In the movie Full Metal Jacket, the boot camp Marines slept with their weapons in the barracks.
Now, I remember Army basic training, and our rifles were tightly regulated. We had to keep them on our person at all times, and then turn them in at the end of the day.
Do the Marines sleep with their weapons like in the movie? Or was that BS.
Don’t know about now, but we did in the late 60’s. After boot camp I went to Camp LeJeune, North Carolina to H&S 1/6. We lived in a 4 bay barracks. Each bay had about 50-60 men. There was a rack in the middle with our rifles. The only locks were our own.
In early 1968 I went to Headquartes Battalion in Washington, DC. The group I was with weren’t issued weapons.
In Vietnam we literally slept with our weapons.
We had an EOD guy get back not too long ago that wrote an article, which he specifically mentioned putting “his loaded 9mm submachine gun on safe”.
I would take that as a definitive, “Yep!”
Tripler
The enemy attacks at night. Why sleep with an unloaded weapon?
Glad you explained what it was you were asking. They sleep with their rifles in the barracks. I went thru PLC camps for two summers and each time their issued each “candidate” a rifle the first day and at the end of camp we turned them in. The same thing happened when I went thru Basic School. However, then I was married and so I left my rifle on the base in a locker and went home.
The first thought that came to mind was 
[sup]A Marine doesn’t sleep with his rifle, but he does sleep with his gun.[/sup]
In 1979, when I was in Basic Combat Training at Fort Knox, we slept with hour M16s.
:smack: “Hour M16s” as opposed to “minute M16s.” :smack:
That should’ve read “our M16s” in the posting above.
I went through Marine Corps Officer Candidate School (officer bootcamp) last summer and we had to maintain accountability for our weapon 24 hours a day.
Either carrying it in formation or in the classroom, the rifle went with us. When we slept in the field, we made a loop with the sling around some part of our body so we would wake up if someone were to try and take our rifle.
When we slept in the squad bay, our weapons were locked up in the rifle rack. The drill instructors were the only ones that had keys to those locks.
The first part of that movie is unbelievably funny.
“You are nothing but unorganized, grabastic pieces of amphibian shit!”
“Looks like the best part of you ran down the crack of your mom’s ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress!”
“Private Pyle, you’d best straighten your ass away and start shitting me Tiffany cufflinks, or i will definately f you up!”