Nothing is off limits

Remember in kindergarten when the teachers and our parents used to say "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me"?  That is an absolute crock of steaming horse manure and Drill Instructor school teaches people how to say the most cutting and evil things.  Most of the time they can do it without cussing.  Nothing is off limits to a DI:  How you look, act, talk, eat;  Where you're from;  Who your parents are;  What race or nationality you are;  Why you joined the Marines.  All these things are on the table and the results can be comically cruel.

My platoon has a Russian kid named Andrei Chernyshev.  He has a thick accent.  I'm talking about a spy movie thick accent and English is not his first language.  Throw in the fact that we aren't allowed to speak in the first person lets the jokes write themselves when it comes to his interactions with the DIs.  The Senior, The Heavy, Smith and Cain either can't pronounce his last name or purposely don't.  Every time Chernyshev tries to ask or answer a question, they cut him off.  He has been called Chernobyl, Moscow, Siberia, Cherry Blossom, Cherny-whatever, Commie, Rusky, KGB and my personal favorite, Sputnik.  The Heavy stood in front of him and started asking him about his family.  His parents are immigrants.  Andrei has four brothers.  It turns out that one is in the Army, one is in the Navy, one is in the Air Force and one is in the Coast Guard.  Upon hearing this, the Heavy accused him of being a spy and ordered him onto the quarter deck!

We have a set of identical twin brothers, Alex and Justin Wilhelmsen.  They are rack mates.  They stand right next to each other on line.  The DIs mispronounce their names:  Wilshammer, Windjammer, Wisenheimer.  They've called them Thing 1 and Thing 2.  They've asked each of them which one is the smart one and quarter decked them both no matter how they answer.  They've accused them of using telepathy and quarter decked them for that.  The Heavy stood in front of one and asked him if twins could feel each other's pain?  He decided to do an experiment.  He punched him in the chest and asked his brother if he felt it.  When the other one said no, he hit him again and asked again.  This happened about five times before his brother finally said he felt it.  Then the Heavy simply moved over and began the experiment again with the other one.  The DIs would send one to the quarter deck and yell "Take your idiot brother with you!"

One of the squad leaders is named David Umoren.  Now in case you don't see the comic aspect of this perhaps I should explain how his name is pronounced.  I sounds exactly how it looks phonetically, or like you moron.  I can only imagine how the DIs felt when they saw his name on the roster.  I mean this is like Barry Bonds playing bar league softball.  It's just plain unfair.  Add that to the fact that he is from the Caribbean and has an accent, well I think you get the idea.  Another recruit's name is Allan Gay.  Another grapefruit pitch.  Thomas Berger.  How many variations of that name do you think you can list?  Samuel Silin.  One of his many nicknames was Silly, but for some reason whenever they call him that it never seemed funny.

Blending in is not really an option.  Somehow, someway, they seem to find something on each of us.  It's only a matter of what it is and when.  There's a blue light special in the insult department and it's on all our gear lists.

Games

This entire experience is one giant mind game.  Drill Instructors have a seemingly endless array of games.  Everything is designed to get us to move faster, listen better, and work as a collective.  The games only start when someone screws up.  Who exactly can one screw a simple instruction like turn to your right??  This friggin platoon somehow figures out a way.  It's almost unbelievable that we can't do anything right. When we first got here I really thought that the DIs were just psychos.  They scream all the time and they always want more.  They snap at you even when you do it right.  I got up in the middle of the night to make a head call.  The squad bay is really dark and on my way to the head I didn't see Sgt Cain until I was about to pass him.  I said "Bye your leave, good evening Sir" and attempted to keep walking.  I should have known better.  "Oh hell no" was his reply, "Get back and try again."  Just so you know get back means go all the way back to my rack and then walk up and do it properly.  I didn't roll my eyes when he said it, but he cussed me out anyway "Good to Connors, you nasty thing lose your bearing too!  You owe me on the quarterdeck in the morning!  Get out of my sight!"  I was almost relieved to be able to go the head and just hoped that Cain would forget about the quarter decking in the morning.

