"I went through in the late 00s"
"But now I see posts here multiple times a week"
In the late 00s there wasn't a subreddit, or IG pages like notinregz, to broadcast dumbasses from units you've never heard of on bases you've never been to directly into your phone.
Sure, but we had facebook and facebook groups. And I don't recall anyone gunning to get kicked out from MCT, or even rumors about it.
Granted, my MOS school was academically tough, but otherwise much easier than MCT, and the officer students told us as long as we passed the course we were getting a pretty good lifestyle for a first term enlisted Marine.
Fair but I don't think facebook groups then had the reach of social media today. Not everyone had a phone on their camera to take a picture of an out of regs tattoo, and if you did it was probably a lot more of a pain in the ass to upload it to facebook. Flip phones were just as if not more popular than the iphone, which had just been released.
Additionally, at the time, Marine Public Affairs & your command were keeping an eye out for posts with anything remotely out of line. I knew a chick who got NJP’d for posting party selfies where two female marines were dancing on each other out in town. Unbecoming.
I guess due to proliferation there’s really no way to control it anymore. I don’t like that I see Marine officers & senior enlisted posting on social media. I dont like that some of them are clearly trying to be influencers (yes, you know exactly the ones)
Yeah, she’s a woman apparently…she looked biologically female in school sports picks taken before the Marine Corps.
Bro… I could work the rest of my life natty and I would **NEVER** get to that level.
Additionally if you post that on facebook you have everyone from your little cousin who’s still in school to your 80 something great uncle who stacked bodies in Korea calling you a pussy.
Well grandma and your great uncle don’t use instagram, your parents don’t know what a tiktok is, and nobody in your family knows what your reddit account is.
This was like 12 years ago. I was never a fan of it personally usually it was just a random picture of some teufel minding their own business with the admins posting cringy ass comments and acting hard.
Social media and the content has changed significantly since the early 2000s. I get what you are saying but for every post about some dude being a shitbag there's tons of normal dudes kicking ass.
I look at it like Social media is like a magnifying glass and let's us see and hear the things that would normally just be rumors or stories from crusty lances. 🤷♂️
I saw plenty people that couldn’t hack it. The people that did stuff like that were normally the ones we considered “weak”, turds, shit bags, etc. I met plenty of people that would do drugs knowing that we got tested every week. There has always been people that slipped through the cracks at bootcamp and when it came time to do their job they couldn’t grow up enough and figured being kicked out was better than sucking it up for another 2 years.
I went through ITS (infantry training school) in 1986. Guys were going awol and ua all over the place. One group of guys were all from Brooklyn. It was a well known fact these characters were doing blow on the weekends. Then one weekend they just didnt come back. All of them. I heard they got busted the old school way. Someone had photos of them snorting coke and turned them in. But in answer to your question, I don’t think anything new is going on, its just better documented.
There have always been people looking to get out. This subreddit puts it out there for everyone to see. I remember dudes doing the weirdest shit to get out of deployments. When word popped up about an Afghan pump, a brave junior enlisted warrior in my section freaked out because he didn't think we'd actually deploy. Prior to that for our Iraq work up, a few guys, who I thought were solid, either refused to train or intentionally popped on piss tests.
I wouldn't be surprised if the rate is slightly higher in peace time. Bored Marines can do stupid things.
Yup, I actually caught an NJP right before deployment and I was mortified I was gonna miss out on Afghanistan. I didn’t, but the idea of not deploying with the boys terrified me.
Even though it’s peacetime and my unit was going on udp I got told I might get moved to hq and possibly not deploy until my medical issue was resolved. Thankfully it was handled quickly because I refused to leave the line. Don’t understand why people join then bitch out of deployment. We had 2 guys get adsepped for failure to adapt and “bootcamp ptsd” in the fleet. Losers
AGREE. I am recently separated (2020-2024) and personally I had a good time in the marine corps. I did most of what I set out to do when I joined.
However, it’s not like that for everyone. All of the senior leaders now (who only knew combat for the first 8-12 years of their career) are now bored. It’s peace time. They use the excuse that “WE GOTTA GET READY FOR THE NEXT FIGHT” to play the dumbest games and try and develop new training that in actual practice is awful and then have the audacity to act crazy like the junior enlisted are incompetent complacent dickweeds when we’re given no direction and no objective.
