My Time in Bootcamp

Phases 1 and 2

This weekend I took my annual trip down memory lane. The days between June 4th and June 7th are always kind of strange for me. Many people who aren’t regularly associated with me or are good friends don’t know that I spent 4 years in the Marine Corps. I shipped out from South Bend IN June 6th, 1995, arrived at MCRD San Diego the evening of June 7th 1995, and was discharged June 4th, 1999, a Friday, because my real discharge date was on a Sunday (I got out two days early for the price of a Burger King Whopper Value Meal).

It’s been 14 years now since I went in, and this time of year I always revisit the ghosts of my past and the terror and regret I felt especially during the first few weeks in Boot Camp. But it occurred to me that I never wrote about it. Instead, I deal with it quietly, sharing occasionally with my wife, and now watching clips from the movie “Ears Open Eyeballs Click” which I discovered about this time last year. But I think I would like to write about it, while I’m in an introspective mood.

Perhaps time has dulled my memories about some things, but I will always carry an aversion and simultaneous fascination for that strange period in my life. I went into the Marine Corps for a number of reasons. I used to say I was depressed about a girl, and that was part of it, but of course it was not all of it. I moved back home after my first year in college, and immediately broke up with a girl I was carrying out a long distance “relationship” over the phone with. Three weeks passed, and I was basically taking it easy. After a year of school, I realized that I had changed and my friends had also changed. Consequently, when I expected that things would be the same for me as when I had left a year before, I was sadly mistaken. Nothing was the same, for better or worse, and I was really disappointed with that fact.

My mother’s husband, Marty, served as a catalyst for my decision to enter the Marine Corps. I had intended to have a job by the middle of June, when I was going to have to start paying to rent my old room (a real injustice, to me anyway). On the first day of June, I was sleeping in, and Marty came into the room I was in and started an argument with me about when I was going to get a job or this or that. I of course fought back, but it was a losing battle. I told him I had to get a haircut before anyone would hire me, and he said if he gave me money for a haircut, I would be able to look for work. I told him that I could find a job with a haircut and made a bet with him that I would have a job by the end of the day or repay him for the haircut, just to shut him up. (See, this is how a 18 year old kid thinks: I see just how stupid it sounds now, a decade and a half later, but at the time it made sense). He agreed to the deal and I was off, with 7 bucks in my pocket.

I proceeded to the barber, and got a haircut from a lady who lamented the loss of all my beautiful hair. I have naturally curly hair and it was about a foot and a half long at that time, and a real mess. She asked me, among other things, why I was getting my haircut, and I said I needed to get a job. She smiled and asked me what sort of work I was looking for. I said, I’d probably try McDonalds. It was the mid-1990’s and they were always hiring back then. I said I had considered the army, but opted not because I didn’t want a haircut, and then I said some ill-fated words :”Well, I guess that ain’t a problem anymore.”

Bad choice. She went on about how her man (boyfriend or husband, I don’t remember) had been in the Army reserves, and if there is one thing I DON’T want to do, according to him, was join the military. I tuned the rest of the conversation out: Here was this lady with a bad color job and way too much makeup telling me about her guy who said I don’t want to join. I hopped on my bike when the haircut was finished and rode the three miles downtown to the recruiter.

Once downtown, I locked my bike up and walked to the army office. The door was locked. It was 10:30 and the door was locked. My thoughts about that was, “What the hell! I can’t even join if I wanted to…” I walked next door to the Marine office, opened the door and stuck my head inside. I saw three guys sitting around the office, one with his feet up on the desk. I said “Hey, where is the Army at?” thinking they all talked to one another and kept each other’s schedule. “Their office is next door, but I don’t know where they are at.” was the answer, from a man whose name I later learned was Gunnery Sergeant Humphrey, my recruiter.

Another man, who went by the name Sgt Swan (which I also learned later) said “Why do you want the Army?” I answered “I want to fire artillery” which was the truth. On the way to the recruiter I had worked up this great scenario. I loved the idea of being an artilleryman, and had intended to join the Army’s artillery unit. I figured as smart as I was, I would be able to get any job I wanted, and thought I could leverage my year in college into something. “Alright” was their response, and they just let me go. I closed the door behind me, and thought, “Well, that’s that. I guess it’s McDonalds.” It was almost like fate was conspiring against my joining the armed services, but was probably more like the recruiters were lazy, or had met a quota in the ghettos and malls of South Bend.

When I got back to my bike, I put in the wrong key in the lock, and then as I was pulling the keys out, I must have dropped them. I picked them up and tried a different key. As I clicked the lock open, a Lance Corporal, the only one in that office whose name I don’t remember, came outside and said “Hey. We got Artillery.” The Lance Corporal was on Recruiters assistance, and got points toward his promotion by bringing me in. I never saw that dude again after that day. I closed the lock back immediately, and said “Alright.” and then followed him back into the office.

Over the next few hours, the recruiter (Gunny Humphery) gave me the whole spiel. When he found out that I had been in college for a year, he became suspicious: Why do you want to join, what are you thinking? Artillery, no you want to be in intel. He looked at my ID and asked me several times if I was a pothead. He asked me if I was in trouble with the law. It was like he was trying to get me to change my mind. When I told him I was insistent on artillery, he showed me a picture of Camp Wilson, MCAGCC 29 Palms CA and said if I did Artillery, THAT ungodly desert would be a place I definitely visited at some point in my time, and maybe I would like to do radio and television or something. I said I would like to do artillery.

He also showed me the recruiting videos and made me put several goals in order by my priority, and then proceeded to tell me how the Marine Corps could meet my goals. I told him that was great, I wanted to sign up. It took me an hour before he gave me the DEP paperwork to sign. I took an ASVAB the next day and he told me that I was among the highest scores that had come out of the South Bend Office and was I sure I wanted to go into Artillery. I told him I wanted to ship as soon as possible.

After I left the office on the first day, and got home at about 1:30, I saw Marty and he asked “Did you get a job.” I showed him my DEP papers, and he was flabbergasted. When my mother came home, she was thrilled, as was my Grandfather, who congratulated me over the phone. Marty’s dad asked me why I didn’t choose to go into the Air Force, like he did. It would be a lot easier than the Marine Corps. I told him I wanted to fire Artillery.

Over the next few days I considered what some alternatives would be. My friends were questioning me, and on one occasion, disagreeing with me. But I chose to stick by my decision. At one point I thought about backing out and going to the seminary to become a preacher. I also thought about doing drugs so I would be disqualified when I finally got to boot camp. Each time I hesitated because I thought how that would look for me to my family: how disappointed everyone would be in me, how people would think I was a fuckup who would never amount to much, and this and that. Who knows, maybe I’d get disowned. Anyway, if I just stuck with the decision to go in, how hard could it be? Millions of Americans have successfully joined the military, I suppose I could too.

On the afternoon of June 5th, 2005, GySgt Humphrey called me, and told me I needed to get my sweats and some running shoes, because I needed to take an IST that afternoon. He had a spot for me to ship the next day if I wanted it. I said I did want it. I barely passed the IST, but I suppose he fudged some of the paperwork, because when the papers were read the next day at MEPS, I had met the minimum requirements. I had to redo the sit-ups and pull-ups in the office at MEPS, in front of like three or four other future recruits. On the 6th of June, I said good bye to my family, and left South Bend for Indianapolis, just 5 days after going into the office for the first time. Sgt. Swan took me to Indy.

I don’t remember a whole lot about MEPS, just that it was sort of a calm before the storm. I didn’t bring much money, but thankfully, the Marine Corps gave us food vouchers. I remember going to Hooters in Indianapolis on the 6th. I remember insisting on the seeing the things that the recruiter had promised in writing, and that the guy who was doing the initial paperwork had to write an annex to the contract, because the recruiter had not put that stuff in my package. I remember that we must have played cards or something in the hotel that they put us up at that night, and I crashed on the floor. I remember waking up way too early the next morning, before the sun came up, and eating in the restaurant, then proceeding back to MEPS. Finally, we had a mock swearing in, and then six of us were loaded into a limo (yes, a limo! It seems the MEPS transportation vehicles were all full from the other services, and six of us fit in the military limo) and taken to the airport. I was named “senior recruit” because my date of rank was listed as June 1, due to the guarantees in my contract, and everyone else’s rank was dated June 6th, because they had no special annex.