When we move to slowly we hear "Oh?!?  Good to go?!? You want to move slow?!?" and then the bizarre task comes.  What constitutes a bizarre task?  Here is a list of notables:

• get on line with two sheets and a blanket
• fix your racks now (after you just stripped it)
• get to the rear of the squad bay
• get to the front of the squad bay
• get to the port side
• get to the starboard side
• get on line with a footlocker
• dump out your footlocker
• put everything back in your footlocker
• dump out your footlockers in the center now
• put everything back in your footlocker (good luck getting your stuff back)
• get into your PT gear
• put your uniforms on
• form a school circle
• get out to the street
• get back to the squad bay
• get into the pit

There are a lot more of these.  If you don't think that this sounds bad, you're right.  You're right because listing them doesn't include a DI screaming at you.  The games begin when the DI tells you to do this and then decides we aren't moving fast enough.  Get on line becomes get on line with two sheets and a blanket, which then becomes make your racks now...  "10, 9, 8, 3, 2, 1 You're done."  Everything always started with "Good to go, you want to move slow?" Then the instruction. Then the countdown.  No matter how fast we did it, we didn't do it fast enough.

The DIs have another set of games.  These are punishments.  We aren't allowed to say I.  We have to refer to ourselves in the third person as "This Recruit."  One recruit called himself I and got the following punishment; He had to stand at the POA and point at his eyeball and shout "Eye!" and then at his chest and shout "Recruit!" repeatedly for an hour.  Another time a recruit fell asleep during a class, so the DI chewed him out asking how he'd feel if he fell asleep on guard duty and got the platoon killed?  Then to emphasize the point he gave eight hours of fire watch and made him stand at the POA holding a pen in his finger tips with his arm straight out.  If he lowered his arm or dropped the pen he had to report to the DI Hut and announce that he had killed the entire platoon.  This kind of thing can happen at any time for any reason and I think I'm becoming paranoid.

Flash forward

Today is March 20, 2011.  Eight years ago today Operation Iraqi Freedom started.  I don't know how I feel about this.  It doesn't seem possible that it's been eight years.  My birthday is March 18.  I turned 27 two days before OIF began.  To be completely honest I didn't think I was going to turn 28.  War in any form is a scary thing, there is nothing glitzy or glamorous about it. People die and get hurt.  I knew all the Marines in MAG-39 who were killed.  I saw the pictures on the news of guys I went to Parris Island with who were killed.  I remember having chow with my friend Otis and sitting and talking to a guy Otis was friends with.  The next day he was killed.  Just one of the many to the folks back home who disagree with why we came to Iraq, but a real face to me.  Life became very simple for us.  Get up in the morning, check your boots for scorpions, go to the head and clean up, go to chow, go to MAG HQ work for 20 hours, go back to the tent, try not to fall asleep untying your boots, pass out...  repeat.  All the while you are doing two things:  hoping you don't die and trying not to think about home.  I know that I chose to join the Marine Corps.  I didn't have to do this.  We were trained to be hard as nails and that the most important thing was the mission.  We were trained to improvise, adapt and overcome.  We were trained to never give up and never surrender.  I never broke a bone or got shot or hit by shrapnel from a IED.  I wasn't deployed multiple times for over a year at a time.   I do have scars.  Sometimes it's very hard to keep my mind focused or my emotions in check.  I can get overly sensitive or insanely angry for no reason.  This happens to a lot of veterans.  The saying goes that time heals all wounds.  I've come to the conclusion that just isn't true.  Some events are so earth shattering, so traumatic, so scary that you will never be able to let them go and you will never feel the same again.  I have developed a bizarre coping mechanism, I focus my rage and aggression on the small and insignificant rather than real issues.  You could say that I sweat the small stuff in order to deal with the big stuff.

