As an undergraduate at Stanford, 6-foot-4 William Austin Treseder is sometimes mistaken for one of the school’s world-class athletes, and other times for the Greek god Apollo because of his flowing blond hair and chiseled physique. But when Treseder skipped class Friday to attend the Leatherneck Luncheon at the Marines’ Memorial Club and Hotel in San Francisco, it took his fellow Marines exactly two minutes to dub him “Marilyn Monroe.”

Treseder returned last year from a tour of duty in Iraq. Before that, he was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps color guard in Washington, D.C., the public face of America’s elite fighting force. But on a campus that booted out ROTC 40 years ago, at times Treseder has struggled to make his service in the Corps understood.

When he returned to the club Saturday night to celebrate the 234th anniversary of the founding of the Marines at the Marine Corps Ball, even when he was being likened to Marilyn, he felt right at home. “It’s like slipping into a warm bath,” said Treseder, 27. “You go there, and you’re home. It’s amazing how restorative that can be when you live in a place where no one speaks the same language you do.”

For 63 years, the Marines’ Memorial Club and Hotel has served as a living reminder of the sacrifice made by America’s war heroes and by those who loved them. As the nation nears Veterans Day — uncertain as ever about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the club provides sanctuary to both the living and the dead.

‘Nothing else like it’

A week before the Leatherneck Luncheon, Carrie Laureno, a manager of product training at Google, had come to the club’s Tribute Memorial Wall to see the plaque dedicated to her friend Maj. Jeffrey R. Calero, with whom she was once involved romantically. Hewn from heartbreak, the wall, located on the 10th floor of the 12-story Beaux-Arts building, tells the solemn story of every American life laid down in Afghanistan and Iraq since Sept. 11, 2001.

“There’s nothing else like it that I know of,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Myatt, who commanded the First Marine Division during the Gulf War and now serves as the club’s president. “The parents of these kids come and sit for hours, or sometimes just to touch the name on the plaque and leave.”

Laureno founded Google’s VetNet a week after Calero was killed by an IED in Afghanistan on Oct. 29, 2007. On Wednesday, she will host the first Google Veterans Day Forum and Celebration. She started the group as therapy to help deal with her grief and concedes the initial response from Google employees was “mixed.” To make the event as inclusive as possible, veterans from the military of any country in Google’s far-flung empire will be recognized.

“Every day is hard, and starting this group has been the only way that I knew how to deal with losing someone so important,” said Laureno, 36, as she prepared for the observance at Google’s Mountain View campus. “We’re so far removed from the war here in the Bay Area, I felt really isolated. It was difficult for me to hear some of the things people say about the military. We’re all safe because of people like Jeff, and we should thank these young men and women who are willing to put themselves on the front lines for all of our benefit.”

A moving experience

The Marines’ Tribute Memorial Wall includes soldiers from every branch of the military, including Calero, a member of the Army’s Special Forces who twice turned down promotions that would have put him safely behind a desk. Laureno made her first visit to the wall one day after the second anniversary of his death.

“I had spent the whole day before that crying, so I was sort of cried out,” she said. “It’s a moving experience. I was thrilled to see him in a place like that with so many other distinguished people. Jeff was the most humble person you’ve ever met, but as long as he was with his military friends, I think he would have loved it.”

A jewel box of 1920s-style architecture — with 138 hotel rooms, two ballrooms and a 660-seat theater where Bing Crosby used to broadcast his radio show — the Memorial Club is located in one of the clubbiest neighborhoods of San Francisco, flanked by the all-women’s Metropolitan and Franciscan clubs, with the Olympic Club just down the hill, and the all-male Bohemia Club a block away. Built as the Western Women’s Club, it gradually turned into a billet for Navy Waves as a way to pay the bills.

With half a million Marines stationed in the Pacific during World War II and the city ringed by 12 military installations, the club became the place to go if you were Navy and looking for a date. The Marines are a department of the Navy, although as any Marine will tell you, they see themselves as “the men’s department.”

Only 29 percent of the club’s 23,000 members are Marines, and in that sense, the Tribute Memorial Wall is nondenominational. Footsteps reverberate through this tribute to those who have gone before like the echo of distant gunfire. But of all the plaques commemorating the dead on the Tribute Memorial Wall, it is the one to San Francisco’s three McKenna brothers — James, Frank and Joseph — that clutches hardest at the heart.

The McKenna Boys

Of the six McKenna children, five were boys, and Leo was the first to enlist at 17, using a falsified birth certificate. He was so badly injured during the battle of Guadalcanal during World War II that, when a Navy buddy saw him years later on Market Street, he exclaimed, “You’re dead!” But because he didn’t die, his brothers Jim and Frank — both of whom had safe stateside postings — requested active duty.

Frank McKenna, a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, was fatally shot down while on his ninth bombing raid over Germany in February 1944. Four months later, Marine Corps Pfc. James McKenna was killed on the beach at Saipan, halfway around the world. During the Korean War in 1951, Marine Pfc. Joseph McKenna — a track star in high school — outran his covering fire while taking a hill and was killed.

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By Bruce Newman
November 8th, 2009