History

Have you heard the expression "Beat it into your head"?  You're probably thinking that I'm about to describe one of my fellow recruits getting beaten down, and if that's the case then in this particular case you would be mistaken.  What I'm referring to is the idea that you can learn something by putting a beat to it and repeating it over and over.  Whenever we go anywhere, we march in four columns to the cadence of one of the DIs.  The cadence is a simple one, usually "Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, Left."  Any subsequent command will always come after the last 'Left'.  But this is the standard beat.  After we start marching, the DI guiding the platoon will say "Echo On!!!" and the entire platoon will repeat "Echo On!!!"  From this point the platoon will repeat everything the DI says until he says "Echo Off!!!"  This is how the DIs beat facts into our heads.  For example, the DI says "The five major battles of World War Two are", the platoon will repeat this. Then he says "Key word B.I.G.O.T.", the platoon repeats.  He finishes with "Bougainville, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Tarawa", the platoon repeats.  In three sentences the platoon has just learned that the Marine Corps five major battles of WWII are Bougainville, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, and Tarawa.  Does it matter that this keyword has the battles out of sequence, no.  This gets 'beaten' into the head due to it's simplicity and repetition.

That is one way that we learn the history of the Marine Corps.  The other way is to sit in giant lecture halls and have actual classes about USMC History.  It has occurred to me sitting through these that the Marine Corps takes more pride in it's history than any other group anywhere.  It also occurs to me that they get some of the most eccentric SNCOs on the planet to teach it.  We learned about one of the two two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winners in Marine Corps history.  He received his first Medal of Honor in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion for singlehandedly defending his position against repeated attacks and inflicted casualties of around 200 on the attacking Boxers.  At the Battle of Belleau during WWI he is credited with yelling to his men "C'mon, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?!?!"  You may have heard that quote before in a movie or TV show, but now you know that a Marine coined it.  This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that nobody takes more pride in their history.  The History classes are usually taught by the same Staff Sergeant.  What makes him unique is that after he tells us some fact about an individual or unit that won a battle against seemingly insurmountable odds he'll say, "That's pretty GODDAMN MOTIVATING, is IT not?!?"  I have written this exactly how he says it with the capitalized words being the ones he put emphasis on.  He's a character for sure.

These classes are a welcome change of pace to our day.  They are held inside, in an air conditioned auditorium.  All we have to do is sit there, listen and stay awake.  That's it!!  Now that sounds pretty easy doesn't it?  For some of these clowns this is too much to ask.  On average at least 10 guys will fall asleep, another 10 will get caught talking, and inevitably the whole platoon will get smoked after the class.

All that silliness aside, I heard something fascinating in one class this week.  The instructor was talking about the changes in warfare and how much the world has changed in the last ten years.  He told us "The next war that the United States will get into will be a direct result of an attack on American soil and that it will happen in the next five years!"  I heard this and thought "Holy SH@# how the hell do they know this?!? And then I got scared because I looked around the room and realized that these stupid sons of bitches sitting all around are going to the ones fighting it?!?!  God help us!