What Fun?

I can't get over it. The Marine Corps idea of fun is so twisted and wrong!

To clarify a few things, I am deployed with the Navy to Iwakuni, Japan. Basically, a handful of sailors deploy to a Marine Corps base for six months because the Navy decided to deploy a squadron of F18 Super-hornets here. We (the handful of sailors who are not in the squadron) are sent to pick up the slack for the intermediate level maintenance command. They break it, remove the bad component, and send it to us where we fix it.

The saddest part of all this is that the handful of sailors fixing this crap are not attached to a Navy command directly. This basically means that the Marines get to have us.

Mom and Dad are going on their vacation so they drop the kids off at Grandma's house. Grandma has bingo practice for the whole weekend so she decides to let the weird next door neighbor watch the kids. Granted, that's kind of messed up, especially if she didn't tell Mom and Dad, but this is how it works. The next door neighbor is in charge and has the kids doing all sorts of things they don't do, EVER; odd jobs for no apparent reason, whether or not the job makes any sense in the first place.

This is what it's like to be a sailor here, but it lasts for six months; not just a weekend.

Getting back on topic, the definition of fun has been seriously destroyed here. Wake up at 4:30 AM, put on pants, undershirt, and steel-toe boots. Now proceed to stand around in a disorganized fashion and freeze your ass off. Run. Run. Then keep running. Continue being disorganized and freeze your ass off some more. Spectate random competitions like tug-o-war whilst freezing your ass off. Make sure that you're starving because you had to meet up for all this nonsense before the chow hall even opens. Continue to starve, freeze, and be perpetually disorganized and bored until you have to go to work. Everyone else who paid 70 bucks for tickets to the Marine Corps Ball (even though it doesn't cover drinks), have fun with the rest of your day; even though we have all had so much fun already.

This is not fun, Marines. You need to reevaluate your whole way of thinking because I assure you that it is completely fucked.