We landed in San Diego a few hours later, probably around 2 pm local time. Keep in mind now that we had been woke up at like 5 am Indy time, which was 2 San Diego time, and had been advised to sleep on the plane, but of course none of us did, because we were so adrenalized. As we taxied in, I will never forget looking across the fence line at the rappelling tower at MCRD, which had a nice new advertisement for the Marine Corps on it. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was where we were going. When we got off the plane, I “ordered” the others with me from Indianapolis to smoke cigarettes if they had them, because we weren’t going to get to smoke for a long long time. We smoked our last cigarettes in front of a “No Smoking sign” in the terminal at San Diego International Airport. Down a long hall we could see the baggage claim. When we had finished, we proceeded down the hall and met the first drill instructor I had ever seen.

The DI ordered us to sit down against a wall, and in a relatively quiet voice ordered us to begin filling out paperwork until everyone had arrived. We sat there for hours. When it was dark, maybe 10 pm the whole lot of us were filed onto busses, and ordered to keep our heads down. We couldn’t look out the windows at all anyway: they were frosted inside. Soon the bus left the Airport and drove around for what seemed like 45 minutes, turning left and right and all this. It was very disorienting. We didn’t say anything, we just kept our heads down. When we stopped, I was aware of some bright lights outside of the bus, and then there was some noise outside of the bus, like some people had already arrived and were getting yelled at, or some DI’s were just winding up, or something. At some length, aman jumped on the bus and started saying something like “When you get off my daggone bus, you will run out there and find yourself a set of my daggone yellow footprints. Your going to put your feet on my yellow footprints and your going to stand there. Do you understand me?” and we all yelled “YES SIR!” as loud as we could with our heads still down, looking at the floor. “Move now” was his command. And we ran.

We Indiana boys tried to stick together, but were not really that successful at that task. There were like 50 DI’s all yelling at the top of their lungs at everyone, and it was total chaos. My feet matched up on the yellow footprints, and soon all was quiet. A DI came out and said “This is the POA: Position of Attention. When we say POA, you stand there with your feet at a 45 degree angle, heels online and touching and your eyes forward, and you say Aye Sir! Do you understand me?” “YES SIR!” Apparently, something that began at precisely that moment was the DI’s suddenly became hard of hearing. “No! Do you Understand me!” “YES SIR!” and we did that for like 3 minutes.

Then we got our first class, on the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Do not Disrespect an Officer. Do not Disrespect an NCO. Do not go UA. And there was the General Article, which was of course, conduct unbecommming a Marine. We were informed that we were now subject to the UCMJ. Did we understand that? YES SIR. “OH MY GOD! I said Do you understand!” “YES SIR! and so forth.

We were harassed a bunch more times like that. We eventually were shaven clean (luckily I had a fresh buzzcut from the 1st) and then stripped of our civilian clothing, even our underwear, and our clothes were thrown into a box. Mine was subsequently lost, never to be seen again. We hung out in a huge red room naked as the day we were born while these crazy drill instructors ran around yelling at us. And then we were issued our utilities, and three pairs of underwear.

Everything we did was by the numbers. “Get your skivvies on right now move.” followed by a random action where young recruits all tried to beat the weird countdown from 10. “10 9 8 7 5 3 1 ZEEERRROOOO!” then we responded “POA SIR!” and returned to the same position that our feet were in on the yellow foot prints, 45 degree angle, heels online and touching, thumbs on the trouser seams. It went like this for some time. Running around here and there like chickens with our heads cut off, learning how to sit “PT Style”, which involved sitting down with our knees bent up and another recruit between then, while we sat between another recruit’s legs ourselves. That is how they got 83 18 and 19 year olds into a room the size of my bedroom.

My laundry number was 76, I wrote it on everything, so if and when it got kicked around the squad bay, I could find it. The most important article of clothing to ensure that I relocated was not my draws, mind you. No man would ever wear another person’s underwear, and they were ALL clearly marked (other things were not.) When all our gear was kicked on a regular basis across the squad bay, the most important thing to relocate was the jockstrap, which we had to wear every time they took us to combat training. How many times did I hear stories about someone’s jockstrap being too small, and them still having to put it on, because someone else had theirs?

The first few days were a blur. We got almost no sleep, but when we did, I slept like the dead. They DI’s called a person who got screwed out of the two or three hours that we were allowed the “fire watch”, and at first I had no idea what that meant. They were watching for fire? Did the DI’s expect a fire? Should I stay up in case they light one? Who the hell knew what the hell they were thinking? But when my head hit the rack, which we spent an hour learning how to make at “Oh Dark Thirty” next thing I knew was I was being awaken to go to chow. And we went, before anyone else did, long before there was any hint of sun in the east. It must have been 4:30 when we ate our first breakfast, and our second.

The first full day at MCRD was filled with things like going to the hospital, getting issued a rifle, getting a whole bunch of shots for who knows what, filling out reams of paperwork and learning my SSN by heart. We marched like ducks, and actually were instructed to do that, to follow the guy in front of us. When he lifts his left foot, we do too. They called the first cadences we heard the first full day. “Left” long pause “right” … and so forth. “Lo righty lay oh…” Their singing was kind of nice, though it was literally at the cadence that a person would call for an elephant. Needless to say, we blew it. We learned how to carry our rifles, we learned how to walk with a full sea bag. It sucked to learn how to walk all over again.

There was one fellow. I couldn’t tell you his name. He was a receiving DI, who I thought was nice. He said he was going to teach us how to march, and shockingly, even by this time, he didn’t flip out when we stepped off on the right (as opposed to left foot, which we apparently should have known) foot and screwed up the march. He seemed like a pretty even keeled DI, and I was glad to know that he would be the DI we would be spending 13 weeks with. We did the whole moment of truth thing, where we took a piss test and told whether or not we had smoked weed. We took classes on Marine History and more UCMJ. And we got a little more sleep the second night. Things were settling into a routine for me.

Next day, we were ordered to pack up our sea bags. Apparently we were dropping to our permanent platoon. I, of course, had no idea what all this meant. We marched over to a different squad bay, and were sat down PT style, all the while being yelled at, again… still. And then when we were all down, the DI’s banged on the door and told someone inside that we were here. And out burst hell. Four new DI’s, who I never seen before came out and were screaming at the top of their lungs, and getting everyone to stand up and all this, throwing stuff all over the place, creating chaos, kicking things around. At any moment, you could hear “Yes SIR!” and “Aye Sir” from like three different places. This was how our permanent DI’s introduced themselves. Striking fear, disorientation and a sense of helplessness in the hearts of the recruits. We were dropped to Platoon 2007, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Recruit Training Regiment, MCRD San Diego. We were called “Trail Trail” because we were the last platoon in the last series in the company.

I still remember three of the four DI’s name’s. There was Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Radke, Drill Instructor Sergeant Miranda, and Drill Instructor Sgt Armstrong. We had another that we picked up with, but he was removed from our platoon for losing his bearing and pushing a recruit while they were alone at the wash racks. This guy was way too intense, and while I can see his face, I can’t see his nametag. He simply traded with another guy, who was more or less a moron, but was assigned the task of teaching us practical knowledge or “prac”. When this guy gave a class, he said the funniest things, and I wish I could repeat them. I once had a list of all the funny things that were said by this guy, but misplaced it. It would be a gem for me to be able to reprint it.

But you see, he talked like John Wayne. The one thing I do remember from 14 years ago that this character said was his lesson about the battle at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War. His lesson went like this: “Marines at the frozen Chosin, right? One Marine Division against Eight Chinese Divisions. Let me tell you something…” And then he paused, as if he was going to say something very profound. He continued, with an absolutely stone stoic face: “That’s a lot of goddamned rice.” And that was his lesson about this very important Marine Corps History event.

Radke was affectionately known (and somewhat derisively called by the other DI’s) as “Daddy.” When the DI’s would be ITing us (doing a circuit of cardio exercise, which we mistook, to the person, for punishment for some stupid error), and Radke showed up, to get us in formation to make some announcement or another, they would say “Oh your Daddy’s here now. He’ll take care of you, Get the fuck on line!” I learned later that Radke was an artilleryman, and had been with India Battery, 3/11, at 29 Palms, which was my first and really only assignment with a real artillery unit. The Marine Corps was a really small place.

Miranda was called the “screw” by us. He was the hardest meanest bastard, who didn’t put up with anything. It soon became clear that Miranda was second in billet in the platoon. He was a killer. He would IT you so hard, and he was on every little mistake or slowness. And he was always there. He spent most of his time berating us because we could never drill well enough. Turns out, as we discovered later that Miranda was a refrigeration mechanic in the fleet. Not infantry or special forces as I assumed. Also, turns out that he, like god knows how many other Marines, had a thing for the opposite of the testosterone driven cock rock people assume ALL Marines dig. But that is later.

