Ermey (an actor) used a non-partisan charity event run by the US Marines to make a political statement accusing the current commander in Chief of trying to bring down America. If the Marines present didn’t drag him off the stage and beat him until he shut up then they’ve lost some of my respect.
You take that back!
Oh, Marine DI’s ARE flaming assholes, no doubt about it. I think they were worst in the Vietnam era because so many of the troops were conscripts, but even when I went through Navy Bootcamp it was pretty bad. However, a lot of the movie was pure horseshit, both the training and the psychedelic tour through Vietnam. Like I said, despite the apparent beliefs of some, it wasn’t a documentary but instead it was a specific directors spin on the subject.
-XT
I thought you couldn’t be drafted into the Marines.
Or the Navy.
Moreover, would you want to go into battle with anyone trained by him? Except for one scene involving a painfully simple obstacle course he never does any sort of training in actual soldiering.
42,000 Marines were drafted during Vietnam, and more during WWII.
The Marines have always been all-volunteer.
[QUOTE=Ibn Warraq]
The Marines have always been all-volunteer.
[/QUOTE]
Do you have a cite for this (I can tell you that BG’s assertion that no one was drafted into the Navy during Vietnam is wrong, since I personally know 2 guys who had that happen to them). According to this:
My emphasis. From my own memory, the Marine Corp started drafting in the mid to late 60’s due to man power shortages. Even before that they had lowered their standards and recruited heavily due to shortages of personnel.
-XT
It looks to me like the best part of Ermey ran down the crack of his mama’s ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress.
More interestingly, the description of that video includes a link that says “As seen on the Straight Dope Messaqe Board,” which links to an SDMB YouTube page that links back to this thread. How does that happen, exactly?
There’s also the target range.
I remember as well. My cousin called me to tell me he had been drafted into the Marines, and I said “You can’t be drafted into the Marines, you gotta volunteer!”
(A sweet kid. Could hit a Pearl Beer can at fifty yards with a 30.06. Shot at least a hundred deer, somehow, always missed. Damndest thing…)
The Coast Guard had a three year waiting list, and you had to have a college degree just to enlist! The Air Force went to a four-year enlistment minimum.
Shut up, memory. Speak to somebody else.
After several of my dad’s cousins and an Uncle were drafted, he ‘volunteered’ for the Navy (quite a trick for someone, um, newly arrived in the US at the time), thus starting our own little family tradition of Navy service…
-XT
[Aside]
I’m a brat. I often wonder how many military brats there are here. People seldom bring it up, but when I meet another, its like we have something very substantial in common, but we can’t quite put our finger on what it is.
Oh, and Bush. Texas Air National Guard, protecting Lubbock from Viet Cong air raids. Sorry, its the rules.
[/aside]
I think that all the Marines go to a separate specialty training for whatever job they are going to do, after boot camp is over. The purpose of boot camp is for physical conditioning and learning to obey orders and work as a team. The actual combat related training comes later.
Air Force brat. Lt. Col. Dad wasn’t a flyer, he was intelligence – spent a year in Da Nang monitoring enemy radio transmissions and warning pilots when and where the enemy might be expecting them. Got disillusioned with the war real fast, talked my Mom into voting for Nixon because he promised to end it (she never forgave him).
Did your mom not forgive him because he was right (about Nixon getting us out of Vietnam), or because of the other stuff Nixon did and the general fact he was a slimy dog? 
-XT
Marine boot camp includes both close quarters combat (MCMAP) and rifle qualification. They go to School of Infantry training afterwards (or specialist training), but there is definitely combat training during boot camp.
This was '68.
Contradiction in terms.
Ah yes, “Peace with Horror”. It was a lie. His idea of “peace” was forcing the NVietnamese to negotiate a settlement which would leave the utterly corrupt and rotten SVietnamese system in place. They already had negotiated with us, we promised them free elections and a unified country. We betrayed that promise at the earliest opportunity.
The origins of the Vietnamese revolution was not “communism vs freedom”. It was Buddhists protesting their oppression by a French educated Catholic elite. What, you think those blazing monks were Trotskyists? Once again, as we so often did, we chose the oppressive stability over uncertain change. And made the Communist take-over of the NLF inevitable.
What was the line? “You are about to meet some of the bravest, most resourceful, most dedicated people you will ever meet. Only trouble is, they are the enemy, and want to kill you.”
QFT.