McRd San Diego

MCRD San Diego

“Good morning Sir, this is your wake up call.” It was five in the morning on June 24th, 2001 and I was about to embark on the biggest adventure of my life. This had been something that I had been looking forward to for almost my whole entire life, finally I was going to be serving my country. Those few hours of sleep had went by way to fast for someone that was not going to sleep for the next three days. The strangest feeling I have ever had in my life was getting on an airplane with nothing, not even a cell phone or any luggage other than a folder with my orders in it and traveling half way across the country to become a Marine..

It had been just two weeks since I had walked across a stage and received my high school diploma and now I was walking across an airport to board a bus on its way to MCRD San Diego. Once aboard the bus I was told to put my head down and close my eyes and put my head between my knees so I was unable to see the way onto the base. No more than fifteen minutes later I was being yelled at by an extremely loud and angry drill instructor telling myself and the other forty or so recruits that we have ten seconds to get off of the bus. We fell off the bus onto four rows of yellow footprints which is known as a formation and all of the while four or five drill instructors yelled at all the new recruits telling us what pieces of shit we were. Very shortly afterwards we filed into a very brightly lit red and white building where all of our belongings were sifted through and taken away, and then they sent us to the barber’s room where the barbers started the process of conformity by cutting off all of our hair. This was a huge change in my life, for once you did not know who was the high school football star or who was the captain of the chess team. When everyone wears the same clothes and has the exact same hair cut you can not judge people based on their looks and for the most part you have to judge them on their character, so at this point you can really see who is a leader and not only a leader because of their social status or what kind of clothes they wear.

I could not believe that it I was actually in boot camp, which was something that I had been dreaming about for the last several years and boy was it a lot different that I had thought. Everything was “by the numbers”, even when I took a shower we were told to do it step by step and could not go ahead and do things on our own. During the first few weeks of boot camp I was told when to look to the right or left, when to turn, when to sit, when to go to the bathroom or “Head” as the Marine Corps calls it. We learned a completely new lingo such as glasses became “portholes”,