I’m sure everyone in the military is aware of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Stolen Valor act by now. I won’t comment on their decision, it was theirs to make; but I will just say that there is nothing more despicable than one of these assholes pretending to be something they’re not.
I’m sure as children we all pretended to be things we weren’t. I put on a Batman outfit for Halloween and pretended to be Batman. I loved Batman, I wanted to be Batman. As I got older, however, I realized I was not Batman and would never be Batman. This is something most children come to terms with. Unfortunately, many do not. Instead of Batman however, they’re impersonating real heroes and telling lies about real events.
Marines and Soldiers alike don’t take lightly to being impersonated. There’s a plethora of Facebook pages and websites (Terminal Lance is not one of them) dedicated to rooting out these basement-dwelling, neckbeard douche-umbrellas for everything they are. Whatever rocks these guys get off by imitating people much better than them, I don’t know. I know that if I never would have enlisted, I probably would have just continued on with my life. On some level I pity these idiots, because clearly their lives are so pathetic that they have lie to the world about who they actually are.
These Stolen Valor assholes are children, pretending to be Batman.
On another note, if you’re going to impersonate a Marine or otherwise, at least do it in a believable way.
I have been extremely fortunate in regard to my dealings with the VA since I got out of the Marine Corps that fateful day. When I say extremely fortunate, I am of course referring to the fact that I’ve had very little in the way of issues since I started utilizing my Post 9/11 GI Bill–a benefit I am truly grateful for. On the other hand, my disability claim was lost in the wind and if I want to fix it there are many hoops I will find myself jumping through.
I can’t tell you the countless horror stories that Marines have emailed me or told me about in regards to the VA’s convoluted process of accessing the benefits due to you after your service is complete. It begins with filing, which is generally fairly straightforward and simply takes a trip to the local VA office, but after that there are a number of possible scenarios in which your claim or your benefits will fall victim to error. I’ve heard of veterans not getting their GI Bill paid on time, not getting paid the correct amount, disability claims disappearing, awarding the wrong percent–or my personal favorite: they pay you too much money and force you either to pay it back or skip your next payment.
To describe the feeling one gets when they see that slightly-oversized envelope stamped with “VA” on the front–how fearful and trembling the hands are as they open it–it is nigh impossible without experiencing it firsthand. Why am I afraid to open my correspondence from the Office of Veteran’s Affairs? Because I know there’s the possibility that they are informing me that something went horribly wrong, and I won’t be receiving my dues or otherwise. It’s not that I’m afraid that I’ve done something wrong in regards to my benefits, I’m afraid I did everything right and will fall victim to the insanity that the VA is known for.
With all of that said, the Post 9/11 GI Bill is the best benefit the military has ever had. If you’re out of the military and you choose not to use it, you are wasting it. They are very literally paying you (and paying well, I might add) to go to college and get yourself a degree. Convoluted or not, don’t think of passing up the opportunity to cash in on what you earned. And to the VA’s credit, I think they’re generally a pretty nice bunch of people that genuinely care about us, they unfortunately have to deal with the bureaucracy like anyone else.
I can’t tell you how many people I know that exited the Corps just as I did, only to find themselves realizing they have no idea how to survive. They try to get a job and can’t seem to lock anything down, they tell me they’re trying to get back in. My usual response?
You’re an idiot. Go to school. There’s NO reason not to.
Being stationed in Hawaii, I could never help myself from feeling sorry for those poor souls serving their sentence contract in the badlands of Southern California. The mojave desert isn’t a pleasant place, which should be obvious considering it contains such foreboding areas as “Death Valley” and “Range 400.” Twentynine Palms is arguably the shittiest place to call home in the Marine Corps, though honestly Marines will bitch about just about anywhere.
Really though, if you find that your permanent duty station is located in this hot locale, you probably have a right to bitch. Not only is it as hot as the United States gets, it’s isolated as fuck. By “as fuck,” I mean it’s at least 2-3 hours from anywhere worth going. If you’re a boot and don’t have a car, Taco Bell and ‘The Zone” will likely be your only solace. There is the noteworthy mention of it being the closest base to Las Vegas however, which may provide some respite from the monotony with its plethora of hookers and air conditioning.
