The Marine Corps birthday is the day when all Marines pretend to not hate their lives for one day and wish each other happy birthday and celebrate in jubilant glee the history of their Corps. Of course, with Marine Corps Birthdays come Marine Corps Balls. When the balls come, Marines find themselves soaked in alcoholic pleasure all night.
Happy 245th Birthday, Marines.
While, of course, most people are staying in this year due to the extremely spooky viral pandemic sweeping the nation, if you really want to experience some Halloween Horrors, you can visit any one of your local Marine Corps infantry barracks for some frightful sights. And sounds. And smells.
Though, perhaps, it may be best to leave the kids at home for this one.
It’s the season (hopefully) for reason as we decide who is going to lead us into 2021 and beyond. Candidates Abe and Garcia are up for a fierce non-democratic election to Corporal, and its only getting uglier and uglier as we approach November 10th.
On one hand, one candidate is level headed and experienced. The other candidate is a complete moron, but he can run really fast and shoot straight, making him a superior Marine to some. It’s a tough decision and could having lasting consequences for years to come.
The Terminal Lance audience was split on this, with the older leaning individuals of Twitter voting decisively for Garcia, whom many believe to be more seasoned and mature.
Who would you promote to Corporal?
— Terminal Lance (@TerminalLance) October 24, 2020
However, the younger skew of Instagram was more tightly geared toward Abe. After all, wouldn’t you prefer someone who can skate out of anything? He’s a Lance Corporal’s Marine you can trust–as long as its not to do any work.
My New York Times bestselling graphic novel, The White Donkey, has been officially added to the Commandant’s Reading List.
Those of you that have been following me since the beginning know that Terminal Lance started as an underground, risqué, and avant-garde idea. Back in 2010, while I was an active duty Lance Corporal in Hawaii, it was taboo to openly criticize or speak honestly and openly about the Marine Corps in any kind of public forum. However, I put my name on it from day one and I put it out there. It was a risk for me personally, but I knew that as long as I was honest and spoke to my own truth, that I would be okay.
Who would have ever thought that a Lance Corporal that started out drawing funny comics about the Marine Corps would end up on the Commandant’s Reading List.
Years ago, before The White Donkey came out, I had told someone at just an average gathering that I was enlisted and went to Iraq twice. I was expecting a typical reply, the kind we’ve all heard in response to these sorts of open confessions.
“How was it?”
“Was it hot?”
Instead, the reply that I got threw me for a loop. She simply asked me, “What did you learn?”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. No one had ever asked me that. There was so much to that experience. From the day I left to check into MEPS, leaving my home state of Oregon for good, to the day my unit landed in TQ to convoy to Camp Fallujah upon our arrival to Iraq in 2007. All of it was a surreal journey, not just physically, but emotionally.
The White Donkey for me was the ultimate expression of my own truth and personal journey of my enlistment. To me, this wasn’t just a book about my Marine Corps experience, but a distillation of everything I had learned. It is because of this that I chose to make the book a work of fiction. In creating a book that was fictional, I was able to concentrate the lessons learned into a narrative that had story and resolution; which is not always the case with actuality and nonfiction.
The White Donkey is a story of coming of age, of navigating romance and life in the looming shadow of being enlisted, of monotony and tedium, of trauma and depression, and ultimately, of love. It is a story that is as much mine as it is every Marine that has been through it. I created it as a cathartic means of reflection, and with the hope that others could identify with it as well.
In The White Donkey and in all of my work with Terminal Lance, I strive to show that Marines–for as bullheaded and invincible as they may see themselves–are first and foremost human. All of us are inherently flawed beings, created to journey through life and experience fleeting moments that give us meaning.
Despite this, your experience is yours, and yours alone. They can shave your head and force you to stand at attention, to scream and shout your replies to orders, to march covered and aligned with fifty others just like you… But you are still you.
It is truly an honor to have my book, the first graphic novel to ever grace this list, to be considered among such high company. It would have never happened without the support of the audience of Terminal Lance that made it happen.
Lance Corporals don’t get paid enough for what we put them through. It’s no wonder that many of them are seeking alternative means to support their income. In an age where anyone can get paid for basically anything, why not make an extra buck?
After all, these kinds of illicit activities have been expressly endorsed by the United States Military as of yesterday, courtesy of the official Ft. Bragg Twitter account commenting on an amateur porn star’s adult oriented tweets.