Armstrong was a man who couldn’t help but smile. He would be yelling at someone for something stupid, and then some silly remark would come out of his mouth and he would immediately have to turn his head to keep himself from laughing out loud. It’s like he tried to say the funniest thing he could say every time to get people to laugh so he could drop you. But he was the guy they assigned to teach us stuff about how to fold our clothes the proper way, or how to iron things, or mark them, or how to properly dress.

All these guys were real good guys, and it is too bad we didn’t know that until the very end. For the vast majority of three months, they were the enemy. I still have a picture of my DI’s, though I don’t have one of myself during Boot Camp.

Days during “First Phase” were spent screwing everything up. We dressed by the numbers, we cleaned by the numbers. We washed by the numbers. Everything all the time, was constant harassment by the Drill Instructors. We learned about our weapons, the M16 A2 Service Rifle, learned how to take it apart, learned how to keep it clean and rust free. When we went for chow, the Guide was the last one in, and they usually made him eat fast, because when the guide was finished, everyone was finished. We PT’d three times a week, did Combat hitting Skills or some other form of physical training three times a week, and were dropped daily for more IT. I was physically beaten.

I remember the showering routine. It was done in shifts. A whole bunch of naked teenagers would run into the “rain room” in nothing but “shower shoes” or flip-flops. We would turn on the water and shower in whatever temperature we happened to hit it at. Needless to say I think I took a lot of cold showers. Showers would go something like this. We would use only bar soap. We’d scrub our grape (or head, but you couldn’t call it your head because the head was the bathroom…) with the soap. Then we’d rinse off. Then we’d wash our arm pits for about ten seconds, rinse, then our gonads and ass. And then we’d rinse. They also wanted us to make sure we got our feet cleaned real good, and then it was out of the shower to the towels which were green and way too small. We’d run back out to the squad bay where we got dressed by the numbers, whether we were dry or not. I can’t tell you how often I slipped on the asbestos tiles with my drenched flip flops, or my flip flop busted while I was running because it made suction on the floor and I had to keep going before I could free it.

The bed routine is a particularly fond memory of mine. After mail call, when we all had letters from our family, and a few of us lucky ones had letters from girls, we would do the hygiene routine. We would go and brush our teeth by the numbers, and then return online, by the numbers, dressed in nothing but a green t-shirt and our draws (hopefully they were ours). We would stand there at the position of attention, and the DI would go around and stand in front of you. He would say something like “Report”, spitting at you half the time. You would snap your forearms up to a 90 degree angle, parallel to the deck, flick your head to the right and say your name, platoon, and Senior drill instructor, SIR. The DI would inspect your nails, and then tell you “Click” and you would turn your hands over and crank your head to the left, saying “Pop!” Then you would report “This recruit has no personal or medical issues to report at this time, Sir.” or if you did you would report it. Then he would move on and you would return to the POA. The DI would occasionally lay into someone for not cleaning their fingers, or say hilarious shit about someone, and you had to stand there and not smile, or they would be on you and drop you immediately.

After the DI left, the Whisky Locker recruit would come around with Listerine in a spray bottle, and give you a spray. This guy was usually a friend of mine, and I worked it out with them that when they came to me they would given me three or four or five sprays of listerine, which was like a shot of nasty tasting booze before bed. Occasionally though, they would grab the wrong bottle from the whiskey locker, and I might end up with a mouth full of Cobra. For those who don’t know what Cobra is, it is an aftershave which we used to spray on the decks when we cleaned them, to make the place smell like 90 plus filthy dirty marine recruits didn’t live there. The smell (and I can promise, the taste) lasted for about a week, and then more was needed. None of us could tell the Whiskey locker recruit anything, and could not announce to him that he got the Cobra instead of the Listerine by mistake. So everyone got Cobra, and occasionally, I got a full shot of it. It didn’t hurt me to drink aftershave, but it was among the worst things I have ever tasted. I have tasted Cobra aftershave several times, a WHOLE lot more often than most men.

About two weeks in, I decided I would try to get thrown out of boot camp. I tried to get my buddies to tell the DI’s I was suicidal. None of them would. I tried to hang on the pull up bar and fall on my knees to break them or something. I didn’t even feel it when I dropped to the ground. I tried to tell the DI’s that I was gay, or that I lied about drugs. Neither of these things flew over. When I tried to say I was gay they wanted me to call my mother and inform her that I was gay. And I couldn’t. So I failed at all that. I tried these schemes for about a week or so, and then gave up. About that time, I also began noticing that I was being more or less left alone by the DI’s. I thought, and still think that it was not because I was doing any better, but because they weren’t sure if I was really messed up and they didn’t want to push me over a line. Of course, that would be flattery, but it didn’t occur to me that this may be the case until I was rewarded with the somewhat dubious title of “Most Improved Recruit” at the end of Boot Camp and was asked by the Senior if I was “still Gay” when I went to graduate. It became clear to me that these DI’s had read my file and decided that no matter what I tried, I was to stay in boot camp and join the Marine Corps. I would like to think they felt the same about all recruits, but I know they didn’t.

There was a fellow who came into my platoon with me from Indiana. I will never forget this guy. His name was Dougherty. He was from southern Indiana, wasn’t too smart, was slow, and wanted to be a Marine more than anyone else in that Platoon. But his problem is that he got real flustered under stress, and did things like put his boots on the wrong feet. Consequently, everyone got dropped on a regular basis because either Dougherty screwed up, or Dougherty was too slow. I mean, we figured eventually, that this was just an excuse, it was going to happen anyway, and Dougherty was simply the most frequent excuse. But some guys didn’t see it that way. During Third Phase, a group of five guys were going to perform a blanket Party on Dougherty, in emulation, no doubt of their favorite movie “Full Metal Jacket” (a movie which did more to screw up the Marine Corps than any other single thing in US History. People who watch that movie before they go to Boot Camp end up thinking that is how it is SUPPOSED to be, and end up fucked up boot camp.) I asked to be put on fire watch that night, and before lights out, I went around and informed these fools that I would wake the DI if they did anything to Dougherty that night, and would take an extra shift if I had to. Nothing happened to Dougherty, but a week later, he was dropped from our Platoon for “shin splints” three weeks before graduation, by the DI’s.

We were in the habit of asking the fire watch to wake us up in the middle of the night so we could do personal things like write letters or fold our clothes. All night, recruits would stay up, shining their boots, shooting the breeze with their buddies, etc. The DI’s encouraged this, by providing us with tasks to accomplish overnight occasionally. Nothing built espirit de Corps more than these late nights spent talking and using the pronoun “I” which was strictly and explicitly forbidden during the day. Between two and four is when most Marines were up. During these hours, the planes stopped taking off and landing at the airport which was right next to MCRD, and people could actually think. After a while, that lull in aircraft flights served as sort of an alarm clock for me. When they restarted, I would begin mentally prepping for the coming reveille in the next hour. It got so I could tell the timing of the plane’s throttle, both forward and back, on take off and landing, and still listen to that whenever I fly as a civilian today. I know the timing of the landing throttles like I know the sound of my own name.

Getting IT’d was a real pain in the neck. There were a number of terms for this IT, which actually meant incentive training, or individual training (we were never sure which). We called it getting dropped, getting pitted or, if you were a DI, “having fun”. Basically, IT usually consisted of push ups, running in place with your arms stretched out, mountain climbers, and “side straddle hops”, which was the Marine Corps term for jumping jacks. It could occur anywhere there was a flat surface, the “quarterdeck”, which was the place where the platoon gathered for news or class or mail call, or it could take place outside in the sand, or in front of the mess hall, or at the PX, or at the wash rack, or any place like this.

The drill was simple. A recruit (or several) was called up in response to some minor infraction they may or may not have committed. He stayed there for what seemed like an eternity, but actually was more like 15 minutes (there was a rumor that said recruits couldn’t get IT’d for more than 45 minutes.) The exercise required recruits to do these exercises at top speed, while sounding off. The DI would say “Higher” (get your knees higher while running in place) and you yelled “Higher, Aye Sir” or “Faster” “Faster Aye Sir!” Then the DI would yell “Marine Corps Push ups!” and proceed through “up down up down up down up down up…” and he would have you hold it. You were not allowed to hit the deck because he would then order you to get up and switch to side straddle hops.