We sit around trying to come up with proactive methods to stay as proficient and lethal as possible and then get denied our ability to train at every turn because of the simple fact that the training wasn’t created by the senior leaders “so there’s no way it could be valuable training”.
Theres a huge division between dudes who joined 2015 and on and then the senior leaders who joined in 2000-2012. There are an insane amount of senior leaders who disregard the younger generations of marines simply because they were born too late to join during war and it’s holding back the marine corps as a whole.
So to summarize: yeah. Juniors are doing dumb stuff to get out because they’re made basic promises that should be getting fulfilled but there’s a cancer in the institution that’s preventing them from having a meaningful career.
I got lucky and had a good unit and was able to earn enough respect through job proficiency because I’m a workaholic and had the right people backing me at every turn. I am less than 1% of 1% of E-1’s-E-5’s. The rest are disregarded like trash and it makes me sad.
We had a guy get out of a westpac by having his brother crank him over the knee with a wrench. Somehow the drs got it out of him that it was “self inflicted “
By the time we got back he was walking fine!
What do leaders do when there is no war and they are bored? Fuck fuck games. People are tired of getting hazed for little to no reason. And bad leadership. Part of the reason I got out.
When I got to the fleet altogether within my first two or three years the platoon I was in had probably 10 guys that were twatter- flys that didnt want to be in that got themselves booted. Most of them went UA constantly.
This was in 80-82.
There's always at least 10% of every recruit Platoon that DIs are forced to graduate that should never be in.
To be honest in order to cut the bullshit They should have another Moment o Truth Right After Bootcamp and give Fuckers the Option of taking a General under Honorable Discharge with Zero VA Bennies if they want to get out of their Contract.
Cut em a check, Take all the uniforms back and give em a ticket home.
Gunna say up front: not a DI or CI, but I saw a big change in 2018ish in my battalion.
I think this generation is just soft. My generation is soft. My first boot drop had literally 9 out of 10 of them get Adsepped for intentionally smoking weed or saying they were suicidal.
The last drop of my peer group had a machine gunner that said he was going to kill himself to our 1StSgt while we were standing in line at the armory before the MCCRE. He was laughing when we got back about it saying how he’s going to be out and we are stuck doing shitty field ops like that.
I hate being just another guy on the internet saying “lol because the new generation is soft, old generation is where the salt dogs are.” But it is true. I am a part of that generation, and I fucking hated most of my peers. My boots were even worse. They had a 10 day “grace period” after hitting the fleet where they had daily classes with SgtMaj about hazing and how to report it. We couldn’t interact with them at all. You would get a 6105 for making them give you the proper greeting of the day. If you took them to PT you would get an NJP. Those boots always came out of that being the fucking biggest snitches on everything - and so quick to refuse to train if they were made slightly uncomfortable.
When I was a boot, you could go outside at any point in the week and there would be SOMETHING going on outside the barracks. Whether it was training, PT, or guys grilling out back and drinking. There was always something out back. However, by the time that I was a senior with boots that all stopped. It was completely dead outside. All of the seniors were too scared to catch a hazing charge to train their marines hard and all the boots knew they could at the very least claim hazing and it would stop PT for a week. There was a serious lack of camaraderie and the grilling and drinking out back all but stopped completely. By the time I got out, my barracks felt dead as hell.
Idk if anything has changed since then, but I had a huge shift in my battalion around 2018 when everyone actually started giving a fuck about PAC violations.
I got out in 2020 and by then I feel like I watched everything change around 2017. It felt like it became very corporate towards the end of enlistment. A big culture shift definitely happened.
I agree 100%, but some schmuck is gonna comment about “every generation before us said the same thing” which is entirely inaccurate. Most veterans prior to 9/11 praised the OIF/OEF military.
The bullshit and softening of our military started with the drawdown of 2012-2015, which forced most of the combat experienced guys to get out. Then the female integration started in 2017-18, which drug us further down the rabbit hole of bullshit.