I have been telling the story of The Misguided Children which began almost twelve years ago in a real time format, but today I wanted to pause and remember the 4,439 brave men and women who have died in Iraq and the over 300,000 who survived but have come home scarred in one way or another.  All gave some, some gave all.  Semper Fidelis.

Black Flag

Have you seen Biloxi Blues?  When they get off the train Jerome says "God it's hot!  It's like Africa hot! I don't know if I'm gonna be able to stay here if it's gonna be this hot!" That's pretty much what Parris Island is like.  It's humid ALL the time.  It's hot ALL the time.  This is not an exaggeration.  It's hot when it rains. It's hot at night.  It's so hot here that the Marine Corps has to categorize how hot it is with the cunning use of flags.  It's called the Automatic Heat Stress Index or AHSI (I swear to God I should have signed up for the MOS that makes acronyms because the Marine Corps has an acronym for F@#$ING everything!) and it has four levels:  1) Green Flag Condition is 80 to 84.9 degrees.  Heavy exercises, for unacclimatized personnel, will be conducted with caution and under constant supervision. 2) Yellow Flag Condition is 85 to 87.9 degrees.  Strenuous exercises or physical labor will be curtailed for unacclimatized, newly assigned Marines and Civilian Marines in their first 3 weeks.  Avoid outdoor classes or work in the sun.  3) Red Flag Condition is 88 to 89 degrees.  All PT or very strenuous work will be curtailed for those not thoroughly acclimatized by at least 3 weeks.  Personnel not thoroughly acclimatized may carry on limited activity not to exceed 6 hours per day. 4) Black Flag Condition is 90 and above degrees.  All nonessential physical activity will be halted.   There have been days when the black flag is up by 9 am.  If we are out practicing drill on the parade deck and the black flag goes up they we go back to the barracks.  It should be noted that drill instructors hate these limitations and take it out on us when they have to alter their plans.  Now we may be in the barracks but that doesn't mean we are getting a break.  We will drill in the squad bay.  This gets extremely messy.  Platoon 2070 sucks at drill and trying to drill in a closed space just makes it worse.  The barracks are air conditioned.  This is not for comfort.  That would be an amenity and there are no amenities here.  They are air conditioned so we can train when it gets too hot outside.  There are 110 guys in this platoon.  It gets hot when 110 guys are running back and forth in a closed space.


I wish I could tell you that the recruits of Platoon 2070 are some of the finest young men America has to offer, but I can't.  Truthfully this might be the biggest collection of assholes and retards ever assembled.  These morons don't listen.  They can't walk in a straight line.  They won't sound off when answering the DIs.  We get chewed out and punished for everything and I'm actually beginning to think we might deserve it.  Why go off on this rant when I've been talking about black flags?  Well, because the funniest and saddest thing that has happened to date occurred while we were drilling inside during a black flag.  We were in our four squads lined up facing starboard in the squad bay.  There are two types of drill: marching and rifle manual.  We were doing rifle manual.  The Senior was standing on a foot locker calling out the commands and the other three jackals were moving through the platoon watching and correcting mistakes.  The Senior yelled "Left Shoulder Arms!" and you can hear all the rifles move but one loud thud on the ground.  Hockenberry for some unknown reason went to order arms.  In case you are wondering what the difference is I'll explain it quickly.  Left shoulder arms basically means that the muzzle of the rifle is above the left shoulder and the buttstock of the rifle is in the left hand.  Order arms means that the muzzle of the rifle is in the right hand and the buttstock is on the ground.  There is slightly more to it but that is the gist.  Now the Senior saw this and lost it.


Senior: "Hockenberry?!?!  God dammit?!?!  Do you even know what state you're in?!?!"
Hockenberry: "Sir Pennsylvania Sir!"


