Fleet Marine Life

This was emailed to me by Stephen E on 5/29/11.

I have many stories.  When you first got to the fleet, it is not possible to pass their field day inspections.  Well, when the platoon Sgt came through, he found a tiny pebble in our neighbors toilet, so they had to continue field day.  He came to our room, and found a pebble under our bed.  This set off an alarm, so I followed him.  That SAME rock magically appeared in every room, albeit in a different spot.

Another time, I had emergency surgery so I had to deploy late.  I went to the Remain Behind Element(RBE), and they eventually did deploy me. However, while I was back in the states and they were in Kuwait, they hazed some one (arm got fractured), and they started to charge EVERYONE.  One of the other guys who was also RBE got a page 11, even though he was 11,000 miles away.  They tried to charge me, but I requested a court martial, threatened to hire a lawyer and they dropped everything against me.

Do you also remember the hikes on Friday, even though Thursday is field day?  I remember staying up until 1 am cleaning, then getting up at 3 am for a 20 mile hike.  What a nightmare.

You already covered mass punishment, which I have LOTS of stories about.

I remember at one point, near my EAS, I was fapped out to guard for the remainder of my contract. Well, I had been on post from 2 am to 8 am, and I was tired and in need of rest. My buddy took an Ambien to help him sleep, I took some of my codeine cough syrup, and laid down. Five minutes later, we get woken up and told we have  to attend a safety stand down. Well, I told my buddy to stay put. I raced down there, signed us both in, got someone to sign in for both of us if they passed around another sign in sheet after break, then went to the guard shack and got some sleep. Come on, they are going to interrupt my sleep time while I am on codeine (prescribed, had bronchitis) and tell me not to drive tired?

While in guard, we had several great guard officers who basically told us that if we stood post in a professional manner and obeyed the rules, he was cool with it. Then after about 7 months of 1 day on, 2 days off (only 2 or 3 work days a week), we got a toolbag SSgt who wanted to go by the book.  He doubled our hours (we were no shit working 98 hours a week), and he came in for about 1 hour a day then went home. He worked maybe 5 or 6 hours a week, we were doing 98 hours a week, and then when we were ready to get out, he asked us if we would like to extend with guard because they would be shorthanded if we didn’t.  We basically told him we would IF he went back to the old way. He said no, so we told him it was no longer our problem.

From what I hear, my unit (1/5) got WAY worse after I left.  The new company gunny’s motto was “Field day wins wars”. Ugh. I heard he got death threats from those under him.

No one can say that their entire experience was bad.  Good times were had, but for every one good time, we had 100 bad ones.  Therein lies the problem.