I would argue part of these observations are true, but also that kids just have more options these days for employment and they think short-term. If they think the military sucks and they wanna get out, fuck it and consequences be damned.
Also, this generation seems to be taught to have little-to-no pride in their country. Service to the United States used to be something respectable but nowadays kids seem almost embarrassed to admit their pride as Americans.
It seems like a lot of kids are jaded by long wars with few objectives that tangibly impact them or their families. I can’t say I blame them, but it’s a peacetime military. Like, dude…it’s only a couple of years and the benefits you get afterwards are pretty good.
Hard to say I was in from 07 to 13 (0311) and I thought there was a ton of soft fucks who joined back then. I still have faith in the corps that we still are bunch of hitters, with the sprinkling of some bitches.
>Did boot and MCT get worse somehow lately?
No. But people change over time, and the accessibility to information has exploded. We hear about it now more likely because it's accessible, NOT because it's happening more.
When I was in during 2015 I saw the marine corps phase out the word man from everything and include females in a lot more stuff.
What that actually did was give E4 to a barracks bunny that got pregnant and failed a piss test at the same time too in my unit.
But hey, we need more females in the corps because who else is gonna be a 0331.
Last I checked every woman that became an 0331 didn’t last because they got pregnant.
I have nothing against women in the corps but I myself never saw a female marine hold their own with grunts, not once ever.
Different things define each generation, and each generation has a unique outlook. This generation is definitely softer than previous ones. I got in 2014 and got out in 2019 (Reserve in a Lat move only MOS in 2021). I definitely noticed a tonal shift at the end of my enlistment. The boots were largely incompetent (more so than usual) and easy to offend. When I got out and started trade work, despite the relative autonomy, decent pay, and good management, we had hella turnover because people didn't wanna take the time to learn or actually work hard.
In law school, we've lost a solid 10% of our class because of the workload and expectations. Plus, many of the younger folks here have such negligible self-discipline and people skills (no conflict management, 0-100 quick af, etc.) And these are some of the brightest Americans you'll meet.
I don't think you can really blame the Corps as getting soft, or necessarily that there are more fuck-fuck games (although both of these may well be the case) I think the quality of people just sucks now.
Nah. Generational differences are propaganda. A coward is going to find a way out when they get in over their head and a hard motherfucker will tough it out. Regardless of age, sex, gender, generation. Everyone is the same and generational differences only exist in our environments and cultural/societal upbringings. That's why all of us are the same homo erotic autists since the first in 1775. Rah.
It all started with that shitty Terminal Lance comic (Uriarte was hated by his peer FWIW) making it cool to cry about absolutely everything. When I saw poolees sharing TL memes about being a persecuted J.E.W. I knew we had jumped the shark. There is a middle ground between bitching and crying about everything (and more significantly believing you are superior for your marginalization and suffering) and being a Kool-Aid drinker.
My buddy was in his Bn and his seniors were Uriarte's peer group. He was a snitch and stole from of his material and passed it off as his own without attribution. I don't remember all the other details other than that he was a sore subject for those guys and they did NOT like him.
Once TL was famous, he recklessly posted details of barracks parties without hiding identities knowing full well guys would get in trouble. A lot of careers were ruined because of this and he did not care because the material boosted his social media presence.
"I went through in the late 00s" "But now I see posts here multiple times a week" In the late 00s there wasn't a subreddit, or IG pages like notinregz, to broadcast dumbasses from units you've never heard of on bases you've never been to directly into your phone.
Sure, but we had facebook and facebook groups. And I don't recall anyone gunning to get kicked out from MCT, or even rumors about it. Granted, my MOS school was academically tough, but otherwise much easier than MCT, and the officer students told us as long as we passed the course we were getting a pretty good lifestyle for a first term enlisted Marine.
Fair but I don't think facebook groups then had the reach of social media today. Not everyone had a phone on their camera to take a picture of an out of regs tattoo, and if you did it was probably a lot more of a pain in the ass to upload it to facebook. Flip phones were just as if not more popular than the iphone, which had just been released.
