F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Chad Adams
The Marine Corps, if nothing else, is a punishing environment. It’s an ever-salty arena, with the locker room vibe perpetually dialed to 11. To say you need thick skin to survive is a massive understatement.
I am Private Joker. A 4341, I come from a long line of Marine Corps Combat Correspondents, though I personally never actually operated in combat. “Last to Know, First to Go”—our motto and creed (and title of the definitive book on the life of CCs). Because our job was, at times, the furthest from being a hardened 0311, we seesawed between living a life of officer-inspired luxury and the crashing defeat of bringing brought right back to the lowest-rung of enlisted life.
In other words, life would be really good for a while. Until it wasn’t.
I lived that dichotomy to the fullest while serving in Okinawa. When life was good, we Public Affairs Marines would expertly land-nav our way out of formations on assignments. Life was good attached to other units, jumping in on training evolutions across the Pac. Trigger time on every imaginable crew-served weapon fell second only to an adrenaline-filled airborne operation or seaborne exercise. From mainland Japan to Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, we saw the world. We would get some in the field by day; we partied even harder by night.
Back in garrison, we took all these stories, along with the commander-ordered mundane, and packaged it into a weekly newspaper—”The Okinawa Marine.”
We also delivered said paper to every free bin across the island, from the jewel, Camp Schwab down to Camp Kinser, stopping at every PX, hospital, MWR building and command office in-between. To execute this island-wide delivery, the junior enlisted broke into teams of two, with each team checking out a small, white Japanese-made van from the Motor Pool. From there, it was full Cannon Ball Run across the island, a mad race through the night to deliver every paper before the colonels and generals reached for their morning cup of Joe.
Back in the office, life in the locker room abounds. One such week, our good corporal who paginated the newspaper, well, he made an ill-advised funny. Busting balls on the favorite son who got the best of the deployment exercises, he changed out the byline of another corporal, replacing his job title of Central Bureau Correspondent to “Master Gunny’s Bitch.”
We of course roared with laughter, just another typical day in the pit that was our newsroom. And then our paginator deleted it, put the correct job title back in its place, as we resumed to calling the writer in question a bitch—which we all, NCOs and junior officers included, were quite happy about.
As the sun began its climb out of the Pacific, casting its light across the island that delivery Friday, I was pulling into the parking lot of the command building. Coffee and a breakfast sandwich in hand, no sleep for the wicked, we trudged back into the office, our weekly delivery mission a success once more.
That’s when the phone started ringing. The first call came from the wife of one of our sergeants. “You all fucked up big,” she blared on speaker. Then another sergeant from another bureau called in. “What the fuck, guys?”
Somewhere along the way, in the swapping of job titles, along with the series of edits and re-edits and more re-edits that dominate the cycle of any publication in the final hours, somewhere in all that chaos, the job title “Master Gunny’s Bitch” defiantly returned.
We don’t know how. A couple of us watched the good corporal delete it on that fateful day of funny. Nevertheless, like a ghost of Marine Corps past, the Bitch returned in all its glory. And now it poisoned us in print to the tune of 20,000 copies littered across the island.
Right about now, it was getting placed on the desks of colonels and generals. The lieutenant general in command of all of III Marine Expeditionary Forces among them.
White hot panic ripped through the office like a lightning bolt. Our leadership went into full alert. Within minutes, the delivery service, along with any other Marine that had their own ride, undertook their latest order—a snatch-and-grab mission of every newspaper on the island.
Around lunch I suppose, the fog of war notwithstanding, I made it back to the office, one of the last stragglers of this ill-fated mission. We seized thousands of papers, no doubt. But thousands more escaped our war party. Our fate was sealed.
Our officer-in-charge, a lieutenant colonel who commanded no respect from our gaggle of enlisted, was called in to see the general. Word was, he received a verbal reprimand equal to a lance corporal going before the gunny—not a pleasant experience. “Don’t you ever fuck up my paper again!” allegedly echoed down the hall, followed by a booming hand striking the desk.
Back in the office, that shit rolled down hill in the most expected of ways. The guilty corporal faced a Page 11 entry into his service record—not good for the career. The rest of us spent all free weekends for the next month or so cleaning every available shitter and more in the command building.
As you might imagine, it really sucked to work there for quite some time.
A couple of years later, I went back to my MOS school for an advanced course. They had a “Wall of Shame,” featuring some the greatest mistakes by Public Affairs units across the globe. One featured the “little soldier” falling out of a major’s ranger panties during a 5K run, splattered across a post newspaper’s front page.
Among the collage—you guessed it—“The Okinawa Marine” and “Master Gunny’s Bitch.” And our good corporal, despite all the suck that followed, he remains legend among us.
