Fleet Marine Life #43 – Knock Knock
One thing that I won’t miss about the Marine Corps is duty. Duty is when you have to get in uniform and sit behind a desk near your barracks for 24 hours. Your responsibilities are to make sure no one does anything stupid like throw beer bottles out their window and into the parking lot.
If I had duty, I always got stuck with a weekend duty. I felt as if the duty gods cast a curse upon me especially when I got duty on my last week in the Marine Corps. It’s whatever.
Nothing bad usually happens during the weekdays. Usually you hear something about people breaking into Marines’ rooms for CIF gear or their Playstations. Even with duty present, no one ever gets caught but other than that, nothing normally happens. I believe duty is necessary during the weekends because that’s when Marines usually do dumb shit and I don’t think anyone would be sober enough during the weekend to call PMO or 911.
Nothing usually ever happened to me while I was on duty. The only incident that I can remember is when our platoon’s Shitbag Steve was drunk on a Friday and attacked the Duty NCO over something stupid. Then on the next day, everyone in my platoon was punished for it. Good times.
Anyways, I hated it when my unit fucks up the duty roster and then they go crazy to find someone for duty. It’s usually because the person that they assigned to duty isn’t available but they assigned him anyways. God damn disorganization.
Under my platoon’s level, there was an excel spreadsheet that had 30-something boxes (representing days of the month) next to everyone’s name. If someone was doing something on the 5th of that month, then the box under “5” would be filled with APT (Appointment) or DTY (Duty). Once everyone’s future tasks are filled out, you don’t have to ask everyone again for that month! If someone has to do duty in my platoon and the platoon leader isn’t sure if certain Marines are busy or not, he can check that spreadsheet that’s posted on the bulletin board. That way confusion is avoided and he doesn’t assign people who cannot do duty to duty. If you solve a problem but the same thing continues to reoccur every month, then you probably haven’t solved it at all.
Avoiding Duty since 1775.
I didn’t drink when I was in the Corps, but one Friday night an NCO was banging on doors needing 2 underlings to assist him in delivering a guy to the brig. Doing the math, I realized that I could lose both Friday night and all Saturday, which was when I cracked open a hard apple cider from the fridge. For that, I thank David Guenther, probably the greatest roommate a Marine could have.
The NCO was so pissed. “You better be 21,” he said. “Have you seriously been drinking?”
“It’s Friday night,” I said, showing him my ID.
Having said that, it was another 7 years before we caught Bin Laden, so maybe I really did the wrong thing.
LOL! I actually had this happen to me more than once.
I had some drunk marine jump over the picnic table in the smoke pit naked right in front of the duty hut? I think he was no ballsed to do it but he was too fast and i couldn’t catch him the first time, the second time I saw which room he ran back to but instead of reporting it i just told the room full of drunk marines to knock it the fuck off because if I did report it that would mean more work for me.
The same thing can be said when your unit calls you into work on the weekend. I lived at Mainside in base housing, and whenever my unit tried to call me into work on the weekend, I would simply reply that I had just drank a beer half an hour ago and was in the middle of another. Not true, but I knew there was no lawful order they could give to make me drive with alcohol in my system.