Usually, IT lasted for 15 minutes, as I said. Sometimes it would last a whole lot longer. Sometimes you were dead dog tired by the time you finished. Sometimes you had to do 8 count body builders. Sometimes there would be so much sweat on the quarterdeck from your mountain climbers that your shoes would slip. Sometimes the DI’s were inventive. They had a certain exercise called “electric chair” where you had to sit in an invisible chair with your back against the wall, for an extended period of time. You would think that would be easy, but after a while your body, not being able to rely on the wall to keep your thighs parallel to the deck, would shift the entire work load onto your knees, and it was up to them to keep you up. Sometimes when it was over, you’d get sent back to the platoon to do what they were doing, and then ten minutes later, get called back to the Quarterdeck to get IT’d again.

The thing is, IT was not punishment, but we didn’t know that until maybe halfway through 2nd phase. IT was more or less unscheduled PT. They just made it appear to be punishment early on to elicit compliance to orders. We didn’t know that it was going to happen whether or not we did anything wrong or not. The guy next to us screwed up sometimes, and we got it. Some dude at the end of the squad bay screwed up and we happened to be the recruit in front of the DI when he saw it, so we went too. Everyone was IT’d, probably equally. Sometimes it was the whole platoon who was IT’d, when we had a few minutes of down time. The DI’s never failed to find something to IT you for. But sometimes you screwed up, and the DI’s didn’t have time to IT you, though you may get IT’d for a lesser offense (or for none at all) at some other time. Then the DI’s would just yell at you and try to get you to break your bearing, but not IT you. By third phase, we welcomed IT, and right before graduation we actually volunteered, as a platoon, to be IT’d one last time. We figured out that any exercise we got made us a whole lot stronger, and the DI’s were on “our” side by that time.

I remember after perhaps the first full week, we were allowed to take Sundays after breakfast to either go to church or to read the newspaper. One Marine would be sent to the Chow hall to pick up a news paper and bring it back to the squad bay. The recruits would devour that paper, taking news to the bathroom to read parts of it, then trade it to their buddies for a different section. I usually made its rounds for everyone who wanted to catch up on the world’s news. Besides mail, it was our one connection to the outside world.

I would usually opt to go to the Lutheran Church service. Not because I was particularly religious, but because it was an opportunity to get out of the squad bay away from the DI’s. The first time I went, I cried during the singing of the Navy Hymn. After that, crying during the sermon was a common occurrence for me, and happened at weird times. Sometimes it was during the recitation of the liturgy, sometimes it was during the singing, sometimes it was right after communion. It was always accompanied with thoughts, even to the very end of “What the hell have I done? Why have I come here?” etc. Crying at church always struck me. During third Phase, I opted to go to the catholic service and the Baptist service, to see how those services went. But the Lutheran service was at the base chapel, and that always activated the water works for me. I cried every time I went to the Lutheran service.

Many times, Sgt. Miranda would order us to move the racks to one side of the squad bay, and then get our rifles. These days, often when it rained, we would drill inside the squad bay. We would stand at the POA, with the butts of our rifles at our feet, while we were lectured about the proper way to do things when in formation. We would hear him call cadence after cadence. We would do close order drill manual, where we ceremonially and simultaneously lifted our rifles off the floor and put them on our shoulders. At the beginning this was always a dismal failure. Nobody ever got their rifles shouldered at the same time. Even when a few of us got it right, a few other of us would blow it, and then, it was down for “rifle PT”, which was IT with our rifles. It never seemed good enough for Miranda, who we assumed was an expert rifleman (he qualified expert) and an infantry sergeant. BY the end of first phase we were much better at close order drill.

We should be: after all, we practiced all the time every day. Everywhere we went, we were in formation, and we practiced drill maneuvers. The entire time, there was one DI calling cadence, and two others yelling at us about staying covered and aligned and keeping in step. At first it was difficult to hit the right foot on exactly the right call. You could always tell when a person was out of step, though, because the platoon, while moving had a natural rise and fall, as they all hit the right foot at the right time, they would then all rise together on the ball of their foot, and then swing their other foot beneath them, and then fall on their heel. The guy who was out of step rose when he should have been falling and vice versa. Therefore, no matter what he tried to do to correct himself, he stuck out like a sore thumb and attracted the DI’s like blood attracts piranha.

At first the march cadence was painfully slow. I’m trying to remember it, but I think it was slower than one step a second. Left Right Left Right. The DI would sing real slow. They gradually picked up the pace, to something a little more natural, but when we got out of step, they would say “Ok, guess we can’t march at a normal speed… looks like we got to go back…” and then start marching real slow, which made it a lot harder for us to keep in step again.

When the DI’s yelled commands, they were yelling more or less inflections, not real words. If I can imitate it in writing, it sounded something like this: “(fah) WAAAHHH… YUTCH!” for forward march. or “calah ha RIIIIII… HARCH!” for column half right, March. Some of them were ridiculous, but I would have to hear them again to be able to get anything close to them in writing here. The most familiar of these strange commands was “lo righty lay-o” while running.

PT was always fun. The DI’s would still ride us pretty hard, but for the most part this was something we actually understood the value of from the beginning. We were there to get stronger, and we did. When we ran, we ran as a platoon, and the DI’s would sing to us, and demand that we sing back. Back in those days, “Jody Cadences” were still kosher on the west coast, and we heard some really dirty ones. If we didn’t sing loud enough, the DI’s would quit singing for a bit. But they told us, early on that the reason we sing while we run was because it helped us control our breathing, and allowed us to run further without getting winded. That trick actually worked, and allowed me to run three miles with the platoon without my lungs burning out of my chest (mind you, I never ran anywhere before I got to boot camp.

At some point during First phase, we went in for swim qualification. MCRD had a great pool, complete with a high dive. There were more or less three classes of swimmers, and you qualified at that class by passing a drill. Everyone had to do 3rd class. This drill included getting dressed in someone’s cammies (which weren’t your own, if I remember) wearing some beat up boots specifically for the purpose, jumping into the pool at the shallow end, and then swimming across the width of the pool. Fairly simple, I passed 3rd class with flying colors. Those who had trouble doing that were givent he chance to swim it again. Some people just stayed there in the shallow end of the pool, and if they didn’t pass that day, they were sent back a number of times until they did.

2nd class swimming was a different story for me. Now, you had to start at the shallow end of the pool and carry a person to the other end of the pool. It was a drill to practice rescue swimming. Both people were dressed in cammies and the passenger of this whole thing was more or less arranged on the back of the swimmer like a pack. Then the person had to start swimming. It took a bit of time to get used to the weight in the water, but I eventually did. I swam along, and looked up to get my bearings, and saw that I had covered about half of the pool. So I figured, Ok, I’m making good time, I can do this other half in as much time. So I’m swimming along and when I think the same time has elapsed, I looked up again to see where I was at. And I was in the same spot relative to the opposite wall. Worse, I had no momentum.

Immediately the water stopped holding me up, I let go of the passenger, and down I went. By the time I sank, I was in water that was probably 8 or 9 feet deep, and while I know now that this isn’t that much, I didn’t know that at the time, because I didn’t really know how to swim, and had never ventured deliberately into water that deep. Plus, you should understand that I have the kind of body which doesn’t float. My legs are more dense, for some reason than water, and I since have learned how freaky it is to everyone else that I can walk around on the bottom of the pool while others simply float back to the surface. My legs both keep me weighted like anchors, and, working in tandem with my air filled lungs and less dense upper body, keep me upright like a vertical stabilizer. if I drown, nobody will ever find me, because I’ll be weighted down standing up on the bottom of a lake. So I panicked in the pool.

Eventually I fought my way back to the surface, and broke the surface just in time to catch a very dense styrofoam life preserve in the head, and back down I went. But I now knew that it was in the water, so I swam back to the surface again, and grabbed it, holding on for dear life. The swimming drill instructors hauled me in, all the while berating me, asking me what the hell my problem was, that I could have killed that other Marine, yadda yadda yadda. After a complete tounge lashing, I was ordered to walk the long way around the pool and get back in line to do it again. I knew there would be no way that was going to happen, and assumed I would probably just have to accept the 3rd class swim qual score and take it again next year (if you qual at 3rd class, you got to requal every year until you do better. At 2nd class you requal every two years and at 1st class you don’t have to requal unless you re-enlist.) I got lucky when I walked past a group of recruits who were sitting down waiting to be counted for having completed the 2nd class swim qual. So I simply sat down there and waited to be marked down for having completed it. While this is a bit of a breech of integrity, it was probably a smart thing for me to do, because it wasn’t like I was ever going to get any better as a swimmer. In subsequent years, I never requalled again. Two years after boot Camp, I was under a swim waiver because of the fact that Camp Fuji Japan didn’t have a pool. The next year I was in the field, and the next year I was out. So a small breech of integrity.

