Fleet Marine Life #149 – Publications
There’s nothing quite as insane as cleaning in cammies at 2am in the morning. My higher ups, for some insane reason, are obsessed with cleaning. Not just them, but every other higher up I have come across. Universally throughout the Corps, all higher ups just want their junior Marines to field day their rooms for 8 hours every Thursday. Now, we don’t live in a spacious room. It’s something like a 15 x 15 foot room. 8 hours to clean a 15 x 15 foot area per week. That’s with 2 people.
Clean to normal people means: not sticky, smells fine, not dirty. Something along those lines. Clean to higher ups means that there cannot be any spec of dust anywhere. Even inside the hollow areas of your chair. One piece of lint means more cleaning.
Why waste so much time on something so trivial?
Higher ups justify this trivial waste of time as an essential part of every day Marine life. To summarize these words, “Field days win wars.”
I have concluded that my higher ups equate cleaning with warfighting.
http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/mcdp1.pdf (Original Publication)
On a side note, I am positive that no one reads any of these pubs nor do they talk about them. It’s something shops keep around to feel “more smarter.”
Cleaning since 1775.
If you did a hasty cleaning, they found something wrong; if you cleaned the fuck out of it, it was the same.
I discovered this early on with a sgt who didn’t like me right off the bat. As a sign of respect, I wanted to show him I was a good marine, so I bought a bottle of bleach and went to work on my tile floors from Tuesday to Thursday, nearly puking my guts out a few times, but thinking there’d be long-term dividends with this gesture.
Thursday night he said it wasn’t clean enough. I followed him onto the catwalk and asked what else there was to do. He said, ‘look, I can tell you tried really hard…….’ and then it trailed off. He had no suggestions. He just didn’t like me, plus the Corps taught him to ask for everything twice if not thrice.
At this, I took the position of all Catholic Popes when confronted with child rape committed by clergy: I shrugged and said “fuck it.”
Oh my fucking GOD! BURN IT WITH FIRE!
do you still have to brasso the garbage cans.???
What a bunch of malarkey.
You know… for a split second, I actually thought about reading that pub at the other end of the link, I got about 5 words in, realized that I really didn’t care, and then left.
But as for field days, after a while I just kinda stopped doing them. I’d wipe everything down once, then close my door, and lay out on my rack, when whatever worthless nco it may be told me it wasn’t clean enough, I’d wipe down the big things a second time, if it still wasn’t clean enough, then I’d just let them come back every hour to reinspect, and I’d spray a little febreeze right before they got there. Eventually they’d decide it was clean enough.
The way I figure it is, if the guys next door are actually doing a field day, and they’re getting failed, then why should I put forth all of the extra effort so I can get failed too? I can get failed just as easily without even doing anything!
The worst was when you would field day until 2 am and had a hike at 4.
I learned early what to do. Put a bunch of porn mags out in a pile and have a coffee maker next to said mags. The inspectors would pick up a mag, get some coffee, look at the floors, the toilet and leave. Then next room screaming ensued, and my neighbors room was cleaner than mine. After I left that unit they got a new gunny whose motto was “Field day wins wars”
Yeah I hated field day, would spend all night cleaning while our nco’s were drinking and they never cleaned their room. Remembered about a year before I got out the commandant supposedly said stop that stupid shit but soon as the order was given out our higher-ups would say some bs like its up to unit discretion. They just wanted to listen to what orders they wanted to.