So ground pounders have to learn it but some of us did better in testing and did not have to be a ground pounder or work on tanks & stuff. You know, where your entire service outside of actual combat is nothing but constant AIT drills all day every day.
And I was in basic 28 years before you were.* ::: Kids these days ::::* 
Air Force uses MGRS, at least for Civil Engineering. That said, for my specific job, I’ve never had to use a map that covered anything much beyond the boundaries of our base, so maybe 9 square miles or so typically. Haven’t done anything outside the wire though, so I’m sure it’s different in that case.
Hey Private run down to the motorpool and grab me some grid squares!
The course may not have mentioned it by name, or explained how it is based on a Universal Transverse Mercator projection, but you were being taught MGRS. Everyone in the Army is using MGRS, despite the fact that almost nobody in the Army calls it MGRS or even knows what MGRS is. As far as most people know, it’s just called a “grid” or a “grid coordinate”.
Similar to rsat3acr’s answer, if I asked 20 soldiers today what “MGRS” is or ask them to give me a location using MGRS, I will get confused looks. If I simply ask them to plot a grid on this 1:50,000 topo map, they’ll be all over it and give me an MGRS formatted coordinate without blinking.
They said they are out of grid squares but thought you could use a water pump for a '75 VW Beetle.
Every soldier is expected to be able to get from point A to point B. Even POGs who are too soft for real Army jobs.
Exactly right. I’ve been using it my entire adult life and I still had to look up the acronym to make sure I knew what I was talking about. Even with the military’s l;ove of acronyms this is not a commonly used one.
For those wondering this is the type of map we are talking about. Each one of the grid squares is one square kilometer.
Like the others have said, this is basic military training, as in Basic Training. It’s a Level 1 soldiering task. You can’t graduate from boot camp without passing map reading. Every training exercise includes a land nav course which uses ONLY grid references.
It’s not esoteric knowledge, either. When I deployed, we used MGRS all day, every day. All 9-line medical evacuations and calls-for-(artillery)-fire used it. I don’t care if you’re a grunt calling for fire, the radio operator taking the call, the medevac pilot flying to the location, the mortarman dialing in the round, or the intel analyst plotting a point of origin, you’re using MGRS. Not knowing MGRS is like not knowing how to read a rank insignia. It’s ridiculous to think someone wouldn’t know how to do it.
That said, maybe your Marine friend has an excuse. Maybe they only glanced quickly at it or maybe it’s been so long, it’s faded from memory. Maybe the leading 4Q threw him off. I dunno, but I guarantee every soldier and probably every Marine knows MGRS.
