Former Marine here 1983-1987. Full Metal Jacket did an outstanding job of portraying Marine boot camp. Although we were never hit we got plenty of pit time. Actually some of us thought that it would be better to be hit than going through 45 minutes of re-education in the sand pit, including me, for making the grave mistake of being caught smiling. I still remember all three of my drill instructors names. Cpl. Portillo still gives me nightmares on occasion, scary bastard.
A report from a current Marine:
DIs curse.
DIs do not beat recruits.
He personally know of one person doing serious brig time for hazing recruits; this was not peer-hazing, and I don’t know what a Marine considers hazing.
Abuse of recruits does occur, but the military comes down with a really heavy hand when it’s so bad they have to respond.
My Air Force relative was talking about intra-recruit hazing; the recruit-squad-leader-people would single out and harass people. They were removed from their recruit-squad-leader position. Quite a fuss about it, actually.
If I hear from my niece in the Navy, I’ll ask her, too. (But I have to say, anyone who harasses her better hope they end up safely in the brig, so her experience may not be typical.)
Personal anecdote. In 1987, or thereabouts, I was involved in an Army/Marine incident that almost turned really bad. I was on a joint service base and it so happened the Army owned 1/2 the building and the Marines owned the other half. It was a large barracks (dorm to the rest of you) shaped like a backwards “L.” There was a large grassy area behind the building with a picnic table where people could hang out during their off-duty time.
One night, we Army people heard someone getting beat up in the back yard. It was the Marines beating up a new, young guy. We Army guys started hopping out the our windows into the backyard to break it up. Then the Marines started hopping out their windows to defend their fellow Marines. It almost got really ugly, but the senior NCO on duty came running and ordered everyone to stand down.
Turns out, the young Marine getting beat up was undergoing some unofficial discipline, for being a lazy slacker.
So, as late as 1987 at least, the Army had moved beyond that sort of thing, but the Marines were still doing it, unofficially.
According to my son, who did Navy boot camp in 2004, the CCs (they call them something else now, but they were Company Commanders in my day and that’s how I think of them) did yell & curse & insult them, but didn’t hit them. They definately did put them through physical duress in the way of forced excercise, though. Nick is a Hospital Corpsman who works with the Marines, so he has a lot of jarhead friends, and he says that Marine Corps boot camp is much harder than Navy, at least as regards the physical training. However, Nick says he finds it hard to believe that the Marine DIs yell and curse and insult any more than his Navy versions did – because they really yelled and cursed and insulted them quite a lot. And, the Marine DIs aren’t supposed to hit, either, although you will always run into a Marine or two who insists that his DI beat the shit out of him on a regular basis.
I did Navy boot camp in 1981 and they never hit any of us. Closest thing to hitting was the first week, when one of my fellow recruits went nuts and tried to run away. We were standing in formation outside and this nutty girl just started hollering her head off about how much she hated the Navy, and the CCs, and all of us. She had a little mini-meltdown right there on the grinder. Then she hauled off and shoved one of our CCs as hard as she could and took off running across the field… The CC chased her down and tackled her and that was the last we ever saw of that girl.
The CCs definately yelled at us, though and swore and insulted us. One of my fellow recruits had short arms and big boobs. I will never forget our CC leaning over her while she did pushups, shouting, “Tomaselli! Get those tits off my deck!” And they wore us down with sleep deprivation and physical excercise.
My company actually lucked out on the physical training front, in a morbid sort of way. In our 2nd or 3rd week, right when we were getting ready to enter into the ‘Hell Week’ portion of training, when the physical training would have been ramped up, one of our CCs died – the same one who had tackled the crazy recruit. She was killed in a bicycle accident on base, right in view of a bunch of her shipmates, so it was a pretty demoralizing event. However, the end result for my company was that everyone took it easy on us during this usually-harsh period of training.
1961, ARMY, Ft. Carson, CO. Nov - Feb… Kinda cool.
Had great instructors. They could do everything better and longer than we could. And they were old men… Wore combat patches from WWII and Korea… They yelled some but no touching in a brutal way. When the Company Commander, a RA Capitan can carry 3 ruck sacks, 3 M1’s 2 extra steel helmets and run backwards faster than we could forwards for over 5 miles shouting encouragement and threats and all kinds of stuff that I was too exhausted to understand, so that we as a unit could get there as one, well, it was kind of hard to think too badly of him. It is a shame so many of you had to go through what you did to become a good soldier when it is not really necessary…
The poor kids that he carried their stuff for, by the end of basic, they were better than average and went on to do very well.
I was sure lucky in my service years as I had mostly good men in authority over me. We got a lot done.
I mostly tuned out when being chewed out. Being yelled at does not hurt. That happened mostly in MOS schools.
Marines had it much tougher than Navy. They did not care so much about our physical fitness in the Navy, most of us were instead recruited for our brains. Especially those of us slotted into the nuclear program.
However, even when I was in, cursing was still normal and there was at least one blanket party of a recruit that would not take showers. His blanket was held down at 4 corners and at least 15 recruits with bars of soap in a sock walked by and hit him. He was then dragged into the showers on his blanket and told to shower or this would be repeated. I think that counts as hazing. There were also a few pink bellies, but I don’t remember the details. I was never on the receiving or giving end.
