By 
I was looking through my old strips and I realized I never did any more of the “Difference” series of comics, despite the fact that I had planned on turning it into a running theme. The differences between POG’s and Grunts is truly night and day, making it a vast wealth of creative material.
How POG’s and Grunts view each other is of course equally wrong. Grunts–contrary to popular belief–are not dumb. POG’s, contrary to the belief amongst most Grunts, aren’t all women and nerds that get promoted like the wind (among other things) blows. A lot of it is semantics, but there is a lot of pride on the Grunt side simply for being. A common argument for POG’s is that, clearly, Grunts are only Grunts because they didn’t have the GT score to be anything else. This is stupid of course, when yours truly is a notably well-known exception to this idea. This also implies that the Grunt MOS fields aren’t a choice, that Grunts just don’t know any better. This is also incorrect, as it is the primary source of pride amongst the ranks of the 0300’s.
Why is choice a source of pride? Another common argument for POG’s is the idea of “I could do their job, but they couldn’t do mine”. Even if this were true (pro-tip: it’s not), it doesn’t change the fact that they didn’t. That’s where the pride comes from, the cockiness of the Grunt, knowing that they made the choice to be the ones on the ground.
The idea is essentially this: Sure, you could do this job, anyone could walk around and get shot at… but you didn’t.
Contrast this to the misconceptions of the infantry regarding POG’s. For starters, many POG cutting scores are actually quite high. Want to know the highest? It’s actually not an infantry MOS. It’s currently the MOS 6483 (Aircraft Electronic Countermeasures System Tech), with a Corporal cutting score of 1864. So where does the perception that POG’s have low cutting scores come from? Ultimately it’s because, on average, the regular line-company grunts (0311, 0331, 0341 and 0351) have laughably high cutting scores almost all the time. The 6483 is just one MOS out of many, and unfortunately for the sake of perception, the POG’s that most Grunts are exposed to on a daily basis tend to pick up with much lower scores than them.
As well, as chauvinist as it may be, Grunts tend to identify POG’s with women as a whole. Grunt life is a man’s world–seriously, it’s a fucking sausage-fest. This environment ultimately breeds sexism, and only one side of the fence has women in it. I’ve mentioned before that I’m far too apathetic to really offer my opinion on the subject, but strictly as an observation: many of the men in the infantry see the presence of women as being a weakness. I’ve never really cared too much for that mindset, but boys will be boys.
Anyway, if I may change the subject: yesterday was Terminal Lance’s 2 year anniversary!
January 5th, 2010 was when the site officially went live and the first comic was posted. Who would have thought that 170 comics, 60 million hits, 30 thousand Facebook fans, a book, a comic in the Marine Corps Times and two years later I’d still be sitting here typing my nonsense twice a week?
I appreciate all of the support my awesome fans have given me over the years. I know I say it all the time, but even if I don’t respond to your email immediately I do read everything I receive. I get mail every day from fans all over the country, old and young, telling me to keep it up. How can I stop when people are so supportive of my endeavors?
Thank you all for keeping me afloat, a comic is nothing without fans to read it.
PS:
Last note, Hooters is doing a thing on January 12th (Thursday). It’s Military appreciation day or some bullshit–whatever it is, you get a free meal if you go to Hooters. Hot women and free food? It’s like they know me…
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @TLCplMax, as well as my more recent addition to Tumblr.
Comments