WTF?!?!?  Seriously?!?!  I can only assume that Hockenberry thought the Senior said from instead of in.  Well all hell broke loose after that.  The Senior actually fell off the foot locker laughing.  Most of the platoon laughed.  Sgt Smith started cussing out Hockenberry for being too stupid to breathe!  SSgt Askew got angry because everybody laughed.  Sgt Cain just stood there looking angry in a stupid way.  The Senior got himself together and ordered us all into the pit.  The sandpit behind the barracks is for punishment PT.  We spent almost 30 minutes in the pit that day.  We weren't even supposed to be outside.  

Candy Cain!!!

Boot camp is all about routines.  Every morning we get out of the rack when the dreaded "LIGHTS, LIGHTS, LIGHTS" gets yelled and we get dressed as fast as possible and on line for the head count.  All the recruits in the platoon stand on line at the POA (position of attention) while the drill instructors count the recruits and rifles.  In the beginning of boot camp all the DIs participated in the count.  We've gotten to the point that it's usually Sgt Cain who does the count.  Sgt Cain is the most hated of the DIs.  Everything the man does is annoying.  His voice just makes the skin crawl and just resonates in the small of your back.  He always wants the platoon's complete attention and then talks out of his ass.  When a DI yells "Zero" all the recruits have to literally stop and freeze in position and yell "Freeze Recruit Freeze."  The DI can leave you in this position for however long they want.  Cain is the worst offender of this.  Despite all his habits that have so endeared him to the recruits of Platoon 2070 one stands alone as the most hated.  In the morning while we stand on line at the POA he will correct recruits hand placement.  It's not the action so much as his particular method.  In the POA, proper hand placement is thumb on the trouser seem and knuckles against your leg.  If Sgt Cain feels that your hand is too far forward or back or that your hand is against your leg, he will adjust you by opening his index finger and thumb and jabbing this open claw into the fleshy part of your wrist between the bones of your hand and arm. (BTW if you don't think that will hurt or is annoying, open your hand like I said and now jab into your other wrist...  I'll wait...  See what I mean!!!)  You can see guys wince and glare at him when he does this.  You can see it in their eyes that they want to punch him right in his Where's Waldo looking face!!!

Now we all hate Sgt Cain, but Colson hates him to the point where he has become outright hostile.  Colson is a 5'10 fat black kid from Kentucky.  He is such a hick that I honestly question whether or not he ever owned shoes before he joined the Marines.  Colson tends to stand at the POA with his his fists pointed out instead of in and everyday Cain adjusts him.  Colson is stupid, annoying and unpleasant to be around, but he does have one talent.  He can throw his voice.  He has figured a way to talk out the side of his mouth and make it appear that it's not him.  He likes to do this to Sgt Cain.  After Sgt Cain passes him Colson will yell "C-A-I-N!!!!" in a high pitched squeal.  This drives Sgt Cain crazy.  He flips out every time and we all get punished.  No matter what he does to us, we won't tell him that it's Colson. While I think Colson is a total idiot I will give him his due, he won't do it when any of the other DIs are around.  After a week of yelling "C-A-I-N!!"  He decided to add "C-A-N-D-Y" to it.  I thought I had seen Cain at his maddest but "C-A-N-D-Y C-A-I-N!!!" pisses him off to end.  It's getting to the point where I personally can't believe that he doesn't know it's Colson yet.  I also can't believe that he hasn't caught him yet.  It's just another way that this place is completely insane.  Colson antagonizes Cain, Cain cusses us out and punishes us and nobody says anything.  Colson is becoming as unpopular as Cain.

This all came to a head last night.  Cain was the on duty DI for the night.  Colson pulled his little stunt twice and we got reamed out.  After lights out, Cain went into his office and shut the door.  About five minutes after he went into his office Colson decided to yell "C-A-N-D-Y C-A-I-N!!!" at the top of his lungs.  Before anyone could laugh Cain's voice came out of nowhere "THAT'S IT!!!  I CAUGHT YOU COLSON YOU FAT STUPID BASTARD!!!  GET UP AND INTO MY OFFICE YOU'RE DONE!!!"  First of all, I saw Cain go into his office, so I'm wondering what ninja technique the sneaky bastard used to get back into the squad bay?!?  Second, see first question?!?!  WOW!!!  This morning the Senior told us that Colson had been dropped from our platoon and that anyone else who wanted to test the DIs would meet the same fate!  I still can't believe how Cain caught him.  I'm actually in a state of awe right now.

