Marine Corps Base Quantico -- Major William Peters has worn two uniforms in his life: that of a 20th century U.S. Marine and that of an 18th-century French musketeer.
Peters, who retired from the Marine Corps in 1989 and lives in Dale City, originated the Xavier University Musketeer mascot in October of 1965, his sophomore year at the Jesuit school in Cincinnati, Ohio. In October of 2015, he was invited to return for the mascot’s 50th anniversary.
“I wanted to do something for the school,” Peters said. “We were called the Musketeers in 1928 but it was always just on paper, never for real. All the other teams we played had mascots.”
He had a Musketeer costume with a sky blue cape made during the summer of 1965 and on October 31, he walked unannounced onto the football field during the homecoming game against Villanova University.
“No one knew what I was doing. They all thought, ‘Who is this guy?’” Peters remembered.
However, that night Xavier beat Villanova 35–0. Clearly, the Musketeer mascot was good luck, so Peters continued in the role until he graduated in 1968 and passed it on to someone else. Today, the mascot has an oversized foam head like most other mascots but Peters’ original costume wasn’t like that.
“It was just me,” Peters said. “I wasn’t a cheerleader — I wanted to keep the mascot’s uniqueness. I would come out with the football team and run the length of the field with them, holding my sword in one hand. The wind would blow my cape around — it looked very cool. At halftime, I would go into the stands and pose with the kids.”
Peters takes his alma mater’s motto, “All for one and one for all,” seriously.
That sense of fierce loyalty may have made him gravitate toward the Marine Corps. Xavier was prepared to award him an Army ROTC scholarship, which would have meant his final two years of college would be free, but he wanted to be a Marine. He entered the Marine Platoon Leaders Class in 1966.
“There was something about the Marine spirit, something I felt,” he said. “I wanted to fight and the Marines were the best fighters. I wanted to prove myself and find out if I was tough enough.”
He remembers that during a visit to the Washington monument, he and fellow Marines decided they were going to run up the 897 stairs to the top.
“That just shows you our mental can-do and physical cockiness,” Peters said.
He attended The Basic School (TBS) aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico and served as a rifle platoon commander, executive officer and assistant adjutant with 1st Battalion, 7th Marines in Vietnam from 1969-1970. Later, he commanded a company of Marines on deployment during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and served two tours in Okinawa, Japan. During several tours at Quantico, he was assigned to Marine Corps Development and Education Command (now Combat Development Command) and Marine Corps Research, Development and Acquisition Command (now Marine Corps Systems Command). He retired in 1989.
Peters spoke of many proud moments from his Marine Corps career.
“Bringing my guys home from Vietnam — most of them made it out,” he said. “That’s a big one.”
He remembered awarding a posthumous bronze star to a Marine who had died 35 years before on Iwo Jima and a parade down 5th Avenue when the widow of a Marine told him she’d come out to see “what her Marines look like.”
“That really moved me,” Peters said. “Her husband was dead and she wasn’t a Marine but we were still her Marines.”
And he remembers visiting a Marine veteran of World War I in the hospital to serve him cake on the Marine Corps Birthday, Nov. 10. The veteran was still suffering the effects of mustard gas and was unable to speak.
“I knelt down and shook his hand,” Peters said. “I started to rise and he wouldn’t let go of my hand. I looked down and he had tears in his eyes. I leaned over and kissed him on the head and told him ‘Semper Fi.’”
“You never, ever let another Marine down,” Peters said. “That crosses time and space.”
Today, Peters is a docent at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. He loves telling visitors about the Marine experience and is a keen observer of the emotional reactions of veterans who visit.
“The guys going into the World War II and Korean galleries are being pushed in wheelchairs and they’re happy and proud,” Peters says. “But the guys in the Vietnam gallery don’t say a thing. They look, they read, they might start shaking. They come up to me and all they say is, ‘I lost a friend there.’ Then their wives tell me, ‘He just told you more about the war than he’s told me in 40 years.’”
Peters gives presentations about the Vietnam War to schools, colleges, veteran groups, commands aboard Quantico and anyone who asks him.
“It’s sad how we were treated when we came back,” he said. “I want to tell people what really happened there.”
— Writer: auphausconner@quanticosentryonline.com