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Nobody goes into the Marine Corps planning on being a Terminal Lance. It is a matter of circumstance, more often than not, and especially if you are of the 03 designated group of MOS’s. While my old MOS doesn’t actually exist anymore, I wasn’t a Terminal Lance through any kind of a lack of effort, but of a broken cutting score system–a relic of the institution designed with logical intentions and illogical results typical of government bureaucracy.
A typical insult that lifers like to throw at me when they realize I’m not fellating their beloved institution on the daily is “no wonder you’re a Terminal Lance! You couldn’t make it as a corporal!” It’s a typically under-thought insult meant to make me seem like I’m not already more accomplished than they ever were, and it falls flat because I have no shame in being a Terminal Lance. I own it with pride, and why shouldn’t I? I was a squad leader, team leader, gunner, went on two deployments to Iraq, etc. It was the broken cutting score system that failed myself and many others in my platoon, leading to nearly an entire weapons platoon of Lance Corporals without a single NCO in a squad.
Like Abe, it’s not that I never wanted to get the next thing. The next thing just never came.
I mean why wouldn’t you? Lance Corporal pay isn’t anything to write home about.
This will most likely be the last comic of 2018! Enjoy what’s left of this clusterfuck of a year, and pour a drink to 2019 being better than the last.
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