You missed a spot

Every time I think that I have seen the full extent of the pure evil nature of my DIs, they prove me wrong.  All my life I've heard that if you don't like the weather in New England, wait a minute.  That principle can be applied here.  Sgt Smith is a hard man.  I don't think that he knows what sympathy is and I know for a fact he doesn't know what empathy is.  Our platoon scribe is a kid named Throck, that is short for Throckmorton.  Yes that is quite a mouthful.  Throck bears a striking resemblance to Drew Carey.  He is about 5'8, has a belly, wicked thick glasses and a seriously high pitched voice.  Throck has been on PI for two months because he broke his leg and got rolled back in training.  Throck can be whiny and seems to operate on his own program.  More than just about any other recruit, he seems to inspire the ire of Sgt Smith.  We were waiting in the chute at the chow hall at lunch time.  Throck was standing in the line closest to where Sgt Smith was cussing out the platoon.  All of a sudden Throck reaches up and with his left hand and smacks his right forearm and quickly tries to put his hand back to his side.  Of course, it made a loud smacking sound and Sgt Smith saw this.  He yells at Throck to get out of line and explain himself.  The exchange went like this:

Smith:  What in the HELL are you doing Throckmorton?

Throck:  (High pitched voice) Sir, killing a mosquito Sir!

Smith: (Smacks Throck in the face with his right hand and then uses that hand to guide him toward the back of the platoon) Come with me Throckmorton!

(Now at the rear of the platoon)

Smith: Don't unpack your bags son, you won't be staying here very long!

Throck is an extremely nervous young man.  This has completely freaked him out.  He's terrified of Sgt Smith.  During Senior Square Away time, Throck asks the Senior if he should be nervous about what Smith said to him.  The Senior who is not the most even tempered man quickly and emphatically says "Throck you don't have to worry about how long you're staying till I tell you that you're in trouble.  Now sit down and shut up!"  Throck seemed more at ease after this which makes me seriously doubt his intelligence because there was nothing reassuring about that statement.  

Now you might be saying to yourself right now that wasn't so bad.  Maybe you're right.  A drill instructor slapping a recruit in the face (not supposed to happen, but it does) isn't that bad.  But maybe you'll feel differently about this.  We had an inspection today.  So last night we had to shave, scrub our hands and fingernails and get a pre-inspection inspection (yes that apparently is a real thing)  We had to come out and stand in front of Sgt Smith with our hands presented at waste level and then turn our heads to the right, left and sky.  If we were clean enough we got to our foot lockers, if not we had to go back and try again.  Now shaving is really rough for the black recruits because some of them get really bad razor bumps.  It goes so bad for some of them that Medical will issue No-Shave Chits.  Guys would be coming out of the head bleeding because they had cut off a razor bump and then Smith would cuss them out.  Now that's pretty bad, getting forced to painfully shave, cutting yourself and then getting an ass chewing for it.  But that's not the focus of my story.  One recruit, Hockenberry (I am not making these names up!!!) is a 5'7 white kid from Pennsylvania.   He is a little slow and not really athletic.  The most distinguishing feature he has is severe acne and pits on his face.  It actually looks like mountains and valleys on his cheeks.  Hockenberry is also terrified of Sgt Smith.  Hockenberry shaved his face as close as he could.  Let's just say he shaved too close.  He came out of the head with a beard of blood from all the acne he cut off. (This is not an exaggeration!!!)  He stood in front of Sgt Smith for inspection and at first Smith's eyes bulged out of his face in shock.  Here's what happened next:

Smith:  What in the HELL were you doing in there Hockenberry?!?!