No matter how you look at it though, Twentynine Palms just plain sucks. The negatives far outweigh anything positive about it; and unless you’re a boot lieutenant you probably don’t get a hard-on every time someone mentions the spacious training areas or multiple ranges for all sorts of explosive weaponry. For the average grunt, the mention of these ranges isn’t something we look forward to–no one actually enjoys running around in 100 lbs of gear in 110 degree weather–despite popular belief amongst officers. Having spent two full Mojave Viper’s (back in my day we called it CAX) at this shithole of a space in the desert, I can safely say there’s few places I’d consider it worse to be.
The worst part? Those Marines stationed there get sent to such shitty deserts on the other side of the planet for months, facing hardships beyond imagination… only to come home to another shitty desert.
In other news, I haven’t mentioned in a while but I do still have a book that you should all buy if you haven’t. Sales directly support the site, in addition to motivating the shit out of me. So buy my book.
If there’s one thing the military has no shortage of, it’s acronyms. There’s so many acronyms in the military that the point of them has been rendered completely useless. When you have as many acronyms as the military does, it actually becomes harder to remember them. You’re bombarded with random arrangements of words that ultimately have no contextual importance other than the acronym itself. No one cares that the SAW is short for “Squad Automatic Weapon,” they just call it a SAW–the meaning is completely negligible.
Some of these acronyms are also just reaching kind of far. The acronym “TOW” stands for:
Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire command data link, guided missile. (or sometimes just Wire-guided Missile). I mean really, if you’re going to make an acronym, it’s kind of cheating to make every single word a hyphenated word. At this point, you could just say whatever the fuck you want:
We could just call the TOW “Terrorist-killing, Old-people-fucking, Women-panty-dropping-missile-thing-launched-from-a-tube.” Would it even make a difference?
My central point? I have no idea. I guess just that having to remember 100 acronyms is actually a lot more difficult than just remembering what regular words mean.
It’s hard not to talk about video games in relation to the Marine Corps. For starters, I’m a huge nerd there’s so many games about the military that it’s hard to ignore. I believe I’ve mentioned before that, like most people, when I enlisted there was some image of me being Solid Snake somewhere in the depths of my imagination. Everyone has that daydream, where they’re the lone wolf badass they play in all the games, the one that takes on an entire enemy encampment by themselves and saves the lives of thousands.
I believe I was at CAX before my first deployment when it hit me, standing fire watch in the open and guarding a stack of SMAW rockets for use on the range the next day. I realized that I certainly wasn’t Solid Snake in this scenario. Unfortunately, I was the idiot guard standing post, walking in a repeated square pattern. A tap on the wall would have alerted me, “Huh, what was that noise?” I would walk over to the source and look around briefly before some grizzled man in a bandana would grab me and choke me to death by repeatedly tapping the square button.
We all want to think we’re the badass in the bandana, but we never are. We’re the fodder that he has to go through on his way to the objective.
Of all of the miserable and awful ideas you run into during training that some 0-7 probably signed off on thinking Marines would love, MILES gear has to be one of the worst. “MILES” is not actually a person, but an acronym (in the military?!) that stands for “Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System.” At least, that’s what the package says. I’m pretty sure it actually stands for “Annoying, Heavy Asshole Beads Wrapped Around My Head That Beep And Give Me Cancer.” The purpose is basically laser tag–except it’s not because laser-tag is usually fun. It’s like laser tag developed by douchebag fun-nazis that hate Marines in a secret underground lair below the White House.
Basically, prior to a field op, your company spends 6 hours at the armory getting issued this useless shit developed in the 80’s that comes in three pieces. The body, head and rifle attachment. Pretty self-explanatory: you put the cumbersome body gear over your already-too-heavy flak jacket–this is great, because it completely stops you from being able to access any of your regular flak-stuff like magazines and whatnot since it’s so huge and always-in-the-way.
The headpiece is a bunch of sensors that wrap around your kevlar–well, I say sensors, but I really mean condensed lead and possibly uranium since it weighs about 312 lbs. When you’re not fighting to keep your own head up with the extra weight, you’re probably trying to fix it while it continually falls off with even the lightest of regular movement.
The rifle adapter is where the actual laser comes from, you know this because it has a warning sticker on it that warns you of radiation. This is great, because you’re pointing it at your friends and giving them eyeball cancer. It also adds about 40 lbs to the barrel of your rifle, because carrying around a 10 lb jagged-metal baby with you at all times isn’t already annoying enough.
The best part, though, is that in order to let you know that you’re dead, it continually beeps. It doesn’t stop beeping until one of the higher-up guys with a reset gun resets your gear for you. This is awesome because they’re usually nowhere to be found when it happens, and the slightest bump of your rifle will cause one of your own team members to beep uncontrollably.
