Boot camp holidays

There in not much on the Internet about Easter at Marine recruit boot camp but a fair bit about other hodidays, mostly Halloween. It seems the DIs get very creative around Halloween. Probably because it's not a religions holiday.

Anyway, there is a group of people in San Deigo who visit the recruits there on Easter and bring them cookies and letters from children's groups, so maybe someone elses mom will get to hug Recruit tomorrow. Oh, I would so rather it be me!!!! But I am glad for him to get to hug anybody.

Images from mikey's funnies

Anyway, back to holidays in general, my favorite was this Christmas story:

It was Christmas Eve night and the recruits were out in the boondocks as they were in the field part of their training. But the drill instructors weren't even acknowledging the occasion. Finally, one of the recruits finally had to broach the issue. "So you want Christmas, let the games begin," said the DI.

The DI then proceeded to have half the platoon climb a big tree (with their flashlights) so that the recruits were evenly spaced throughout the tree. Half of these recruits were ordered to put the red lens in their flashlights, while the others kept the white lens in. Then the DI ordered the recruits in the tree to sing "Silent Night, Holy Night" while switching on and off their flashlights.

As such, the half of the platoon that didn't climb the tree were witness to a real live singing Christmas tree complete with blinking red and white lights. After the song was over, the recruits in the tree and on the ground switched places and repeated the experience, so that everyone had a very Marine Christmas that they will never forget.

And here is one from Halloween .... nasty

Halloween in Boot Camp

We all knew that Halloween in Marine Boot Camp wasn't going to be good, as we figured our DIs had something special in mind.
Well, the evening of Halloween, the DIs had some time to kill.
(Previously, during field training, the DIs collected all of the cocoa mix from our MREs. That was not a good sign.)
Anyway, we were all sitting in front of the squad bay cleaning our weapons. The DI then called four recruits to the front and had them start doing bends and thrusts (a push up where you stand up after each one). After several, several minutes the recruits would be gasping for air. At such time, the recruits were ready for their treat - a nice packet of cocoa mix. While heaving and gasping for air, the DIs made the recruits eat the cocoa mix. As you can probably guess, the dry mix was spewed everywhere, coming out of both mouths and snorted through and out noses. It was not a pretty sight. This process was repeated until the entire platoon got their Marine Halloween trick-or-treat.