I also remember that during first phase, we did combat hitting skills. The first phase version of Combat Hitting Skills involved both sparring with gloves and helmets and using pugel sticks, in immitation of our rifles and bayonettes. The thinking of course was “So what if you were in combat and needed to engage an enemy who was at close quarters. You’re out of ammo, he’s coming for you, what do you do.” I enjoyed using the pugel sticks. it was sort of like “American Gladiators”. We had football helmets on and those things are remarkable shock absorbant. I got hit a few times, scored some blows of my own and got called off when it was going on too long.

Sparring was a totally different story, of course. I had never been in a fist fight before, so I had no idea what a well placed shot to the head or the face felt like. And the sparring helmets were not as shock absorbant as the football helmets were. When it was my turn, I tried to remember the punching techniques they showed us, but while I was thinking about it, the other person who must have absorbed the lesson a bit more readily than I did, clocked me in the side of the head. I saw stars, even though I know he must have pulled the punch a little bit. The second one came at full force though, and he had me down. The DI’s who were watching this fight were making quite a bit of fun of me, saying that I won the Oscar for bad acting, calling me Rocky and all this. It was pretty sad. When I got up and they started the fight again, I tried to do what that guy just did, generally failed to connect in any effective way, and took another punch to the head. The DI’s subsequently called the fight, and got me out of there, more or less talking all sorts of shit to me as I slowly took off my gloves and helmet to hand it to the next guy. The fact that they had to run so many recruits through so many fights saved me from getting socked again. I have taken a few punches since then, but have avoided fist fights like the plague after discovering first hand that I am no good at them.

Cleaning the Squad bay was a Sunday ritual. That was known as “Field Day” for Marines. I still don’t know the origin of that term. The DI’s would say stuff like “Turn to one Field Day”, and we would move the racks from one side of the squad bay to the other, and then have human dust mop races (where a green towel was put on the ground, and a recruit put his hands on either end of the towel and then ran forward, doubled over. Very inefficient method of moving, but efficent method of cleaning, apparently.) from one end of the squad bay to the other, lengthwise. The racks would be moved back and we would do it again. Cleaning the Head, or bathroom, always sucked. It was the part I tried never to get stuck on, and usually hung out by the windows, cleaning them with Windex and newspaper, or mopping. I got real good at using a string mop, and still wish we had one today at my house, because they are really efficient.

Prac was important during first phase. We would take classes on all the stuff in “the Green Monster”, which had Marine Corps History, General Orders, parts of the Rifle, the UCMJ, a section on uniforms and so forth. We took classes on each of these subjects, sometimes as a company, sometimes as a platoon. We eventually covered the entire book. We were expected to know our chain of command, and were quizzed over that regularly, as well as the General Orders. At the end of the first phase, we were quizzed over that stuff. “Trail Trail” always finished dead last. And we finished last in the PFT and we finished last in the Drill competition. The DI’s had fun with the platoon the day the results for these contests came out.

Sometimes the DI’s would do stupid things like making us go out side, each pick up two handfuls of sand, bring it back upstairs and throw it on the floor, before Field Day. Why? Who the hell knows. Maybe it was so we made sure we cleaned the floor, because perhaps we didn’t clean something else before. Or maybe it was because one of us was slow getting on line. Sometimes the DI’s would make us pick up our foot lockers, which had about 25 pounds of gear and clothes inside, not including the 5 pounds that the foot locker itself weighed, and run them back and forth the length of the squad bay. Sometimes they would make us dump our foot lockers in the center of the squad bay, walk through and kick it all over the place despite the fact that we tried to keep our stuff segregated (because we knew we were going to have to restow it), and then demand that we get all our stuff back in our foot locker in “Ten Nine Eight…” Some of the shit they made us do, which I don’t really remember anymore, was very stupid. I only know that because of this nonsense, which I suppose was to instill discipline and make us mark all our stuff, Boot Camp, especially the First Phase, qualifies as the stupid time in my life.

We went “up North” directly before the 4th of July. “Up North” was Camp Pendleton, Edson Range, where we were going to learn to use our weapons.

PHASE 2: Edson Range

Returning to this account after a long time, I realize that it is generally unfinished. Right before we actually went up to Edson Range, on Camp Pendleton, a small buzz was created among the recruits who may have had older brothers go through boot camp before them. We were about to go “up north” which is suppose is like a mini-deployment, the first experienced by young Marine recruits. We were leaving our squadbay behind for good, and we proceeded to clean the thing from top to bottom. That night we loaded everything we owned into our seabags, and readied them to be loaded into a truck the next day. We ourselves rode a bus, heads down just like the day we first came to boot camp. This time, thought, we actually drove to Edsoon Range which was a fair distance away, up toward Los Angelas. I looked out the window on the opposite side of the bus occasionally, and saw a little of the countryside, and this was actually my first real look of California (though I had lived there for a month by now, the only other time I ever saw any of California was from either the air or from MCRD. We could see the San Diego skyline from where we were, and the airport, but nothing else.)

When we hopped off the bus, I had no idea what we were supposed to be doing, because of course I was not told anything. I soon learned why we had deployed up to Edson Range. Edson Range is the location of the Known Distance Live Fire course for Marine recruits on the West Coast. It was here that we were going to learn how to kill. More appropriately, it was Edson Range where we were to be instructed and familiarized with the standard M16A2 service rifle, which had, up to that point been more or less a prop in our close order drills. We were to learn how to effectively employ that machine of death against paper targets at 200, 300 and 500 yards. Once we became familiar with the weapons and qualified on them, we were technically qualified to shoot and kill people, especially those laying in a prone position (at 200 yards) kneeling (at 300 yards) and standing behind some bushes (at 500 yards). We ourselves learned the various firing positions, the prone, kneeling and standing firing positions.

The KD course had 5 different rounds, if my memory serves me, but it may just be 4. I’ll assume its 5. The first two, at the 200 yard position, were in the prone and sitting positions. (I’m not sure if this kneeling one actually existed.) Then on the 300 yard line, we did the kneeling and the standing. Then on the 500 yard line we did standing only. We were aiming at sillouhette targets that were supposed to mimic the size of a man. Each of the targets were loaded on heavy, chain driven carriages, which were pulled by other recruits who were hanging out in a dugout by a really thick burm of dirt and rocks.

Before I get into firing, I must mention some things about Edson Range itself. The place is like an expeditionary camp. I have been to other camps on Camp Pendleton, and they all have a lot of services. Edson Range was just about worthless. It had the squadbays that were similar to the ones at MCRD, but their architecture was a bit funkier. And they generally smelled weird, or at least different than the ones we had been living in for a month. Our first task was of course to clean all the dust and filth that had accumulated in these barracks since the last group had left.

You have to understand, We were at Edson Range in the summer time. This is the dry, hot season for California, and Camp Pendleton is what Southern California would look like if there were no sprinklers. The place was a desert that opened on the west out toward the ocean which is right across the freeway. To the east there were high desert mountains. The squadbays had doors and windows, but these were always left open. The fresh air came with bugs and dirt, and cleaning was a constant need. Coupled with the fact that were were constantly filthy, and the fact that these barracks had been empty for who know how long, and you get what we had there. Another field day.

We spent our first week snapping in. This means, of course that we did not have live ammo. Instead, we got classes on how to do sight alignment and sight picture, which I won’t go into (if you’re reading this and going in the Marines, you will learn; if you already were in, you already know, and if you aren’t going in, it has to do with lining up the rear sight appeture with the front sight tip.) We practiced breathing. We learned how to stabilize the rifle using the shoulder strap. We learned how to adjust our sights using a nail. And we practiced racking the firing mechanism over and over again, just so we could learn how hard to pull the trigger. I still remember the feeling of that little click you get in the trigger before you squeeze off a round. You get that little click, which I suppose is equivalent to the first action of the firing mechanism, and then when you finally pull the trigger, the rather audible click. as the spring in the trigger is released. It’s a feeling that won’t leave me as long as I live. probably because we repeated it about 100 times a day for 7 days.

I should also point out that a lot of the snapping in was done in the sand, which was very hot considering the fact that it was the second week of July. But a lot of it was also conducted on asphalt. I don’t mean the kind that had been flattened by a concrete roller. This asphalt was sharp and very uncomfortable. And it absorbed the rays of the sun and radiated them back like a broiler. When you were kneeling on this stuff, and you were hot because the sun was blazing down on you while the asphalt was slow roasting you from below, and you were under the constant threat of being called off the line where you were practicing to go get IT’d, well, life kind of sucked then.

