Did Your Parents Have Any Children That Lived?

None of these clips are safe for work or civilized company.



Major Payne pops up on the Showtime every once in a while. I bust a gut every time. No matter how stupid the scene...I can't help it. I'm simple like that.

Of course it helps that I've had my own experience with Drill Sergeants. I spent 4 solid months of my life trying not to laugh at their antics...sometimes desperately. Not because the experience was fun. It wasn't really and often it was dreadful but, these Drills are more creative than housepainters with the insults and swear words.

I had a couple crawl up my ass one night in the mess hall because I couldn't stop laughing. Earlier in the day this kid from New York...an Italian named Capo...had made some borderline racist comment. He was coming from the chowline with his tray when 3 or 4 black Drills ambushed him. They rushed him...swarmed on him...."You don't like black people Onion?...You gotta problem with black people Bucket?" He froze...his eyes got big as dinner plates. They weren't just on him...they were bobbing and weaving and circling him like snakes looking to strike.  I couldn't help it and a chuckle pressed out between my clinched teeth.

Yeah...that didn't work out so well for me.

There's this clip from Full Metal Jacket. If, for some reason, you've never seen the film...the following is very rough and there is something here to offend almost anyone. Proceed with caution.




My Daddy was in the Marine Corps between 59 and 63. He said that was as close as you could get to being there without actually signing up. He said it gave him flashbacks to Paris Island....but, he loves it. I had Heard all the stories before I'd ever seen the movie. He loved telling them. In fact, I was a little disappointed that Drill Instructor Hartman never asks a recruit if his parents were communists..."send you in here f*** up the U.S. Marine Corps?" Ha. One of my best buddies in service had been in the Marine Corps. He wanted to go back in but, once you left 'em...they wouldn't take you back so he was stuck with us in the army. He had an audio cassette tape of this scene. He would blare it over the loudspeakers in the mess hall while we were cooking supper.

I don't really know why anybody would look back fondly and laugh about an experience like boot camp. It is impossible to explain how immersive the misery is...there's no escape from it. Your every move is scrutinized and controlled. You dream about it when you sleep. It's like the smell of the generic green cleaner that permeates every sterile corner in the barracks. It's truly oppressive...but, I haven't met very many people that didn't relish a chance to look back on it...didn't have funny stories to tell.

My own experience was somewhere between Major Payne and Full Metal Jacket. I was only threatened with death once...or threatened with death three or four times on one occasion. Eventually your mind finds a grove and just about the time your body gets in shape the tasks become more interesting....rifle training, rappelling, field exercises, combat patrols and a gloriously anachronistic chance to Go Over the Top. In an exercise that must have been unchanged since 1914, we all filed down in a trench...flares shrieked and burst, machine gun fire snapped the air over our heads (seemed like inches...it was probably 20ft)...a whistle pierces the racket and up we go on our belies....into no man's land. There was barbed wire and charges buried in holes. The first one went off about five feet from me...the ground rattled and I bounced violently on the hard packed ground. I'm sure that I never ran as fast as I crawled after that explosion.

We went without supper that night. The whole way  a Drill Sgt. stood at the front of the bus talking in detail about the Tacos his wife was making him for supper and the cold...ice cold beer he was gonna drink when he got home.

Bastard...they were all bastards.




"I will motivate you Pyle...if it short dicks every cannibal on the Congo."

Hhahahahhhhahahaha