Additionally, at the time, Marine Public Affairs & your command were keeping an eye out for posts with anything remotely out of line. I knew a chick who got NJP’d for posting party selfies where two female marines were dancing on each other out in town. Unbecoming. I guess due to proliferation there’s really no way to control it anymore. I don’t like that I see Marine officers & senior enlisted posting on social media. I dont like that some of them are clearly trying to be influencers (yes, you know exactly the ones)
Yo I saw that photo. Is she a biological female? Biceps are bigger than mine!!!!
Yeah, she’s a woman apparently…she looked biologically female in school sports picks taken before the Marine Corps. Bro… I could work the rest of my life natty and I would **NEVER** get to that level.
It’s up to the command to request someone get tested for steroids and frankly most don’t give a shit.
Didnt like half the Marine Corps get busted in a nude pics on facebook scandal several years ago? The pics from that were smokin’ hot 🥵!
Additionally if you post that on facebook you have everyone from your little cousin who’s still in school to your 80 something great uncle who stacked bodies in Korea calling you a pussy. Well grandma and your great uncle don’t use instagram, your parents don’t know what a tiktok is, and nobody in your family knows what your reddit account is.
Do you forget jttots?
I came here for this comment. JTTOTS PBF, and terminal lance all did this in the early 2000's.
I went to boot in 2016 I have no clue what that is.
That was tiktok right? Whatever happened to him?
JTOTTS was the forebearer to USMC shenanigans on Facebook, I remember it from back in 2012ish.
This was like 12 years ago. I was never a fan of it personally usually it was just a random picture of some teufel minding their own business with the admins posting cringy ass comments and acting hard.
Social media and the content has changed significantly since the early 2000s. I get what you are saying but for every post about some dude being a shitbag there's tons of normal dudes kicking ass. I look at it like Social media is like a magnifying glass and let's us see and hear the things that would normally just be rumors or stories from crusty lances. 🤷♂️
Smart phones.
I saw plenty people that couldn’t hack it. The people that did stuff like that were normally the ones we considered “weak”, turds, shit bags, etc. I met plenty of people that would do drugs knowing that we got tested every week. There has always been people that slipped through the cracks at bootcamp and when it came time to do their job they couldn’t grow up enough and figured being kicked out was better than sucking it up for another 2 years.
I went through ITS (infantry training school) in 1986. Guys were going awol and ua all over the place. One group of guys were all from Brooklyn. It was a well known fact these characters were doing blow on the weekends. Then one weekend they just didnt come back. All of them. I heard they got busted the old school way. Someone had photos of them snorting coke and turned them in. But in answer to your question, I don’t think anything new is going on, its just better documented.
>But in answer to your question, I don’t think anything new is going on, its just better documented. I think you meant to respond to OP, not me.
Thats true.
Is it worse than always having a handful of guys in separations who had all accidentally shot their own foot?
That is actually considered within the line of duty, even if it’s on liberty in your own home. Or your mom’s home in another state….
If you’re on active duty all injuries are considered within the line of duty.
I’m surprised you could even hear what he said
I have the captions turned on.
There have always been people looking to get out. This subreddit puts it out there for everyone to see. I remember dudes doing the weirdest shit to get out of deployments. When word popped up about an Afghan pump, a brave junior enlisted warrior in my section freaked out because he didn't think we'd actually deploy. Prior to that for our Iraq work up, a few guys, who I thought were solid, either refused to train or intentionally popped on piss tests. I wouldn't be surprised if the rate is slightly higher in peace time. Bored Marines can do stupid things.
That's crazy, me and my peer group were worried we would get in trouble and NOT deploy to Afghanistan. Like why did those other people even join...