When we weren’t snapping in, we were doing other things. At some point we got an afternoon off for the 4th of July and watched a movie as a platoon. I couldn’t tell you what movie it was, but on the 4th of July, I was unknowingly introduced to what is apparently a very long and widely regarded Marine Tradition called “Manditory Fun”. As it happened in boot camp, so too does it happen almost everywhere I went. Manditory fun goes like this: There is some holiday (or there doesn’t even really need to be a holiday, it could just be a nice Friday Afternoon.) The command of the unit you are with decides that the unit will secure from whatever work or training they are doing and have a cookout or play a game of football, or go watch a movie, or go visit the Japanese and get drunk. You technically are not on liberty so you can’t opt out of the activity and do something else that you would rather do. Instead, you are formed into a platoon and marched to the location where the manditory fun is to occur, and then the activity commences. In boot camp, we were formed into a platoon, it was announced that it was Independence Day, and to observe it we were going to watch a movie. We were also allowed to talk during the movie, and the DI’s left us alone to go hang out somewhere else. The fact that we were allowed to talk to one another during the movie of course was more important than the movie itself, and we of course had a good time (you always end up having a good time during manditory fun.) And if we got too rowdy, a DI would stick his head out the door and tell us to keep it down. it was a pleasant break. After the movie ended, of course we were formed up, probably IT’d and then went to dinner.

During the first half of Second Phase, the DI’s introduced a tactic of IT called “Island hopping”. We were used to getting dropped on the asbestos tiles of the quarterdeck, which became slippery when covered with our sweat, but were cool to the touch, and made things a bit more bearable. With Island hopping, there was no cool tiles to land on while doing pushups. The sand’s of Edson Range were hot, and kept heat, regardless of what time of day it was. The only time they were relatively cool was in the early morning or if there were clouds that covered the sun. Consequently, doing pushups in the sand was miserable.

And the DI’s were very creative about their IT regimen while Island Hopping. Each barracks had a huge sand pit right in front of it, specifically for IT. The Island Hopping regimen was an introduction to the circuit course, which is a staple of Marine PT after you leave boot camp. During Island Hopping, the DI’s were, of course, referencing the Marine Corps glory days in World War II, where Marines would go to an island in the Pacific, clear it of Japanese soldiers, and then set up some really preliminary infrastructure, and then move on to the next one. It was a VERY costly campaign in terms of life, and of course, the reference was not lost on those of us who paid attention during Marine Corps History classes. Sufficient to say, each pit contained a new horror for us to endure, and regardless of how tired we were, we ran between them. I say that sort of tounge in cheek. Of course, the same rules that applied to IT in San Diego applied out here, but it was psychologically harder because we had to complete the entire circuit, time permitting, before we could even consider going in, and the sand was always burning hot.

One last discovery made during the first week of second phase, which I have never heard independent confirmation of (though every single recruit in my own platoon agreed) was that the chowhall on Edson Range had the best bread any of us had ever eaten. Period. I ask my brother-in-law now, who went through boot camp in like 2000, and he doesn’t particularly remember Edson Range’s bread. Other Marines I bring this up to give me a similar response: nothing particularly remarkable about it. but if you ate in that Chowhall during July 1995, there was only one thing you particularly cared to eat, and that was the bread. And unlike the rest of the food, you could take as much of it as you liked. We had guys, me included, that took six and seven slices of bread, and since we had to put our food away doublequick, eating that bread and washing it down with either koolaid or chocolate milk was really all we had time to do. I saw guys eat bread three meals a day, it was like crack. I tried to vary my meals up a bit, but I always had at least two slices of bread at the Edson Range chowhall.

Snapping in week eventually ended with a short conditioning hike. We had never really been hiking, or “Humping”, as the Marine Corps called it: instead we had done a could of little, light pack humps on the PT track in San Diego before this. But this hike, a short 5 mile hump was the first real one we did. Rifles, 20 pound packs and full utilities, we actually walked out to the beach down the beach a ways, and back, staying in line the whole way. And we saw something fairly awesome while we were out there. The marine Corps was driving around a hover craft the size of a tank out on the water. See the hovercraft base, if that is what you would call it, was right near Edson range, off down the coast a little ways. So the DI’s must have known that if we turned north along the beach, we would see sand, cliffs and nothing else. But if we turned south, we might see the hovercraft. And we did. They deliberately stopped us at a place that we could see this mammoth machine for ourselves, and then they proceeded to do call-and-response on how motivating that was. We all agreed.

Live fire week started the next Monday. I visited the Lutheran Chapel that weekend, cried as per usual, and met the chaplain, who was not a Lutheran (that blew my mind: how could a person who was probably Baptist deliver a Lutheran service?) I asked him some questions, stalling a bit and then we headed back to the barracks to do yet another field day. That afternoon, I remember specifically, we had to climb a rope. The rope was a thick type of rope, worn from years of service and exposure to the sun, sand wind and rain, and was suspended on a wooden construction from a secure hook about 20 feet off the deck. The DI’s informed us that we were all going to learn to climb this thing, and then proceeded, each of them to demonstrate different ways to do it. You could either wrap the rope around your one foot, locking it in place with your other, and use that as a sort of improvised step ladder, or you could wrap it around your thigh, and then hold it between your feet, and push yourself up it that way with your legs, or you could do it the way our DI’s did it, and climb it with the sheer force and power of their upper body, not utilizing their legs at all. Each of them demonstrated the third method, each reaching the top, slapping the wooden beam and yelling “Platoon 2007 Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Radke, OOO-RAH!”

Naturally the recruits tried to emulate the DI’s. Few of them were successful. Most of the time it was some dude who was like 5 feet 3 inches and 100% chest and arms (that is, one who looked like Drill Instructor Sgt. Miranda) who was able to do it that ay. But most of us were not strong like that, so we tried to employ a number of different techniques to get up the rope. When it was my turn, I failed the attempt miserably. I couldn’t get off the ground hardly, my hands hurt and burned when they slipped, the rope wouldn’t stay locked around my feet, etc etc etc. I went to the back of the line. We repeated these attempts over and over again, everytime we were back at Edson Range from being out in the field, or from being on the range, or when we were PTing, and I never completed the task. Until, that is, late in Second Phase, right before returning to San Diego. One Sunday, Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Radke and the one whose name I can’t remember marched maybe 5 of us out to the rope. I suppose none of us had completed the rope.

We were subsequently ordered to climb the rope. We were informed that we were going to stay there until we climbed the rope. We were informed that if we didn’t feel that we didn’t want to climb the rope, we might instead prefer to do pushups. I think this was the inducement I needed. I went to the rope, tried it a couple times, failed it, and then both of these two men were on me, screaming at me about this or that, putting the fear of God into me, ordering me up the rope. I wrapped the rope around my thigh and locked it in with my boot, held on, and pulled myself up a bit. When the rope locked in, I could feel the eyelettes that my bootlaces were threaded through dig into my tarsal bones in my feet, but I locked it in as if my life depended on it. Slowly I made my way up the rope, and once I got to the top, I slapped that wood and shouted that phrase that everyone else had, and then began lowering myself slowly down. One of those fellows asked me why I didn’t do that the first time. I had no answer. “This recruit does not know.” I don’t know if the other folks faired as well as I did, but before I went back to San Diego I made it up the goddamned rope, at least.

The second week of live fire began. Each day was divided into two shifts. One half of us were marched to the “butts” which was the rather vulgar name given to the dugouts behind the burms, where the targets were loaded and pulled by hand. The other half were on the fire line. After lunch which consisted more or less of the old style of MREs and canteen water, we switched places.

Firing consisted mainly of the regmen I described above. I shot all week and on Friday, which was qual day, I got a Marksman qualifier, which was equivalent to 3rd class swim qual. The next highest award was called sharpshooter and the highest qualifier rank was expert. Our badge looked like a square with a circular target on it. It was affectionately, though rather derisively called the “Pizza Box” because it looked like a delivery pizza. The sharpshooter badge was more or less a Maltese cross, but it looked like an Iron Cros, and most recruits wanted this badge because it looked so cool. The Expert badge was cross rifles surrounded by a laurel wreath. The pizza box was fine with me. I sort of have the feeling that getting the pizza box, which most Marines got, was in a way more respectable than getting th Sharpshooter badge, which looked cooler. If you got sharpshooter, you should have been able to get expert, so getting second reflects on a lack of trying. If you earned the Pizza Box, there was no way you could probably have done better. (The next time I qualled 3 years later, I went unqualified. I had to requal the next week and qualified expert, but because I got unqualified on the first try, I got the marksman badge, and not the expert badge.)

