Board Thread:Writer's Showcase/@comment-36468746-20180805011614

I'm a United States Marine currently stationed at Camp Pendleton, California. At the beginning of my military career I was just like many of the other young, dumb enlisted men. I was hyped up to go and bust down doors and send led down range in some middle eastern country where I could get away with going to whorehouses and buying illegal alcohol from starving street-vendors. I wanted to be the guy on the TV ad that pointed at the camera and said, "You got what it takes to be a Marine??" Well, long-story short I can say that I definitely did not go to the middle east, nor am I going to any whorehouses in the foreseeable future, because I got shafted by what we Marines like to call, the Green Weenie. The Green Weenie is an all powerful, all knowing, omnipotent god of misfortune and bad luck that's only kingdom of power seems to be.......the Marine Corps. Whenever our platoon would get "randomly selected" for extra shots at the medical hut or called out to stay back for cleaning duty while everyone else got to leave for the weekend was always promptly chalked up to the Green Weenie striking yet again.

Anyway, I went to boot camp in San Diego, California where I spent 3 months learning how to be a robot that obeyed every command from some angsty Staff-NCO (that stands for Non-Commissioned Officer) that was just ordered away from his cushy job behind a desk where all he had to do was push papers for two hours before he excused himself for his mandatory smoke break. All-in-all, boot camp wasn't bad. Well, except for the time when the Drill Instructors caught 8 recruits slicing open one of the many cats that we have on depot to perform a satanic ritual out of a book that one of them had gotten in the mail from their witch-doctor cousin. The ritual was to summon a demon by the name of Pilltobar, who was promised to come and remove all of our troubles from us, but instead seemed to just give everyone crippling diarrhea.

We once had officers from the Navy and the Air Force come in to give us shots that contained a glowing swirly mixture of what looked like living organisms. I didn't mind it too much, not like I could protest, however, I did get slightly concerned when I woke up in the middle of the night to my rackmate, Heath, chanting Cantonese while pouring salt on our beds, the floor and down his shirt and into his pants. Come to think of it, where had he gotten all that salt from? He didn't have a bottle or a packet of the stuff, it just seemed like it appeared from his hands as he tossed it around. Was it really salt? I asked him what the hell he was doing and he just sort of stopped, looked up at me, and said quite matter-of-factly "Curing the scourge." I didn't know what the hell that was supposed to mean so I just told him that he better have it cleaned up by morning and rolled over and went to bed. The next morning, not only was the salt gone, my rackmate had no recollection of the event. When I asked him where he had picked up Cantonese, he just looked at me funny and said, "No, my knees are fine."

For this next part of the story there are a few things you should probably know. First, MCRD San Diego is the training depot in the middle of San Diego right next to the airport. Edson Range is the training grounds for recruits who aren't Marines yet and it's where we do all of our shooting, hiking, and the infamous Crucible. When you watch the videos of guys getting off the bus and standing on the yellow footprints, their at MCRD San Diego. When you get to the part where their shooting at a target range or receiving their Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, their at Edson Range which is inside Camp Pendleton. One other thing, we have this thing called firewatch. It's where you have to get up in the middle of the night for a one hour shift and guard the armory lockers or walk around and make sure nobody is trying to kill themselves. It's a pain in the ass and I normally just try to not look like I'm sleeping for 45 minutes before I go to wake up the next guy.

Okay, so a few days before we graduated we had a group of psychologists come in from the Pentagon (at least, that's what the lady told me) to do a psychological evaluation of us. They called our names, one by one, and we would go to this big empty room save for a few chairs in the center to be interviewed. It started off with normal questions but slowly evolved into stranger and stranger probings. The lady started off by asking me things like, "Do you feel suicidal or homicidal? Have you been getting along with the other Marines?" but eventually she started to ask me things like, "Did you experience any hallucinations or strange occurrences between the hours of 2:37 and 4:04 AM during your time at Edson Range?" To which I had to respond, yes. At least once a week after we left San Diego to go to Edson Range I would experience something completely off-the-wall bonkers in the dead middle of the night. One week I woke up to go take a piss and came back to find everyone, and I mean, at least 80 guys, all sitting up in their bunks, not moving, not making a sound, staring at me as I made my way back to my rack, their eyes never leaving me as I made my way to the very back of the squad bay where my rack was located. I checked my watch and it said that it was 4:01 AM. Just a few minutes later, a deep rumbling shook the entire squad bay for about 10 seconds and after that everyone just laid back down and went to sleep and it seemed like nothing at all had happened.

Another incident happened when I was on firewatch from 2 - 3 AM. Just as I was about to wake up the next firewatch shift, this black and grey tar-y liquid started oozing from the cracks in the floor like frosting being squeezed out of a tube. I tried to step around it but it was nearly unavoidable, covering the entire floor in less than a minute. I looked at the other guys who were all standing guard with me and they just looked at it and shrugged. We still woke up the guys who were supposed to relieve us and they didn't seem to even notice that it was there at all. It was like that one scene in "It" by Stephen King where the girl's dad couldn't see the blood even though he was basically trudging through it. By the time I was cleared to go back to bed, the liquid had climbed so high that I had to stand on top of my footlocker to keep from getting my boots soaked. By the time I woke up the next morning, the only trace of the tar-like substance was the faint odor of what I can only describe as melting plastic.

Anyway, I have a lot more stories if you guys are interested. Forgive me if I'm not the best story-teller, I didn't take AP english in high school. I just need someplace to catalog all of my experiences and this seemed like the best place to get advice or any sort of explanation as to what's going on. If you guys want more stories, let me know and I'll start writing out the better ones. Goodnight. 