Italian neighborhood in South Philadelphia, Palestina wanted to do two things with his life – be a mobster or a cop. The last thing he wanted was a tour in Vietnam.

“That’s just what I didn’t need to hear,” said Palestina, of his mother’s words. Up to that point, he had done everything to avoid the Corps, and with good reason. During the days of Vietnam, no other branch of service had a higher casualty rate.

Just weeks earlier, he had turned down a six-month commitment to the Marines. “Here I could have gone for six months, but now I’m being drafted. It was like a nightmare,” he said.

But life has its ironies.

Instead of being shipped to Vietnam like he expected, Palestina was assigned duties as a cook.
“There were few Marines during that time that didn’t go to Vietnam, except for me,” he said. “There were 77 of us in the platoon. When they gave out our assignments, 70 were picked for infantry and five of us were chosen as cooks.”

During his two years with the Corps, he served at the training center at Parris Island, then at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and aboard a ship in the Caribbean. He also spent time in Panama undergoing juggle training.

Early on, Palestina gained a reputation for his cooking.

Six weeks into his training, he was scheduled to make pizza for 1,200 men. “You have to follow Navy regulations and it said to use tomato soup, crushed tomato and cheddar cheese. I said, ‘You got to be kidding me?’”

After a phone call to his mother to double check ingredients, he made arrangements for someone to pick up a case of crushed tomatoes, a case of puree and mozzarella cheese. And he made pizza.
“The next thing you know the base commander calls me into his office. I was scared. He turns to me and says, ‘I understand you made the pizza. You understand you didn’t follow regulations?’ Then he turns to me and says, ‘That was the best f-ing pizza I’ve ever had.’ He gave me a four-day pass.”

Palestina quickly became known among the men for his willingness to bend regulations and cook to order, sometimes to the consternation of the other cooks on the line.

“If I fed you and you liked what I did, that gave me pleasure,” said Palestina. “The way I looked at it, half the guys I’m feeding are going to be dead in another two years and I should be making their lives better.”

Palestina never saw action, except from the inside of a mess hall. “I don’t know why I never went to Vietnam. I only know three people in the Marine Corps that I was associated with that didn’t go.”

Today, as Palestina looks back on Feb. 1, 1966 – the day he was drafted into the Marines – he considers it the best thing that ever happened to him.

“If I didn’t get drafted and I didn’t go into the Marine Corps, God knows if I would have been dead from an overdose or killed by the mob. What started out as a Marine Corps nightmare has become the proudest thing that I ever did.

“It changed my life. It made a man out of me. It gave me a respect for what our military does. And it gave me discipline.”

Following his service, he earned a degree in business administration from Temple University under the GI Bill and found a job as an insurance underwriter.

He met his future wife, Joan. They were married in 1969. “My wife is the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

The couple moved out of the city to Northampton Township where they settled down and raised their family. They have two children, Melissa, of Warminster, and Peter Jr., at home, and two grandchildren, Matthew and Sean.

More recently, Palestina served on the Northampton Township Board of Supervisors from 1984 to 2007.

During his tenure on the board, he instituted the Northampton Patriots Flag Program to honor the men and women of the township serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The seeds of the program were planted seven years ago when Palestina and Council Rock School Board member Bernadette Heenan organized a ceremony honoring the troops at Northampton Commons. A flag representing each soldier was planted in the ground.

The flags were later brought inside the township building and placed in a handmade display. When a soldier returns home, their military flag is presented to the veteran during a public meeting and a U.S. flag is put in the display in place of the military flag.

“The toughest thing I ever had to do was three years ago,” said Palestina. “The parents of Bob Dembowski had asked about a flag for him. We put it in that Wednesday night at a supervisors’ meeting. The next day he was killed in action. I was stunned. It still chokes me up today.”

Today, 63 flags are on display, eight of them representing people who are still in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I can honestly say other than the birth of my kids there has been no greater pleasure,” Palestina told a reporter in 2007, of his involvement with the flag project. “Having been in the military myself, I know how important it is for people at home to appreciate what you are doing. It makes their life a little better when they are in harm’s way.”