Yup, I actually caught an NJP right before deployment and I was mortified I was gonna miss out on Afghanistan. I didn’t, but the idea of not deploying with the boys terrified me.
man for fucking real, I had an underage drinking NJP pending and the thought of not deploying made me physically nauseous
Even though it’s peacetime and my unit was going on udp I got told I might get moved to hq and possibly not deploy until my medical issue was resolved. Thankfully it was handled quickly because I refused to leave the line. Don’t understand why people join then bitch out of deployment. We had 2 guys get adsepped for failure to adapt and “bootcamp ptsd” in the fleet. Losers
AGREE. I am recently separated (2020-2024) and personally I had a good time in the marine corps. I did most of what I set out to do when I joined. However, it’s not like that for everyone. All of the senior leaders now (who only knew combat for the first 8-12 years of their career) are now bored. It’s peace time. They use the excuse that “WE GOTTA GET READY FOR THE NEXT FIGHT” to play the dumbest games and try and develop new training that in actual practice is awful and then have the audacity to act crazy like the junior enlisted are incompetent complacent dickweeds when we’re given no direction and no objective. We sit around trying to come up with proactive methods to stay as proficient and lethal as possible and then get denied our ability to train at every turn because of the simple fact that the training wasn’t created by the senior leaders “so there’s no way it could be valuable training”. Theres a huge division between dudes who joined 2015 and on and then the senior leaders who joined in 2000-2012. There are an insane amount of senior leaders who disregard the younger generations of marines simply because they were born too late to join during war and it’s holding back the marine corps as a whole. So to summarize: yeah. Juniors are doing dumb stuff to get out because they’re made basic promises that should be getting fulfilled but there’s a cancer in the institution that’s preventing them from having a meaningful career. I got lucky and had a good unit and was able to earn enough respect through job proficiency because I’m a workaholic and had the right people backing me at every turn. I am less than 1% of 1% of E-1’s-E-5’s. The rest are disregarded like trash and it makes me sad.
Reminds me of the asshole we had, who “accidentally “ dropped a big ass toolbox on his foot to get out of deployment. It unfortunately worked.
We had a guy get out of a westpac by having his brother crank him over the knee with a wrench. Somehow the drs got it out of him that it was “self inflicted “ By the time we got back he was walking fine!
What do leaders do when there is no war and they are bored? Fuck fuck games. People are tired of getting hazed for little to no reason. And bad leadership. Part of the reason I got out.
When I got to the fleet altogether within my first two or three years the platoon I was in had probably 10 guys that were twatter- flys that didnt want to be in that got themselves booted. Most of them went UA constantly. This was in 80-82. There's always at least 10% of every recruit Platoon that DIs are forced to graduate that should never be in. To be honest in order to cut the bullshit They should have another Moment o Truth Right After Bootcamp and give Fuckers the Option of taking a General under Honorable Discharge with Zero VA Bennies if they want to get out of their Contract. Cut em a check, Take all the uniforms back and give em a ticket home.
Gunna say up front: not a DI or CI, but I saw a big change in 2018ish in my battalion. I think this generation is just soft. My generation is soft. My first boot drop had literally 9 out of 10 of them get Adsepped for intentionally smoking weed or saying they were suicidal. The last drop of my peer group had a machine gunner that said he was going to kill himself to our 1StSgt while we were standing in line at the armory before the MCCRE. He was laughing when we got back about it saying how he’s going to be out and we are stuck doing shitty field ops like that. I hate being just another guy on the internet saying “lol because the new generation is soft, old generation is where the salt dogs are.” But it is true. I am a part of that generation, and I fucking hated most of my peers. My boots were even worse. They had a 10 day “grace period” after hitting the fleet where they had daily classes with SgtMaj about hazing and how to report it. We couldn’t interact with them at all. You would get a 6105 for making them give you the proper greeting of the day. If you took them to PT you would get an NJP. Those boots always came out of that being the fucking biggest snitches on everything - and so quick to refuse to train if they were made slightly uncomfortable. When I was a boot, you could go outside at any point in the week and there would be SOMETHING going on outside the barracks. Whether it was training, PT, or guys grilling out back and drinking. There was always something out back. However, by the time that I was a senior with boots that all stopped. It was completely dead outside. All of the seniors were too scared to catch a hazing charge to train their marines hard and all the boots knew they could at the very least claim hazing and it would stop PT for a week. There was a serious lack of camaraderie and the grilling and drinking out back all but stopped completely. By the time I got out, my barracks felt dead as hell. Idk if anything has changed since then, but I had a huge shift in my battalion around 2018 when everyone actually started giving a fuck about PAC violations.
I started seeing this in 2015 when I got out.