I’m sure the training meeting starts off something like this, “Oh lets use the MILES gear guys! Marines love that shit!” The Staff NCO’s and Officers in the battalion headquarters all concur that Marines in fact love things the average person would find stupid and cumbersome as hell. They issue the gear to you in a giant unorganized clusterfuck and within 24 hours all the Marines have taken the gear off and put it in their packs so they can actually do some real training.
The simple truth is that the MILES gear adds absolutely nothing to the training. You can do all of the same scenarios and gunplay with just blanks and some coyotes moderating the scenario. A much better solution are SIM rounds, which is basically playing paintball with your real rifles.
I saw Prometheus on Friday night, and I still haven’t figured out if I liked it or not. It may be the lack of Space Marines that bothers me, the lack of aliens, or the lack of Charlize Theron stripping down for a milk bath…
Got Milk?
Whatever the case, it left me with a confused feeling inside. On one hand, I really wanted to love the movie. The trailer was incredible, and I love Ridley Scott and “Alien“. This movie started off great, it was an interesting premise and the cinematography was spotless. However, once the movie gets rolling it starts to slowly come apart at the seams with weird plot holes and unclear motivations.
Obligatory Spoiler Alert
So we have an eccentric billionaire who hires a team of “scientists” to travel 36 lightyears away from earth on a hunch that there might be evidence of alien life. Nevermind the fact that, if anything, we’d probably send a plethora of probes and satellites to orbit the planet years before any humans ever stepped foot on it–this didn’t bother me, I’m okay with this. I’m also choosing to ignore the fact that 2 years of traveling is nowhere near the amount of time it would take to travel 36 lightyears (here’s a hint: it would take 36 years traveling at the speed of light).
This mission–no matter how you look at it–is the most important mission ever undertaken by man. When they get off the ship, the douchebag anthropologist boyfriend guy even says, “One small step for man huh?” or something like that, so obviously he knows that this is important. They go into some alien ruins and find some dead alien bodies. Pretty amazing right? I mean, they just proved the existence of alien life–this is world-changing stuff.
Yet, no one on this ship seems to care. At all. Well, maybe at first, but overall not really. You’ve got the douchehammer anthropologist who, upon discovering dead aliens (not live ones) drinks himself into a stupor because he wanted to see live aliens. Really? You just discovered aliens and you’re gonna get all emo and fucking stupid about it? You’ve got the biologist and a geologist who give so few shits, they actually choose to abandon the group and head back to the ship. They get lost.
You’d think, “oh shit, two members of this elite group are lost! You guys should monitor their vitals and movements to make sure they’re okay on this potentially hostile alien world where we found dead bodies and scary canisters of alien goo.” Nope, no one gives a shit that they’re lost, no one monitors them, they’re simple told to “stay warm”. They die. Strangely, no one notices (via their head cams or transmitted vitals and GPS signal or otherwise) until they arrive on the scene the next day and find their bodies.
There’s this android that walks around, opening doors and pushing buttons and shit and being all shady–no one seems to care, as if he wasn’t creepy enough.
Then you have just the lore of the movie itself to deal with. Was the stuff the alien drank in the beginning of the film the same thing the android gives to douchehammer? If so, why does it turn him into an evil space zombie instead of killing him outright like it did to the other guy? Did he know it would lead to Shaw (the main chick) getting pregnant with an alien squid/facehugger thing? I have no idea, the movie doesn’t tell you.
The movie’s central theme is the idea of coming to terms with one’s creator. The movie preaches this over and over again, but then that theme becomes murky when you realize that the “map” the people were given leads them to a weapons testing site and not where the aliens are from. Why would they even give humans that information? What purpose would they possibly have to want people to come to this planet, where the only thing that exists is some kind of doomsday bio-weapon? Silly, I say.
Overall, I left the theater really liking the movie. The more I thought about it though, the less sense any of it really made. The movie is a spectacle to look at, the ending is great and it’s pretty entertaining for the most part. However, it’s just not the intelligent and (arguably) perfect movie that Ridley Scott’s original “Alien” was. Go into the movie with zero expectations and you’ll be fine, at the very least it’s beautifully done.
Lastly, sorry for the late update, I’ve been having hardware issues all day.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that if there is a hell made especially for me, it’s a never-ending line at the Armory. In fact, you could probably even consider this a proper sequel, or an awakening from that previous strip.
