July 12, 1997 - New Recruits

970712 - Woke up @ 0400 because Sgt. V__________ overslept. I didn't mind. I then had chow and came back to the squad bay where I sat and sat until noon chow. After noon chow I sat some more and was quarterdecked for talking to B_______. At 1430, me and 8 other guys went to the Weapons BN Chapel to set up the chairs. It was amazing, we set up 400+ chairs perfectly aligned in under 20 min. We then came back to the squad bay and M______ had gone to pick up 4 92-day reservists who were joining our platoon. When he returned they were immediately put on the quarterdeck. They've been treated sort of poorly but not as bad as some. I found out today that 1st BN is actually the toughest, tightest BN here. Our DIs have been saying it but now I know it's true. COOL! I'm extremely motivated and excited about the 2nd half of boot camp. 48 days left. Been here 41 days.

It's a little funny to me the things that I thought were important enough to record in this journal. Twenty years later, I'm a lot less impressed with the fact that I was a part of a crew who set up some chairs really well.

This was the day that we got new recruits added to our platoon because, unlike me, these guys actually were scheduled to graduate earlier than their original platoon. It was not at all surprising that they were treated poorly; regardless of how great they had been in their original platoon, they were outsiders here and needed to learn, and learn fast, that our Drill Instructors hated them. We'd all had 6 weeks to learn that lesson; they had less than six hours. Not that there was a deadline per se, but Drill Instructors like doing things with a sense of urgency.

In boot camp, every battalion and even every company is taught that theirs is the best. It's sort of an overflow of having been taught (correctly) that the Marines are the best. Once you're in the best branch of the military, you have to find ways to set yourself apart from the other Marines. And so we had all been told that we were in the best platoon, in the best company, in the best battalion in boot camp. (I should add that it was completely unnecessary to say that we were from the best boot camp; everyone knows that Parris Island is the only real boot camp. Case in point: my fellow early chow buddy was from Mississippi and should have gone to San Diego for boot camp. He told his recruiters he would only enlist if he could go to the real boot camp, in Parris Island).

Regardless of the possible brainwashing, we now had recruits from another battalion confirming what the Drill Instructors had been saying. Well, either that, or they thought our Drill Instructors were difficult because they had just been on the quarterdeck on and off for the better part of a day.