A recent post by Darkwater on the Marines birthday, he being a proud former one (former only in the sense of a former FBI agent) reminded me of my encounter with the headline of this post.
I was wearing my ARMY cap one day at HEB soon after the Iraq invasion, in solidarity with the troops, you see, and a brash young cashier looked at it and said the words. I never knew ARMY could be treated as an acronym that way.
But, then, I was always a little slow. In Basic Training at Fort Knox the summer of 1967 I kept seeing FTA graffiti. I thought how interesting that the Future Teachers of America seemed to be everywhere on post. Finally learned, to my embarrassment, that FTA stood for F*** The Army.
The HEB encounter was likewise humiliating, until I remembered why I had avoided the Marines back when I was drafted and could have joined any one of the services to avoid the Army if I had wanted to: I had no interest in coming home in a bag and the Marines were/are well known for taking high casualties.
I found out why in OCS infantry training when our sergeant instructors said that we, unlike the Jarheads, did not, “charge hi diddle diddle, straight up the middle,” but hunkered down, called in an artillery prep and then worked the edges of the enemy position, if they still existed.
And that was, indeed, the way we operated in Viet Nam. Even when the enemy didn’t sit around and wait for the shells to arrive. They did often enough. When I came home I was surprised to discover the extent to which civilians held the Marines in awe, not needing to join, probably. And I began to realize that the Marines have always had better PR and advertising campaigns than the Army. Why that is I never figured out.
Then, many years later, one day at HEB, wearing an ARMY cap soon after the Iraq invasion, a brash young cashier looked at my cap and said: “Ain’t Ready for Marines Yet?” Cute. I should have replied (we always know what we should have said) “No, but I still have all my parts in reasonably good working order.”
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 