What is there to say about the armory? It’s fucking miserable.
Look at the armory itself. It’s a gray, cement building comprised of one solid, gray steel door and freakishly small windows only a rifle or a small gnome could fit through. A few yards away from the building walls is the fence, atop it sits lengths of barbed wire to repel members of the thieve’s guild from burglary. Inside the armory is even more depressing. The armorers residing in the building, after many years of living in complete darkness, have become mutated and grotesque. Their large, nearly blind eyes have almost doubled in size compared to those of a normal man. They skulk amongst the shadows, tinkering with their weapons and scoffing at you through their little window. In the confines of the armory, they feel powerful; they know you can’t harm them through the tiny opening.
Okay, maybe I’ve been playing too much Skyrim, but grunts spend a lot of time at the armory, and every time is as miserable as the last. Even if its not (though it can be), it feels like punishment. You check out your weapon and clean it… for hours. You don’t know why, you swore the entire platoon cleaned their weapons yesterday, but its possible that the armorers used some kind of sorcery to put carbon back in your chamber. It doesn’t matter, you’re going to pull your weapon out and baby-wipe it until your fingers bleed… or until chow, whichever comes first.
Despite the fact that Garcia is usually the one with the cooler head (he’s bald, it makes sense), he doesn’t know anything about computers.
One of the many inconveniences of being a grunt in the Marine Corps is the fact that they don’t actually give you government computer access. In fact, most infantry Marines have no idea what a NIPR or SIPR account is. The only people that get .mil email addresses in an infantry battalion are the command and Headquarters platoon. The rest of the grunts more than likely don’t even know that most of the Marine Corps uses their CAC to get online every day.
If this strip is any indication (it isn’t), grunts as well as the Marine Corps are probably better off leaving it the way it is.
I remember when I got transferred to the S-3 to work with ComCam, I was given computer access. I had my own email and everything, and I thought I had reached some higher echelon of Corps-dom. In a kind of awful way, it’s true. Grunts are at the bottom, always and forever, at least culturally. It is as they say about being akin to a fungus: they keep me in the dark and feed me shit. Somehow though, this has attributed in some way to the reverence that grunts receive from other Marines. It’s kind of like:
“Wow, you guys get treated like shit all the time. I respect you, because I don’t and that must suck.”
In all reality though, there’s really no reason for the average grunt to need government computer access. I can imagine the most use that would come out of it would be a search history of Olivia Munn and burning spot on penis after sex.
On a side note, a few of you were lucky enough to watch me draw this strip. Yes, I broadcasted the creation of it on my live stream account. You can watch the recorded session if you wish. I only announced it to my Tumblr/Twitter because I didn’t want a flood of people in there, since this was the first time I’d ever done it. It was cool though! People got to chat, watch me draw and listen to my eclectic taste in music.
Keep up with my many internet venues for the next one.
He’s the one that blows past everyone on the PFT, does his twenty pull-ups and hundred crunches all while absolutely reeking of his good friend Jack Daniels. He’s that one guy you can always expect to be hammered and somehow not only perform his job, but do it probably better than most people. Cone is that guy. For Cone, operating on alcohol is operating on a normal level.
The seriousness of alcoholism aside, every platoon has that one guy. Not necessarily the platoon alcoholic, but the guy that’s always lovably drunk at the best moments.
Although Cone is kind of being introduced here as a new character, this isn’t actually the first time he’s appeared in a Terminal Lance strip. The first appearance of Cone can be seen all the way back in Terminal Lance #14. Cone is actually a real person, and he’s awesome. One of my favorite memories of him was one of many nights he got really hammered and fell off the 2nd story catwalk at Macky Hall in Hawaii. He got up, without a scratch on him, and came back up the stairs like it never even happened and continued to drink and party. I’m fairly convinced that he’s immortal, or simply that alcohol is his spinach of sorts.
In other news, while I wasn’t able to make it personally this time, those of you in the Philadelphia area should check out the ComiCon this weekend! Brian Iglesias, the owner of Veteran’s Expeditionary Media (who published “KNIFE-HANDS”) will be there. I believe he’ll have some books for sale and probably some DVD’s, as he also directed and produced the Korean War documentary “CHOSIN”.
Otherwise, very quickly, no I’m not SgtMaj Kent; there’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline for Terminal Lance in the future, so keep up with me on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr for the latest.