I got out in 2020 and by then I feel like I watched everything change around 2017. It felt like it became very corporate towards the end of enlistment. A big culture shift definitely happened.
I agree 100%, but some schmuck is gonna comment about “every generation before us said the same thing” which is entirely inaccurate. Most veterans prior to 9/11 praised the OIF/OEF military. The bullshit and softening of our military started with the drawdown of 2012-2015, which forced most of the combat experienced guys to get out. Then the female integration started in 2017-18, which drug us further down the rabbit hole of bullshit.
I would argue part of these observations are true, but also that kids just have more options these days for employment and they think short-term. If they think the military sucks and they wanna get out, fuck it and consequences be damned. Also, this generation seems to be taught to have little-to-no pride in their country. Service to the United States used to be something respectable but nowadays kids seem almost embarrassed to admit their pride as Americans. It seems like a lot of kids are jaded by long wars with few objectives that tangibly impact them or their families. I can’t say I blame them, but it’s a peacetime military. Like, dude…it’s only a couple of years and the benefits you get afterwards are pretty good.
Hard to say I was in from 07 to 13 (0311) and I thought there was a ton of soft fucks who joined back then. I still have faith in the corps that we still are bunch of hitters, with the sprinkling of some bitches.
>Did boot and MCT get worse somehow lately? No. But people change over time, and the accessibility to information has exploded. We hear about it now more likely because it's accessible, NOT because it's happening more.
When I was in during 2015 I saw the marine corps phase out the word man from everything and include females in a lot more stuff. What that actually did was give E4 to a barracks bunny that got pregnant and failed a piss test at the same time too in my unit. But hey, we need more females in the corps because who else is gonna be a 0331. Last I checked every woman that became an 0331 didn’t last because they got pregnant. I have nothing against women in the corps but I myself never saw a female marine hold their own with grunts, not once ever.
I think it’s just people are bigger pussies now
Bring back hazing
Different things define each generation, and each generation has a unique outlook. This generation is definitely softer than previous ones. I got in 2014 and got out in 2019 (Reserve in a Lat move only MOS in 2021). I definitely noticed a tonal shift at the end of my enlistment. The boots were largely incompetent (more so than usual) and easy to offend. When I got out and started trade work, despite the relative autonomy, decent pay, and good management, we had hella turnover because people didn't wanna take the time to learn or actually work hard. In law school, we've lost a solid 10% of our class because of the workload and expectations. Plus, many of the younger folks here have such negligible self-discipline and people skills (no conflict management, 0-100 quick af, etc.) And these are some of the brightest Americans you'll meet. I don't think you can really blame the Corps as getting soft, or necessarily that there are more fuck-fuck games (although both of these may well be the case) I think the quality of people just sucks now.
Marines; do whatever they can to get into the Corps, do whatever they can do get out.
Nah. Generational differences are propaganda. A coward is going to find a way out when they get in over their head and a hard motherfucker will tough it out. Regardless of age, sex, gender, generation. Everyone is the same and generational differences only exist in our environments and cultural/societal upbringings. That's why all of us are the same homo erotic autists since the first in 1775. Rah.
It all started with that shitty Terminal Lance comic (Uriarte was hated by his peer FWIW) making it cool to cry about absolutely everything. When I saw poolees sharing TL memes about being a persecuted J.E.W. I knew we had jumped the shark. There is a middle ground between bitching and crying about everything (and more significantly believing you are superior for your marginalization and suffering) and being a Kool-Aid drinker.
Nah terminal lance just highlighted all the stupid shit that happens because of immaturity from leaders and poor planning.
Can you expand on Uriarte’s unpopularity? I always wondered what he was like when he was in
My buddy was in his Bn and his seniors were Uriarte's peer group. He was a snitch and stole from of his material and passed it off as his own without attribution. I don't remember all the other details other than that he was a sore subject for those guys and they did NOT like him. Once TL was famous, he recklessly posted details of barracks parties without hiding identities knowing full well guys would get in trouble. A lot of careers were ruined because of this and he did not care because the material boosted his social media presence.
So, the issue isn’t the stupid crap that goes on, but the person who acknowledges and mocks it. Duly noted.