" I originally thought must be some kind of Coastie"

5 for you

Yeah, in retrospect, I should have known he wasn't in the Coast Guard. Guy was way too chill and unfazed by the screaming Marine outside his door; a Coastie would have peed himself and handed over all his lunch money.

If my experience with Marines is any indication, he's so deep in the closet he thinks he's behind enemy lines, and can be cured with twelve hours of deep dicking.

Evil homer your little jab gets one star. But this video gets five.

OH HI CENA DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE HERE.

You could also have said, "Oh hi Mark." The actual quote still works for me.

ugh. my brain. I can hardly write today.

And stars.

It's... complicated. They do, but they aren't always very nice about.

When I was in service, I noticed that the level of military-civvie goodwill tended to be directly proportional to the square of the distance between the two groups. In places where there's not a lot of military personnel, civvies have a more romantic attitude about the military in general, and military folks are less stressed the fuck out and more receptive to the whole "American Hero" thing, so you really do see stuff like spontaneous acts of kindness. But as you get closer to permanent posts, like the place this was filmed, Camp Pendleton, civvies get less romantic and servicemen get less gracious. An NCO of mine illustrated the phenomenon quite neatly during one of his PUA lectures: If you're a soldier, and you're picking up girls at a bar, you tell them you're a soldier IF you're off on leave, in a place at least 100k from a major post. But if you're within that radius, you figure out what the nearest college is and you tell the ladies you're a student there, no, just a student, Army, me, naaaw baby of course not what makes you think that. There's a similar, related mathematical law based on your current distance from downrange - retirees and guys close to discharge are very gracious, grunts getting shot at on a daily basis, not gracious at all. This guy is at a major Marine base, and he's about halfway between in the shit and out of it, so tension levels are probably at around 75%; not enough to spark a full-on 'nam style civilian massacre, but more than enough to trigger a case of the raging jerkwads.

As for internal relations, it can get pretty bitter. The culture of espirit de corps means that there's a whole bunch of concentric group circles into which you get pigeonholed, and you're expected to root for the home team on whatever level of organization currently comes into play. You're expected to bash the other branches, you're expected to bash other MOSes, you're expected to bash the guys in your company who belong to the wrong platoon. Engineers bash MPs. Marines bash Navy. 82nd Airborne bashes 101st Airborne. Bravo Company bashes Charlie. Everyone bashes the Coast Guard. They're "friendly" rivalries, make no mistake, but if your job is killing people, I guess friendliness has a way of coming out weird.

And don't even get me started on the pogues. *I* was a pogue, and even I hate us!

The thing is, I'm sure if bullets started flying, Sgt Roadrage and the YT Platoon would be ready to lay down their lives for all those civvie fucks. But that doesn't mean they're going to like 'em.

And I'm really not proud to admit this, but watching this, my first instinct was to side with the screaming marine. I actually wrestled with the idea of extending sympathy to the poor guy in the car, and it wasn't until I saw the dogtags and softcap on the dashboard that I was able to do so.

I've got to admit, this really does put things into perspective, a lot.

I'd say I have a far more stressful job than your average non-military person, I've wanted to yell at people before, mostly for work related stuff. That said, even I can't imagine the kind of pressure some of these guys must be under.

This is a weird question, EH, but I'm curious; how does everyone look at the cooks? Those guys catch a lot of shit?