Terminal Lance #273 “That First Night”

There’s nothing quite like that first night of boot camp. After the so-called “Black Friday” where you’re introduced to your drill instructors, the first night is a rectally-clenching horror-fest of little to no sleep. Whoever the poor, unfortunate recruits are that have to stand watch in the first week are generally met with an onslaught of random Drill Instructors messing with you all night.

It’s amazing what you learn you can sleep through in that first week. For instance, I never knew that I could actually sleep through people yelling and screaming all night at the top of their lungs until I went to bootcamp and was forced to deal with it in person.

The rhyme is really just for fun. For some reason, in my head I remember bootcamp as being rather cartoonish. Drill Instructors power-walk everywhere and bark at you in their worn-out frog voices, recruits lose all common sense and run around in an amusing blur of ineptitude, screaming things like, “AYE AYE, SIR” even when they aren’t prompted to. It was a weird three months, for sure, and one that I was glad to be rid of come graduation day.

In other news, did you see that Terminal Lance: Head Call made it to the Top 3 in its category? Not bad for a Lance Corporal. If you haven’t bought the book yet, what’s wrong with you? It’s got 100 strips that were only published in the Marine Corps Times newspaper–so if you don’t read the paper, you haven’t read them!