Fleet Marine Life

This was emailed to me by Stephen E on 05/31/11

Here’s a goodie.  This was within a month of me getting in the fleet, mind you.

As is common knowledge, DUI’s are a big problem, and 1/5 was one of the worst.  I think we had over 15 DUI’s insofar, and the battalion commander gave us his own libo brief that Fri, telling us again and again don’t drink and drive.  Then the CO repeated the message, then 1st sgt, then the platoon cmdr, then the platoon sgt. I think we heard the phrase “don’t drink and drive” 1000 times in 1 hour.  Anyway, after the libo brief from hell concluded, we all went our separate ways for the weekend.

The next morning at 8 am, I get a knock on my barracks door (hadn’t yet moved out of the barracks), and I get told to get in cammies and go to the area in front of the company office. I do so, and what I saw took me aback.  About 200 people were there, and more were on their way.  I asked what was going on, and they said it was a battalion recall.  I waited and waited, and I noticed at some point that they had forced those with kids to come in, even though some of them had wives who worked. They FORCED them to bring their kids to the formation.

After about 2 hours of that, we got down to business. The BC told us that a dumbass from B company got a DUI. Well, he went off on a tirade blaming all of us, despite the fact that most of us didn’t even know the kid. After about 20 minutes of hearing the BC telling us we were shitbags, he announced that we were all confined to the 62 area.  For those of us who had vehicles, keys were to be turned in to the duty, and the mileage taken down to ensure no traveling was done. Then he gave it to the CO’s. Our CO declined a speech, but our 1st sgt (henceforth to be called Satan) got in front of us and we feared the worst, and rightly so.  He opened by saying “I have failed you.  So in order to maintain good order in the barracks, only NCO’s will be allowed to stand duty, even the ADNCO will be a corporal.”  Well, we PFC’s and LCpls were cheering this inside, but he continued.  He went on to say “We will have roving posts to assist the duty. These roving posts will be two man, and they will be stationed at the barracks, including the parking lot, the chow hall, and the SMP. They will activate at 8 pm and go till reveille.  For those of you who live at base housing, you are confined to your houses. In order to ensure you stay there, you are REQUIRED to get a landline phone and register it with the OOD, and he will call it at random times to ensure you are there, and calls will stop at 10 pm.”

The next day, Sun, we were all up and about at 6 am for a thrash run which was so hard about 25% of the company fell out, including our platoon commander.  Even the married guys were there.  This crap went on for 3 weeks, then we got a new CO. That CO immediately pulled the plug on the roving posts, saying it was the duties job to do that and that we had no judicial authority.  He mentioned that even if we saw a car swerving chaotically, we had no authority to stop him or arrest him, so the posts were meaningless.  Satan could do nothing but give in.  The bad thing was, we had Satan on our next deployment, which was to Okinawa.  You could just imagine the fun he had there with his expanded powers to NJP people since we were in a foreign country.  The CO tried to keep him in check though, ensuring he didn’t get out of control, which he would have.

If you have a better story of mass punishment, let me hear it.  So far though, I
have heard none that equal that.  I’ve been out for 2 years, so I don’t hear much
these days though.

It was a strange thing.  We had the BEST CO in the Marine Corps (not kidding,
everyone in the entire battalion loved him), and the most evil, sadistic 1st sgt on earth who was so hated that it was universally agreed that if we went to combat and he got hurt, we would leave him for the enemy to take.