I will say just a couple of things about being on the firing line. Besides the gravel-like asphalt tearing you up when you have to kneel on it, or move from the prone to the sitting, etc, there were some fun things about firing. When you actually rack a live round into the M-16A2, and have a magazine of live ammo, it feels different in your hands than an empty weapon that just goes “click”. It feels more substantial, it actually feels more deadly, if you can believe it. The extra weight provided by the full magazine filled with 5.56 copper ball rounds is just enough to make it feel like a weapon and not a toy. Then when you first hear the discharge of that firearm by the side of your head and smell/feel the buring powder (which sometimes kicks out of the side port), and see the brass casing ejected and hear it clink on the ground, there is something about that experience you don’t forget. Nor do you forget the sound of the firing mechanism flying back and engaging the spring, and then coming back forward, grabbing and then seating another round. The spring is actually audible, and it all happens less than an inch from your ear. The kick of the rifle in your shoulder becomes a familiar feeling. I had never fired a weapon before. Naturally I was a bit trepedatious. They built that into the training, because most of the fellows that were there with me had also not actually fired a piece of military machinery in their lives. They trained that hesitation caused by lack of experience out of us, giving us a respect for the power of something as common place as a rifle. In a sense, that week, my opinions on firearms changed dramatically.

While we were snapping in, of course, we had no way of knowing what the consequences of our actions were: we had no idea what a round could do or where it would eventually go. But when they gave us live ammunition, all of a sudden, the DI’s disappeared. They knew now that we were learning to become killers, and if they fucked with us too hard, we now had the tools to exact revenge. All it would take would be one shout for a recruit to turn his weapon around on someone who had tormented him for well over a month. It wouldn’t be too hard for a recruit, even one of modest intelligence, to smuggle a round home in his pocket, load it up and in a moment, hurt someone really bad. They knew that, but we didn’t.

Because they knew this, they for the most part disappeared, and left us in the hands of the rifle range instructors, who were not paid to make us strong or instill discipline in us, but were paid to order us to calm down, to breath slowly, and to keep everyone safe while as calmly as possible, correcting our ignorance with regards to this weapon. Our regular DI’s (there were never 4 on duty during this week) got us in the evenings, but it was more or less to make sure our weapons were locked safely up, get us to the chowhall and back, to get us cleaned up, and to get us into the rack. The visits to the pit were no longer nearly as common, if we had training time in the evenings, it was filled with drill, and not IT, and the DI’s began talking to us rather than screaming at us (their voices finally began healing). When we finally got live rounds, the power ballance changed. But you see, at this point we had internalized the training to the point where it wouldn’t have occured to us to take advantage of this lax attitude, and most of us didn’t notice that anything was any different until much later, when it was all explained to us. After they handed out the first fastclip of rounds, boot camp was never ever again the same way it was before we gained our proverbial “gift of fire”. The difference now, looking back on it, was like night and day.

When we finally could see results we would get from aiming and pulling the trigger, this opened up a whole new world on the rifle. While on the firing line, we were to shoot our weapons down range. generally, if our sights were set properly, the round would go where we wanted it to. But often times, we would jump in anticipation of the shot, especially, for a good reason, in the kneeling position, where all our weight was on our one knee, which was being tenderized and cooked by the asphalt. This would of course cause the round to go somewhere else. Some times it went into the burm in front of the target. If you hit the thing just right, the people in the butts would get a shower of dirt and rocks, and naturally, because you were paired, they would seek revenge next time they were on the firing line. Shooting the burm was frowned upon by the shooting coaches, but sometimes accidents happened, and what can they say? Sometimes they happened deliberately.

Other anomolies occured which were a little more defensible. Since there were fourty Marine recurits lined up side by side, each infront of their own targets that were right next to one another, it was easy to mistake, especially when you get tunnel vision, the next target over for your own. The only way they would know if a shooter did this would be if the target puller notices two rapid-succession impacts on the burm behind another nearby target, and stood around waiting for an impact on his own target. Since each shooter had to wait for a target to be pulled down and the hole marked, two quick shots on the same target was a sure sign that a shooter had shot the wrong target.

Other times, people shot things that weren’t targets at all. I can guess that at least four times in as many years, people on the KD course shot the speaker, that fire commands were called on, out. The speaker was hidden behind a ply wood construction, you see, and it was brightly painted, so that people would not shoot it. But that didn’t stop people from shooting it anyway. You knew that it was shot when you heard a loud crack of a bullet going through wood (as opposed to paper of the target) followed either by a bunch of feedback and static from the destroyed speaker, or nothing coming out of that speaker any more.

Every shot you made you had to record. So when you shot, you would see where you hit, and then you had to mark it on a small picture of the target in your shot book. The goal of course was consistency: if you made a group and the group was high and to the left, the coach would come around and adjust your sights to help move it into the center of the target. If your shots were all over the place, you were remediated on shooting because clearly you were not firing the same shot every time. That was a skill you had to acquire, because adjusting for windage would not be enough to put you on target each and every time. Plus, if you didn’t master the techniques of shooting, you weren’t going to be able to put well-placed shots on a target unless it was too late and they were presenting a target so big that you couldn’t possibly miss. The goal was to keep your enemy from getting that close, so you had to be able to hit them from far away.

Pulling the butts was a lot of fun. Nobody bothered you down there. You got to take your blouse off and wear just a t-shirt. Nobody yelled anything at anyone down there unless a person was slow in getting the target up in the air or down. You got to talk to your buddy standing next to you. It was fun. Besides dodging the occasional rock and dirt shower, the job of the person who pulled the butts was to operate a chain driven carriage which held a target that was about 3'X5' and had a sillouhette picture and several rings on it. I also had to keep track of the shots that passed through the target. If a person hit in the black, I would they took a large cardboard circle with a plastic in on it, stick it into the hole and then run it back up, so they could see that they hit the sillouhette. If they made it into the ring, but not into the black, a small black circle was put into the hole, and if they missed the ring, the got a big black circle stuck way out off the target. If they missed all together, the circle was stuck in at some random point in the corner. If I couldn’t find a new hole but saw an impact on the mountain of dirt behind the target, it was safe to assume that they missed all together.

I always prefered to fire in the morning, and pull butts in the afternoon. The afternoon in the butts had a certain advantage. In the morning on the line, the wind was a little whacky and would bounce people’s shots all over the place, and the sun would always be in your eyes, but then, in the afternoon, you got to be in the cool shade while the sun was scorching those up on the firing line. Plus, it was easier to see the round go through the target in the afternoon because the sun was shining on it instead of in your face. It was, however, about half and half the number of mornings I spent on the firing lines as opposed to the number of mornings I spent in the butts.

During Qualifying week, we got a new addition to our platoon. We had dropped a few people all along the way, and we had also picked new people up. But this guy was different. His name was something like but not necessarily Garcia (let’s just say Garcia), and he was introduced to us by one of the DI’s as a person who had been in our platoon a year ago and got himself hurt somehow, and now was picking up exactly where he left off, with the same set of drill instructors that he left behind, in the same platoon and the same company. Now that was rare. He got hurt, dropped on some T-day, and healed completely, just to get picked up again by the same people who had dropped him.

I say this is rare because it usually didn’t take that long to heal up if someone gets hurt. Who knows how this guy sustained his injury or what injury it was, but by the time he graduated (with us) he had spent a year and a quarter in the Marine training regiment, while most Marine recruits spend 13 weeks there. His life had been MRP for all that time. For those of you who don’t know what MRP is, it is the Medical Rehabilitation Platoon. All those guys do is light work and cleaning as they are able, watch television, and hang out in the baracks. But you see, they also have drill instructors. And they live at MCRD. So it’s not like its supposed to be fun. When these guys get out of MRP (that is, when they heal), often they go to PCP who shares the same squadbay as them. PCP is derisively called “Pork Chop Platoon” but it really means “Physical Conditioning Platoon.” As I will describe later, I visited them daily for a week to do PT all day. But basically, that’s what they do all day: they work out until they have lost enough weight or have gotten strong enough to return to training. And they stay in MRP and PCP as long as they need to. There were rumors of dudes who spent their entire first enlistment in MRP, but I can’t say that I ever met anyone like that who knew who these people were.