I squeak by the minimal physical fitness requirement and acted as the education PO and caused no problems so I just did my thing and got through boot camp.
The one area where being in the nuclear program really helped was with the swimming test. I was basically drowning in cold water on the swim test. a Seal had to rescue me and as I was a Nuke, they classified me as the lowest level of swimmer, it was either class 4 or class D. I don’t recall anymore. Apparently it meant, I might not drown, if I got lucky.
BTW: The Navy never provided any swim training and I never had to shoot a gun. But that is another story.
Jim
I went through the Army’s Basic Combat Training at Fort Knox back in 1979. My platoon’s senior Drill Sergeant did not curse nor did he tolerate it from the other Drills in the platoon and he certainly did not tolerate it from us trainees.
What Exit?, what’s a “pink belly”? And I’m amazed the Navy provided no swimming instruction!
I quote the urban Dictionary:
It is an accurate description. Apparently it is not too bad.
The blanket party was nasty, the only thing I will say to excuse the brutality of it was the recruit in question was a nasty smelly piece of work that did not respond to anything else. I think he just wanted to go home at that point, but maybe he was truly a complete dirt bag. I would like to say again that I did not participate and did not know about it until it was happening. I will admit, I did not even consider trying to stop it and I did not like the recruit at all that it happened to. At least he suffered no permanent harm.
Why are there no books about what happens in basic and how it’s changed over the years?
-Is it considered a breach of military secrets, or does it just hold no interest for sociologists?
-Are training manuals ever available (say, after being obsoleted)? Or is the only source anecdote?
Seems like a lot of silence considering it used to be (and some people still think it is) an intrinsic rite of American manhood.
This wasn’t true in '63. There was a swimming test that required recruits to jump off a 12-foot tower and swim the length of the pool. If you couldn’t pass the swim test, they gave you extra instruction in the evenings. Took me a week to learn to swim. We also had basic marksmanship training with the M-1, although there was no qualification standard.
I’ve heard before about informal responses to someone who refuses to shower. Is this common in the military? If so, I wonder what the deal is. Is refusal to shower some kind of common response to pressure?
I dunno. Maybe they’re afraid to let anyone see them naked?
I’ve seen (and smelled) it in the Army, and generally someone will just order the person to take a shower - and use soap - and they’ll stand there and make sure the person is taking a shower. If that doesn’t work, there are retraining battalions or “failure to adapt” discharges. The Army doesn’t beat people up anymore.
I wouldn’t say common really… but most sailors I know have at least one ‘dirtbag shipmate’ story to tell.
My dirtbag shipmate was named Joel and he was disgusting. We were on shore duty together, at a small command (lots of civil service folks, and around 15 sailors, counting officers). By the time I was stationed there, Joel was married and no longer lived on base. At first, though, Joel had been in the barracks, rooming with another guy from our command. The period when he lived in the barracks was Joel’s cleanest period during his tour. His roomate outranked him and ordered him into the shower every morning, and ordered him to wash his clothes.
Once Joel moved into town, though, all that ceased. Judging from the smell, I don’t think Joel ever bathed at all unless forced to. Once a week or so, when he got too smelly to stand, our boss would order him back to his apartment to take a shower. He never washed his uniform, but would buy just one set and wear it until it was gray. Then Senior Chief would order him to get a new set. His hair was always greasy, lank & flakey. He had dandruff in his beard.
He was a dirtbag. I’ll never forget one time on second shift. On that shift, we were often grouped up in sets of 2 or 3 to work on different jobs. This particular night, a sailor named Rhonda drew the short straw and had to work with Joel. I was working solo on a job near the desk of our Leading Petty Officer. After less than 15 minutes, Rhonda came out and told the LPO that she would not work with Joel until he bathed because “he smells dirty.” The LPO sent Joel home to shower. Remember that Joel was a married man, married to a woman whose personal hygiene was as poor as his was. An hour later, Joel comes back and again joins Rhonda at their station. Moments later Rhonda is back at the LPO’s desk – “Now he smells like dirty pussy!”
I’m so pleased right now with my lifelong civilian status.
Navy officers…aren’t they trained by Marine DIs?
Well, Joel’s a civilian now, too, somewhere. He wanted to reenlist, but his issues (the hygiene thing was only the tip of the iceburg) were well documented enough, that the command was able to prevent him from doing so. His evaluation was marked ‘not recommended for retention’ and he was put out of the Navy at the end of his tour. IIRC, he was from Washington (possibly Oregon) and he and his wife moved back there after he left.
What possible justification does the Navy or any other branch of the service have for not kicking someone the fuck out if they are unable to shower regularly? If someone is so dirty that he actually smells bad, if he can’t even address his most basic physical needs, what else is he overlooking? How can such a person possibly be trusted with any kind of responsibility? They should be given a general discharge.
In Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, the recruits are run so ragged and are so pressed for time in boot camp that sometimes they skip bathing. When a DI smells a particularly rank recruit, he orders all of the other recruits to wash the guy, which they gladly do with cold water, soap and stiff-bristled brushes. Ouch!
IANANancyboy, but I gotta say: EWWWW!!!
:eek: