"The sun had not yet risen that morning of July 1, 1977, when I slipped behind the wheel of "Black Beauty," my '68 Cadillac convertible, and headed north on I-5 to Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base. I had the top down as usual since it hadn't rained much in Southern California since 1969. Camp Pendleton is perhaps the largest military base in the world. It occupies 125,000 acres, or almost 200 square miles, in Southern California. It has over seventeen miles of coastline that extends from Oceanside north to San Clemente. It is home to as many as seventy thousand United States marines."