This guy Garcia was about the most unintelligent person in our Platoon. And the DI’s had a lot of fun making fun of this guy. At some point in the training cycle after we picked this guy up, I was standing firewatch in the squadbay, while everyone else was out cleaning their rifles. Garcia and DI Sgt. Armstrong come back up, and Armstrong is chewing Martinez out for losing his firing pin retaining pin, a tiny little kotter pin that is easy to misplace if you aren’t extra careful and without which you can’t fire the weapon. Garcia is standing in the door way and Armstrong is chewing him out asking him “How could you lose this Firing Pin retaining Pin?!” Martinez answered “Sir, This recruit does not know how he could lose the… firing pin retaining pin, Sir.” Armstrong stops a moment, as if he is thinking of where it could possibly be, and then remembers that Garcia is still standing there. “You know what? The other DI’s said you were a rock. I don’t think you are, Recruit Garcia. I’ll bet you hid that firing pin retaining pin and sent it home in an envelope, didn’t you?” Garcia answered, “Sir, No, Sir.” Armstrong continues, “Yes you did, recruit Garcia. You’re going to mail your rifle piece by piece so you can build your own M16A2 Service rifle at home, aren’t you? “

Now, I thought this was hillarious. So hillarious that I committed this conversation to memory. Garcia didn’t think it was so funny, but if he did, he certainly couldn’t laugh about it. Armstrong IT’d him for about 5 minutes on the quarter deck, and then they were outside to look for the firing pin retaining pin. We got him from PCP. At the end of second phase, we lost Dougherty, who I talked about above, to MRP. He had, luckily for him, acquired a case of cellulitis and couldn’t keep training with us. He picked up with a platoon two weeks later, and thankfully didn’t have to spend much time there. But I think there was something else going on there too. As I described above, Dougherty was under constant threat of reprisal from some recruits, and it probably was a no brainer to let him drop, go get treated and then come back with a different platoon. I saw him once at PCP and then saw him later again after boot camp was over. He was, predictably, marked for infantry.

Once qualifying week was over, we did field week. As I understand, things in the Marine Corps are a lot different now adays. They have something called the “crucible” which I don’t know anything about. But then again, we did things in boot camp that they don’t do anymore. Our first week in the “field” which was actually like 1 miles off mainside Edson Range was spent primarily on learning the skills of land navigation, bivouacing, survival skills, obstacle courses (both during the day and at night), and of course the dreaded gas chamber. Nothing was too hard, but that gas chamber really was awful. About 20 of us went in at a time, and the DI’s were standing in there. You could smell a very sweet smell, kind of like incense smoke. I learned later that this was the smell of CS gas, which is more commonly refered to as tear gas.

Now, tear gas doesn’t kill you. I mean, if you are hit in the face with a cannister and are incapacitated, and then have to breathe it in, I suppose you would die. But if you can escape, (and believe me, your body tries to escape) you’ll be perfectly alright, after a little while. So we have twenty of us go in there. There are no windows, the walls are made of cinder block, it’s hot, and the light is very dim. The class we had recently took on how to don and clear a gas mask is repeated in abreviated form by the DI, and then he drops what look like pills into a coffee can. We are ordered to put our gas masks on and clear them of gas. So far so good, for me anyway. By the time the gas hits me, others around me have started to panic.

Why? Well, they didn’t clear their mask, probably. And when that gas hits you, it clears your sinuses. Immediately. And it causes you to cry. Immediately. Consequently, people began choking, because another affect it has on you is that it constricts your air passages. People thought they were asphyxiating. There was enough CS gas popped to imitate a combat zone, and these people were getting, unfortunately for them a full dose. Meanwhile, the DI’s took their gas masks off, so they could talk to us. And they just walked around in this stuff. I’m not even going to guess how they did this, but they would joke later that they had inhaled so much CS that it didn’t phase them anymore. That’s believable. What it did to me, however made me doubt that entirely.

Some DI would stand in front of you and tell you to break your seal. now there was just enough light in there so you could see what it was doing to others, and you could certainly hear them. And so naturally I didn’t want to. But that didn’t stop my arms from moving, and breaking the seal. As soon as that gas hit my nose, I mean the instant it hit my nose, the tears started uncontrolable. I wasn’t actually crying, but my tear glands didn’t know that. Snot began running out of control from my nose, my throat closed up and I couldn’t breathe, or see anything. The DI ordered me to say my name, Platoon and Senior Drill Instructor. I did as I was asked, and then he went on to the next person. It did not occur to me to try to reclear my mask, and I just stood there for maybe a minute while they were finishing. Then we sang the first verse of the Marine’s Hymn, tears running down my face and soaking my shirt, snot dripping out of my nose, sweating profusely. And then they let us go.

I actually stayed in there the entire time I was supposed to. In the group that followed me, one dude tried to make a break for the door. The door flew open, and out came a recruit, followed by an arm, which grabbed him by the blouse and yanked him back into the chamber, slamming the door behind him. Some people came out and threw up all over the place. But interestingly enough, nobody had to go to the clinic. We were instructed to strip down to our skivies and walk around to air out. It took a long time for the gas to get off of us, but as we learned, it is only potent for a very short period of time, and if you can make it through the initial blast, you’re going to be uncomfortable for a while, but you can make it. Plus gas disperses quickly in the air, and is meant to provide a quick knock out punch to the people it is employed against. If you make it to the second or third minute, you will have no problems after that.

After the first field week, we went on another hump, I think thin time it was either 7 or ten miles. This was the longest distance I had walked at a stretch, and I thought it was really generally amazing. We left early and returned early. At some point during the last two weeks of second phase, I got myself a real bad eye infection. After three days of my eye weeping, and sealing itself shut overnight, I finally reported my ailment to the DI’s, and they sent me to BAS, and called me Rocky again. At BAS, they gave me some ointment which I tried for a few days. Things did not get any better: my eye was infected because our hygiene in the field was miserable. We were surrounded by dirt and grit at all times. We slept in it, we ate it, and we never showered. So naturally, it was impossible to keep my hands clean enough to administer the ointment without also including a significant portion of dirt. When I went back to the clinic, and pointed this fact out, they gave me some antibiotic drops. The infection began to clear up immediately, but took two weeks to clear up all together. But it was still bad enough that in the bootcamp photo we took immediately upon returning from second phase, my eye was still swollen and pink, and it looked like I had been punched in the face right before the picture was taken. For my part I was thankful to not get dropped.

At some point during second phase we got flu shots in the butt muscle. The clinic told us that we need to not tense up when they administered the medicine, because that would cause some weird reaction. I remember that the shot administered by hypodermic needle was very VERY cold, and it felt like I had a golf ball placed under my skin in my muscle. It was very uncomfortable. But I also saw the adverse reaction in one guy. We got the shots outside, and immediately upon administration, this guy dropped to the ground and started yelling and spinning around on the ground. Apparently, the recruit had tenses up and his leg was going into spasms. They had some other recruits pick him up and carry him off to the side, and told him to ice the injection site, and stay off of it until his leg worked again. If the rest of us weren’t laughing, we were terrified that that was going to happen to us.

In the last week of second phase, we stayed out in the field once more. We hiked each day to various live fire ranges across Edson Range. We learned about, disassembled, and fired crew served weapons like the Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher, the Mod-Deuce 50 caliber machine gun, and the SAW. Each day we learned about another weapon. We also did an obstacle course, both by day and night, took a field prac test about the crew served weapons, did a night NBC drill (where we were back at the KD course, shooting at targets in our gas mask) where the speakers and the burm in front of the butts took a beating. The week was capped off with the crowning achievement of second phase, a hike up the “Reaper”.

It was made clear to me that after the institution of the Cruicible 5 months after I got out of boot camp, the Reaper was saved until the very end as a motivational hike. For us, it was completed at the end of Second phase, before we went on mess and maintenance week. It makes sense to do it there. We were already in the field, our gear was all packed up ready to return to mainside. The only thing we had to do was climb a mountain. We could see the Reaper from everywhere in Edson Range. That mountain loomed over everything we did, and we climbed it.

They informed us that the mountain itself plays tricks on you. Apparently, mountains look higher when you are at the base looking up at them. Well, we hiked over to the Reaper from our bivouac site and it sure looked huge. I’ve climbed higher mountains since, with packs, but the Reaper holds a special place in my memory. It’s called the Reaper, because from the top it looks like the scythe, not because it kills people, but the way some of those guys acted, you’d think they were about to die. People kept falling back, and the line stretched way out. We constantly had to stop to wait for people to catch up. It was a real pain in the neck, having to stop. The first slope must have been two miles long, but I wouldn’t have any idea because the method of calculating distance, by the time it took to cover it did not work given our difficulty in keeping everyone together. At one point, I fell back myself, but soon caught up and picked up the rear for a while. Finally we made it to the top and got a great view of both Edson Range and the Ocean beyond. We walked along the top, descended quickly, and returned to mainside Edson Range.

Our last duties during second phase were to clean the barracks. Again.