The hustle doesn’t stop for anyone.
In a little bit of good unrelated news, did you see that THE WHITE DONKEY: TERMINAL LANCE has officially been added to the Commandant’s Reading List? This was a welcome surprise, and this book would have never happened without the support of all the fans of Terminal Lance that contributed to the Kickstarter campaign back in 2013. You guys are the real MVP. The book is available in hardcover everywhere books are sold.
Our pandemic just got a whole lot more serious with the President of the United States testing positive for COVID-19 and being admitted to Walter Reed yesterday. As is custom, we are now scouring the Wikipedias to figure out who is in the line of succession to take over in the event that he doesn’t make it. With the “super spreader” events going on at the White House, we have to assume that it’s only a matter of time before a random Lance Corporal is forced to be sworn in as Commander in Chief.
Would this really be that bad, though? I feel like we can all agree, at least around these parts, that Lance Corporals are the most dope motherfuckers on the planet. Every day would consist of PT on your own, fast chow, and a whole lot of liberty before noon.
Maybe this election is all a big racket after all… Let’s just get a Lance Corporal in the White House and call it a day.
Over the last 20 years we’ve been in a weird place in terms of our military budget. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were able to convince the American people that we needed to be spending half a trillion dollars annually on the Department of Defense, but then the wars died down (a lot) and now we’re still spending record amounts of money on the military.
All well and good if the money is going to troop welfare and making their lives a little less shitty… Except it never does. Chow halls across the Corps are notorious for their subpar prison meals, which Marines actually pay for out of their monthly BAS allotment (and can be requested back if they don’t wish to partake in such dining delicacies, but then you have to pay for the chow hall with cash, which is super awkward).
While we may never know where all that money is going, we can rest assured that it’s certainly not going to the food.
In every barracks exists one Marine that’s been through the ringer so many times, he has become an expert on Marine Corps Orders and regulations, and all matters pertaining to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). That Marine is the Barracks Lawyer, and he’s there to represent you in your time of need.
He knows that Article 134 is a bland catch-all that essentially means nothing. If you take it to Court-Martial, there’s no way they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did anything wrong.
You got this in the bag, bro. They got nothing on you.
The reality is that he’s probably right. While many Marines make mistakes worth real punishment, some just get burned by their command for the sake of getting burned. In these unfortunate instances, when you’ve been truly wronged by a system that cares more about itself than its Marines, its time to seek out a barracks lawyer.
The CIF issuing at the beginning of your Marine Corps career is one of the most ubiquitously dubious rackets that is part of the military experience. When you arrive at any new command, you have to get “kitted” out, which means the government gives you a whole ton of equipment that is standard issue.
“Give” is a tricky word though. Most of the gear is a lease, and you will have to give it back before you leave. However, some of it is “consumable,” which means they expect it to be destroyed in the normal course of Marine Corps life in the field and abroad. Of course, who expects a Lance Corporal to keep accurate track of small, losable items over the course of 3-4 years? CIF, apparently.
There is always at least one or two things that everyone either forgets or loses. After all, everyone arranges their gear differently, and you don’t always need to use everything you’re given. While you can try to just plant it at the bottom of your seabag and hope it never moves over the next few years, the daily military life of hustle and bustle, moving rooms and racks constantly, will often see certain items vanish into the aether.
Check any of the “military surplus” stores conveniently located around any major base and find an assortment of lost (stolen) CIF issued items happily for sale at a “surplus.”
Boots… Boots never change. Someone said to me that this comic could take place in 2020 or 1970 and it would change nothing. You may be asking yourself, what is it about boots that makes them so ubiquitously geeky? So ridiculously, over-the-top lame? Is it the fashion? The backpacks? The complete doe-eyed innocence in their nerdy swagger?
It’s a bit of all of the above. Boots can’t help themselves from being exceptionally awful because they don’t know any better. The Marine Corps is an honest cross-sampling of America, which is kind of what makes it such a wonderful place of immense diversity, but also a place of unpredictable bootness. Most of these kids joining the Corps have never left home, and never had anyone beyond their mom buy them clothes.
Equipped in their seabags with little more than their finest mom-jeans and their virginity, boots descend upon the small military towns of America ready to light up the town with their blissful ignorance. Tour any military town in America and find barely legal boots in packs and with backpacks ready to take on the world, innocent and free of shame.