Hockenberry:  Sir shaving Sir!

Smith:  (Stares at him menacingly then inspects him, then he points at one side) You missed a spot. Go do it again.

So Hockenberry went back into the head and shaved again!  When he came out the second time looking just as jacked up as he did the first time, Sgt Smith inspected him and then sprayed him in the face with after shave!  I don't even want to imagine how much that must have stung.  

Diet trays to the front

When I first went to my recruiters office I weighed 242 lbs.  That was in March.  When I left for PI, I weighed 222 lbs.  My recruiter told me that I needed to weigh 225 before I left.  This freaked me out because I was having trouble hitting that mark.  If I didn't get to 225 or below would they not let go to boot camp? (Bear in mind that at this point I don't think that would have been the end of the world but I did then!)  Well, it turns out that this was one of many false things that my esteemed recruiter told me.  I could have weighed 250 and as long as I could pass the IST they would have let me go to boot.  Why does this bother me?  It bothers me because what the bastard should have told was that I needed to get under 215 lbs because is the weight limit for men who are 74 inches tall.  Had he told me that then I would have worked harder and cut more weight.  Instead I came down here thinking that I had lost enough weight and low and behold my DIs held a different view.  I have been placed on diet tray.  This means that when we go to chow I have to move to the front of the line when we go in and announce to the mess staff that I need a diet tray.  All my brown skivvy shirts have two white lines printed on the front and the back so the DIs know to spend a little extra time torturing me during PT.  All of this just seems to add to the overall humiliation and brain washing that this wonderful place has to offer!

That being said it should be noted that this place might be the best dietary program in the history of the world.  I came here at 222 on June 15th.  It is July 1st and I weigh 200 lbs.  I asked the Senior when a recruit can get off the Diet Tray program and he told me they would take me off when I was 15 lbs under the weight limit.  I'm not rocket scientist but that should mean that I should be off diet tray NOW!  Well, as with everything else they do down here, the DIs operate on their own time frame or whenever they F@#$ING feel like it.  Anyways, there is a side effect to losing 22 lbs in fifteen days and that is that you can lose muscle and stamina as well.  I am exhausted.  I could eleven pull ups when I came here and now I am maxing out at seven.   This came into play when we had pugil sticks the other day.  The first two times we had pugil stick matches I won easily because I was stronger than my opponent.  This last time I got knocked around for two reasons, I am a lot lighter and I am not used to it.  I know why it happened and so do the DIs but that didn't stop the evil bastards from chewing my ass for losing.  You know, maybe that's why I'm dropping weight so fast cuz the damn DIs chew our asses so much!!

Do you think that I am making up how devious the DIs are?  Do you think that I am exaggerating because of how much I hate them and this place?  Maybe you have a point.  However, I want you to consider this little tale first.  Every night we have Senior Drill Instructor time.  We all sit around with the Senior and mail is passed out and he tells what is going on the world.  Everyone wants to get mail.  Sometimes guys get packages with food in them.  Not just any food either, candy or sweets!  If a guy gets one of these packages he has to come to the front, open in front of everyone and he can eat what's in it until all the mail is passed out.  However, this is yet another of the Catch 22s.  When all the mail is passed out, you aren't allowed to keep what's left.  You must turn it in to the heavy who puts in the trash and then dumps cologne and bleach on it after he tears open all the packaging to ensure that no one will attempt to eat it later. (I've seen guys dig through the trash at night and eat the stuff anyways!  Desperate times I guess!)  Then the guy who got to eat will get called up the quarterdeck and get PT'd for about 15 minutes or until he looks like he's gonna throw up or actually throws up!  The DIs love it when a recruit pukes!  I haven't gotten any care packages yet, and honestly I don't want one.  I think I'll write a letter to my dad and tell him not to send me anything other than letters, I catch enough hell from these vultures as is.