March 13, 2005

Inevitably, the bullshit emerges. In the Marine Corps, it’s always too good to be true.

One of the reasons I volunteered to stay back for rear party while the rest of the battalion goes home was that the rear party Marines from our last deployment told us they mostly just sat around, made an extra couple of hazard pay-augmented paychecks, while skipping out on a lot of Company bullshit.

Now I find myself under the command of incompetent, moronic leadership, stuck with a bunch of lazy POGs, washing vehicles to the exacting standards of anal-retentive Customs inspectors.

The twelve to fourteen hour workdays don’t bother me that much. I can deal with being tired and working with soaked boots indefinitely, especially with my ipod to keep me company.

It’s the stupid shit that irks me. If our leadership could just get their shit together and muster up just a single iota of organization, our work time could easily be cut in half. But they’re not the ones actually doing the work, so I suppose they don’t really have any incentive.

And neither do they have to stand tent watch, or gate guard in flak jacket and helmet with a loaded weapon, in a place you can’t even reach without getting past two real guardposts. It’s funny: we didn’t have this many guardposts-per-area in any of the FOBs in hostile territory.

Coming out of a combat zone, it’s hard for me to take any of this seriously.

But this is how POGs do. And this is why we hate POGs.