Terminal Lance #45 “Vacations Don’t Count”

I’m sure before the war started, going to far away lands for training and exercises was considered hard as fuck. Personally, however, I was never impressed with these tales of absence and excursions. I don’t mean to imply that Iraq and Afghanistan are the only hard places available within the last 20 years–in fact we had a fairly prominent member of our unit who was involved in a conflict in Haiti long before Iraq broke out, where he earned his coveted Combat Action Ribbon. To say that these two locales are the only places that Marines are involved in conflict is a daft understatement, and I fully understand that.

However, heroic expeditions to unknown wars usually wasn’t the case when you find out why and how your senior leadership had managed to skate out of combat zones for his entire enlistment.

In fact, even as I was leaving the Marine Corps, in 2010, there were SNCO’s that I had encountered that had yet to go overseas in support of the war. At all. I won’t discount the idea that the Marine Corps needs SNCO recruiters and DI’s and whatever-the-fuck-else people do outside of the fleet–but when the nation is at war, how do you be in the Marine Corps and not go to war?

It really did shock the hell out of me coming into the fleet, where I naturally assumed all of the 03XX SNCO’s had already been–when I came to find out it was only my Senior Lance Corporals (I still consider that a real billet) that had any real trace of salt on their collars. And please, don’t take this strip as a bash on recruiting or any other B-Billet. I actually ran into my recruiter in Iraq–in Sahl Sinjar of all places–on my 2nd deployment.

Anyway, in other news, Terminal Lance is now on Twitter! Unfortunately the names “Terminal_Lance” and “TerminalLance” were already taken, so I had to take a slightly more personal approach with it. Feel free to follow my tweets @TLCplMax.

Oh, and something hilarious I saw on the Facebook fan page:

Lol, what?

I still think it’s funny.

Outside of that, the print sale went well. I’ll let you know when I have another set available. Until next time, have a great week and get something done!