I was stolen by a recruiter. The office I should have signed up through was in La Crosse, WI, about 35 miles away. Instead, a recruiter from Dubuque, IA came 120 miles to talk to me. I filled out a blow-in from a magazine, and it apparently was routed to the wrong recruiting station. SSgt Straw must have really needed to fill a quota, because he was deep in another recruiter's territory when he came to see me. As such, I never attended any poolee functions the whole 11 months I was in the Delayed Entry Program. I had a little book that basically just listed my chain of command and the Guard Orders. That was the extent of my Marine Corps Essential Subject knowledge before I got to bootcamp. SSgt Straw transferred while I was in the Delayed Entry Program. I was supposed to leave for bootcamp a week after my 18th birthday. But, for some reason it didn’t work, and I had to wait another week. Anyway, I didn’t leave for bootcamp until the first week of September. A recruiter came up from Dubuque and picked me up, and put me on a bus to Des Moines, to the AAFES station there. I arrived there in the evening, so I had to wait until morning to do anything. I was given a room with another guy who was there to sign up, but not actually leave for bootcamp yet. This was to be my last free day for a while, so I wanted to have a party. We bought some beer and got some ice. I was only eighteen and pretty clueless, so there weren’t any women involved. The guy didn’t bring much money with him, and I was told not to bring a lot, so it wasn’t much of a party. We had some beers, watched TV, and wound up staying up all night.
In the morning, we were taken to the AAFES station and I was given another physical, signed a bunch of papers, and took the pledge. I and another guy were given all our paperwork in a sealed envelope and driven to the airport. We almost missed our flight because we were sitting in the wrong part of the terminal (neither of us had ever flown before), but we did manage to make it just in time. There were four or five other guys on the plane who were also reporting in. The plane stopped somewhere, I think Denver, and more guys going to bootcamp got on. We finally arrived in San Diego in the middle of the night. We had been told to find the military liaison desk at the San Diego airport when we got there. We all walked up to the desk in a gaggle and plopped our envelopes down.
The Marine behind the desk looked up at us from the tops of his eyes and asked us quietly, “Did I tell you to put your envelopes on my desk?”
We stammered, “No.” and picked our envelopes off the desk. He finished whatever he was doing and then gathered our envelopes from us and told us there was a bus outside. We were to get on it, sit down, and shut up. We got on the bus, and someone in the back yelled something like, “Sit down and be quiet, and they’ll go easier on us!” or words to that effect. So we all found seats. Eventually, a couple guys did start talking, and then a couple more. Some of the guys were making as much noise as the guys talking, trying to shush them. Suddenly, some corporal or sergeant threw himself on the bus and yelled at us to, “Shut the f*** up!” and “If I hear another peep outa you, I’m gonna kick your asses!”, and glared at us for a long minute. Then he left us alone again. After a while he got in again and started the bus and put it in gear.
We went maybe two miles, and the bus pulled up in front of a building. I had thought it would take at least a while to get to the recruit depot. Actually, MCRD San Diego shares a boundary with the airport. We later heard stories of recruits escaping across the runways and getting hit by planes. True? Who knows?
There were yellow footprints painted in rows on the asphalt in front of the building we were told to all get on a set, then drop any bags we had. Then they ran us into different parts of the building, where we were issued a seabag, underwear, toilet items, clothes, and given haircuts. Each time, we would return to our footprints and stuff the new things we had been issued into our seabag. For instance, when we were issued our clothing, we all filed past windows where we told the Marines behind the counters what size clothing we wore, and they gave us X number of each thing. Then we had to stand on more footprints in the room and bag everything, by the numbers. Apparently, someone was in overall charge of us, because he kept reappearing and yelling at us to do this or that. He would say, “Get your two packages of skivvie shorts and hold ‘em up in the air. Get em high!”
When he was satisfied everyone had two packages, he would shout. “Bag it!”, and there would be a great flurry as we all scrambled to put our skivvie shorts in our bag. Then it would be t-shirts, then cotton socks, etc. Anytime you weren’t fast enough, or made a mistake, such as claimed you didn’t have the right amount of something, and then it turned out you did, you got a facefull of him or the closest Marine to you, screaming that you were an idiot. Looking back, yes, the Marines working in the issue stations were power-drunk sadists, but they also saw to it that thousands of recruits were issued the correct amount of every item they would need in bootcamp, and got signatures for it, too. We had no clue as to what we were doing, how to fill the forms out, and they managed to get us everything we needed and out the door in the minimum time possible.
After all the sizing and counting and shearing, we finally filed into a barracks about 3 am. The Marine in charge of us turned out to be a Drill Instructor named SSgt Cole. He had us all line up in front of our bunks, naked except for flip-flops, with a towel, razor, and bottle of shaving cream. We applied shaving cream to our face, and were then given five minutes to run into the shower room and shave, shower, dry off, and get back in front of our bunks wearing a new set of our skivvie shorts and t-shirt. Then we went to bed for about an hour and a half, until reveille. And that concluded my first night in the Marine Corps.
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this page was last edited on: 09/16/08
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