Fleet Marine Life #68 – The USMC Way
There are several ways of doing things in the Corps. The right way, the wrong way and then the USMC way. The USMC way is a way where you simply appear to accomplish the mission regardless of whether or not it was done correctly or not. Junior Marines take the USMC way more times than you think. Marines may not do things the “right” way to accomplish the mission but thanks to higher ups either being ignornant or willingly ignorant (blind eye), no really cares.
The comic above is a true story. My buddy’s platoon was tasked with taking down a lot of tents. Their libo was on the line. And when that shit is on the line, shit gets real. Doing the mission the right way (Moral way) was too time consuming. Many hours of libo would have been cast away like a carton of spoiled milk. Of course, his platoon universally decided to take the USMC way. They got a TRAM to run over all these tents and then drag these flattened, pancake-like tents to DRMO (A place where broken shit goes and gets fixed or whatever).
The tents were taken down and the officers didn’t really care. No one really paid for it except the taxpayers. Oh, well.
Doing shit the wrong way and then making it look right for liberty since 1775.
This just proves my theory. Two wrongs will never make a right, but two wrongs can cancel each other out. That sums up the USMC way of doing things. The officer fucks up and the enlisted would ordinarily suffer for it. As a result, the enlisted take the USMC way out and everything cancels out.
Ahaha!
DRMO that shit!
I am convinced that higher ups do not firmly grasp the concept of time. If they did, they wouldn’t tell you to do 6 months of work in 2 weeks, telling you no libo until it’s all done. Out of that idiocy came the USMC style of doing things. Not wrong, but clearly not right. This plays perfectly into my theory that while two wrongs will never make a right, two wrongs can be made to cancel each other out.
This was really funny. In the Navy, this happens all the time.
How many tents did your friend destroy?
I can’t remember. Hahahaha. Don’t worry about it.
You Asshole!! This made me laugh out loud in my Spanish class. One of the biggest problems is the highers tend to wait until the very last minute to give you the task, which leads to the USMC way of doing things. At one point some of the Humvees had bad tires and we were on a different base doing a field op. The proper way would have been to call Pendleton motor pool, who would have called 29 palms motor pool and then 29 palms would have taken care of us. Too long and our weekend field libo was in the balance. Me and some buddies told the officers not to worry, then we went to their motor pool and stole 3 tires.
In “First to Fight”, the author talks about how the USMC used to steal everything from everyone except weapons because that’s someone’s lifeline. They even stole vehicles. The author called it, “The honorable art of institutional theft.” The Marine Corps was so ghetto and so broke, that toilet paper was issued on the basis of a few squares of toilet paper multiplied by how many men were in that unit. Because of the lack of funds, Marines had little choice but to steal. So Marines from Unit A would steal X amount of tires from Unit B. Unit B would discover that X amount of tires are missing and would acquire tires illegally from Unit C. Unit C would then have to steal from Unit A. This is a round-robin of theft where no one really benefits but everyone still does it anyways. And Marines didn’t steal just to steal. They stole with the idea that they could put the goods to better use for the greater good of the Corps.
The author was given a task by a higher officer to build a boathouse. The author then ordered Sgt Paul Wolkovitz to build a boat house. Unfortunately, there were no building supplies or any way of getting any. So the Sergeant, with the help of a truck and two privates, helped to “liberate” enough goods from the neighbors. In 1924, a boat was caught in a violent storm and broke up on shore. While several Navy and Marine units were busying trying to find survivors, this Sergeant was going along the coastline stenciling USMC in everything he found that washed ashore.
Would I recommend this book to any Marine? Not really. It was one of the driest books on war I have ever read. The absolute driest. I could only bear to read 4 pages a day.
As the saying goes: There’s only 1 thief in the Marine Corps. Everyone else is just trying to get their shit back.