The post Life & Legend in the Suck appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
The Marine Corps, if nothing else, is a punishing environment. It’s an ever-salty arena, with the locker room vibe perpetually dialed to 11. To say you need thick skin to survive is a massive understatement.
I am Private Joker. A 4341, I come from a long line of Marine Corps Combat Correspondents, though I personally never actually operated in combat. “Last to Know, First to Go”—our motto and creed (and title of the definitive book on the life of CCs). Because our job was, at times, the furthest from being a hardened 0311, we seesawed between living a life of officer-inspired luxury and the crashing defeat of bringing brought right back to the lowest-rung of enlisted life.
In other words, life would be really good for a while. Until it wasn’t.
I lived that dichotomy to the fullest while serving in Okinawa. When life was good, we Public Affairs Marines would expertly land-nav our way out of formations on assignments. Life was good attached to other units, jumping in on training evolutions across the Pac. Trigger time on every imaginable crew-served weapon fell second only to an adrenaline-filled airborne operation or seaborne exercise. From mainland Japan to Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, we saw the world. We would get some in the field by day; we partied even harder by night.
Back in garrison, we took all these stories, along with the commander-ordered mundane, and packaged it into a weekly newspaper—”The Okinawa Marine.”
Who Do You Think You Are, Mickey Spillane?
We also delivered said paper to every free bin across the island, from the jewel, Camp Schwab down to Camp Kinser, stopping at every PX, hospital, MWR building and command office in-between. To execute this island-wide delivery, the junior enlisted broke into teams of two, with each team checking out a small, white Japanese-made van from the Motor Pool. From there, it was full Cannon Ball Run across the island, a mad race through the night to deliver every paper before the colonels and generals reached for their morning cup of Joe.
Back in the office, life in the locker room abounds. One such week, our good corporal who paginated the newspaper, well, he made an ill-advised funny. Busting balls on the favorite son who got the best of the deployment exercises, he changed out the byline of another corporal, replacing his job title of Central Bureau Correspondent to “Master Gunny’s Bitch.”
We of course roared with laughter, just another typical day in the pit that was our newsroom. And then our paginator deleted it, put the correct job title back in its place, as we resumed to calling the writer in question a bitch—which we all, NCOs and junior officers included, were quite happy about.
As the sun began its climb out of the Pacific, casting its light across the island that delivery Friday, I was pulling into the parking lot of the command building. Coffee and a breakfast sandwich in hand, no sleep for the wicked, we trudged back into the office, our weekly delivery mission a success once more.
That’s when the phone started ringing. The first call came from the wife of one of our sergeants. “You all fucked up big,” she blared on speaker. Then another sergeant from another bureau called in. “What the fuck, guys?”
Somewhere along the way, in the swapping of job titles, along with the series of edits and re-edits and more re-edits that dominate the cycle of any publication in the final hours, somewhere in all that chaos, the job title “Master Gunny’s Bitch” defiantly returned.
We don’t know how. A couple of us watched the good corporal delete it on that fateful day of funny. Nevertheless, like a ghost of Marine Corps past, the Bitch returned in all its glory. And now it poisoned us in print to the tune of 20,000 copies littered across the island.
Right about now, it was getting placed on the desks of colonels and generals. The lieutenant general in command of all of III Marine Expeditionary Forces among them.
Let Me See Your War Face
White hot panic ripped through the office like a lightning bolt. Our leadership went into full alert. Within minutes, the delivery service, along with any other Marine that had their own ride, undertook their latest order—a snatch-and-grab mission of every newspaper on the island.
Around lunch I suppose, the fog of war notwithstanding, I made it back to the office, one of the last stragglers of this ill-fated mission. We seized thousands of papers, no doubt. But thousands more escaped our war party. Our fate was sealed.
Our officer-in-charge, a lieutenant colonel who commanded no respect from our gaggle of enlisted, was called in to see the general. Word was, he received a verbal reprimand equal to a lance corporal going before the gunny—not a pleasant experience. “Don’t you ever fuck up my paper again!” allegedly echoed down the hall, followed by a booming hand striking the desk.
Back in the office, that shit rolled down hill in the most expected of ways. The guilty corporal faced a Page 11 entry into his service record—not good for the career. The rest of us spent all free weekends for the next month or so cleaning every available shitter and more in the command building.
As you might imagine, it really sucked to work there for quite some time.
A couple of years later, I went back to my MOS school for an advanced course. They had a “Wall of Shame,” featuring some the greatest mistakes by Public Affairs units across the globe. One featured the “little soldier” falling out of a major’s ranger panties during a 5K run, splattered across a post newspaper’s front page.
Among the collage—you guessed it—“The Okinawa Marine” and “Master Gunny’s Bitch.” And our good corporal, despite all the suck that followed, he remains legend among us.
The post Life & Legend in the Suck appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
