Worth More Dead

he was in his late teens. He flourished there and obtained his GED high school degree in the service. His fellow recruits called Roland “Pete” and admired his judo proficiency. One of his Marine buddies recalls a visit to Louisiana with Pitre in 1972.
    “We went to New Orleans on a four-day weekend,” he says. “Five of us drove down from Cherry Point, North Carolina. We went to see Pete’s fiancée, who was named Debby.”
    Roland had a large Marine Corps tattoo on his upper left arm and had DEB tattooed on his right arm.
    “He always called her Deb,” his fellow Marine remembered. “He once told me that if he ever got into trouble and was asked about it, he would say his tattoo stood for his initials, and that his name was Donald Edward Buschere. It was a long time ago, and I’m not sure of the spelling.”
    Pitre didn’t explain why he expected trouble or an arrest or why he might need an alias. The Marine, remembering Roland Pitre almost thirty-five years later, says he was impressed with Deb’s family. “We stayed at Deb’s parents’ house, a nice, upper-middle-class neighborhood. And they treated us like kings. Deb’s father was a fairly successful businessman, and her mother was a great cook. They seemed to think the world of Pete.”
    Deb, who hoped to marry the dashing Marine that Roland Pitre was in 1972, was very petite and “gorgeous.” She rounded up two of her girlfriends to be blind dates for the two Marines who accompanied Pitre to New Orleans.
    “We all went to the French Quarter one evening for drinks and dancing,” one of them remembers. “We visited Roland’s father—but only briefly—in this town outside New Orleans, called Metairie. We stayed at his house just long enough for Pete to show us a painting one of his girlfriends had done. It showed him in his karate or judo outfit executing a kick. I’m pretty sure he had his black belt in karate before he ever joined the Marines.”
    Pitre had also been a boxer. He told his buddies that was where he got his broken nose. “The guy just loved to mix it up.”
    But Roland Pitre didn’t marry his gorgeous girlfriend Deb, and he wasn’t faithful to her, either. He almost always had several women on the string at once. One of them may have been Cheryl, whom he eventually did marry. “We all traveled to Pennsylvania once,” a buddy recalls. “Pete had a girlfriend there, too, who was a student nurse. I’m not sure what her name was. Her family lived on a farm just outside Union City.”
    They had another pleasant visit in that small town close to Lake Erie. Roland Pitre never seemed to mind that his buddies knew that he cheated on his women. Indeed, he seemed proud of it and counted on them not to say the wrong thing.
    They also knew that Pete lied, but they suspected he did it to be funny, and he didn’t hurt any of them; his fibs and outright lies were often hilarious. Early on, his closest Marine friend had his doubts about Pitre’s truthfulness. They were assigned to the same training schools, beginning with seven months of avionics classes at a base just outside Memphis, Tennessee. Then they were transferred to the Marine Composite Reconnaissance Squadron 1 (VMCJ-1) for photo reconnaissance and electronic warfare operations at MCAS at Cherry Point, North Carolina. During their four months there, he and Pitre worked on two types of aircraft: the McDonnell Douglas RF-4B Phantom II and the Grumman Intruder. One of the planes was equipped to collect photographic intelligence; the other retrieved electronic intelligence and also jammed and garbled enemy radar. The young Marines worked principally on the jammers. Their training was given only to students with superior IQs and carried with it a lot of responsibility.
    Roland Pitre had keen native intelligence, although he had minimal formal schooling. He also had his rowdy and mischievous side. “Pete told me that he was working as a narc for the military police,” his buddy says. “He would go out and smoke dope with his ‘friends,’ and then he would turn them in. He told me once he borrowed a car from one of his doper buddies and drove it to the MP station, revealing a substantial stash of marijuana. He then told the dopers that the MPs and a drug dog had busted him at the main gate.”
    Pitre never appeared to have any pangs of conscience about narcing on his friends, and he certainly never felt guilty about betraying the women in his life. He was 19 or 20 and