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MCRD ? San Diego

I was on the other side of the fence.....

NAVY NTC Boot camp, or as I called it, Camp "Hollywood" I used to look at the same airport wishing I'g get the heck out of bootcamp. NAVY bootcamp was most inconvenient to my lifestyle.....
:icon_lol:
Our CC (Marines called them DI) said if we ever hopped the fence to go AWOL we'd end up in the MC boot camp and they would be allowed to kick our asses to death! I always did and still do beleive that would be the case. :salute:
 
I was as Camp Holly wood back in '63. After we washed our duds (by hand with #9 rock/ actually with a kaiki brush) up with clothes stops.
A clothes stop is a small diameter cord about 12 inches long with metal ends to keep the cord from fraying. This short cord was used to tie laundry to a clothes line or other convenient object for drying. Every recruit was issued a length of clothes stops in boot camp instead of clothes pins. They ceased to be issued in 1973.
Anyway, we were told by our CC to hang our Dungaree trousers with the fly side facing MCRD.

Come to think of it, When I visited MCRD many years later, I never saw a spec of paper on the grounds,.... anywhere.
MCRD was meticulously kept free of any debris. Think it must of been the recruits that kept their base spotless.
 
wbuchart said:
NAVY NTC Boot camp, or as I called it, Camp "Hollywood" I used to look at the same airport wishing I'g get the heck out of bootcamp. NAVY bootcamp was most inconvenient to my lifestyle.....
:icon_lol:
Our CC (Marines called them DI) said if we ever hopped the fence to go AWOL we'd end up in the MC boot camp and they would be allowed to kick our asses to death! I always did and still do beleive that would be the case. :salute:
Click to expand...

I remember being told that too, one guy could not stop looking at the jets leaving Lindbergh Field, the CC's gave him some binoculars and put on a dumpster in the 'dead cockroach' position for about an hour. The guy never did look at another plane. When I was in SD for a friends retirement at the end of July I took my wife to see where I went to boot camp. Not much left of the RTC/NTC side of the base, the NEX Commissary is now a Von's, Worm Island looks to be more or less intact and the Never Sail is still standing. At least the Marines have some sense of history, I may joke about MCRD's being a great hotel but when I'm there I swear I can feel my uncle's presence. He was a Marine before Pearl Harbor and was a Wake Island and POW camp survivor, so for our family MCRD is 'sacred ground'.
 
Couple of things...

The best movie I've seen that really seems to capture a lot of MCRD San Diego is the 1970 movie "Tribes"...(Jan Michael Vincent, Darren McGavin, Earl Hindeman, etc.) Mind you, I'm not a Marine (29.5 years of AF).

Grew up around the Marines however (Camp Pendleton, MCAS (H) Tustin, and El Toro), so I take more than an average interest...

Kent
 
I was using a search engine to try to locate an old Marine buddy of mine from Michigan who I went to boot camp with when I saw this old thread. I hope Banana Bob is well.
 
Semper Fi, Marines.

1st RTBN, Co C, Plt 1037, MCRD San Diego, Calif.

Though I Love the Corps, I hate that place. I lost my best friend to that fence and the temptation of that GD airport.
We were in the 4th week of training and he got a "Dear John"(Fittingly, his name was Johnny). We were quartered in different quonset huts, so, I really didn't know how badly it had affected him. We had started Guard Duty that week, and they posted him on that friggin' fence.
Later, at Duty Muster he was UA.
The next morning they found him in New York, dangling from an airliner's nosegear bay, strapped into it with his 782 belt.
The really remarkable thing is, that Flight originated at LAX, so, obviously he had survived an unknown flight from San Diego to LA.
Tough little sh*t made it that far! Probably on sheer determination. Amazing feat nonetheless.
I'm sure nobody knew, or even had a clue, as to how distraught he was. Tightlipped as could be.

Devastating as that loss was to me, the Corps and the US Congress needed a scapegoat, and took the situation to the limit.
Imagine a 5th week recruit, being grilled by a Bird Col, with 2 Congressional aides taking notes, with a stenographer for the record. I was terrified.
Our JDI had been pretty tough on Johnny for UA smoking the prior week, and the JDI was their easy target.
The JDI had physically roughed Johnny up, and that was, according to my view of the investigation, all they needed.
We were from the mean streets surrounding 8 Mile and Van Dyke, and Johnny was tough. Real Tough.
The punishment he received was diddly squat compared to the kind of stuff ya got from street fights back home.
He had actually laughed about getting knocked around by the JDI afterward.

Needless to say, the poor JDI, doing exactly what every other DI there did(at that time), got the shaft. Big Time.
That is, sincerely, too bad. He didn't deserve to lose his career(2nd enlistment) over it.

Of course, that all occured long before obscenities and corporal punishment were deemed much too extreme for the "Ladies".

Here it is forty some years later, and even though I think about it often, this is the first time I've ever put that down in writing.
I'm the soul survivor of our "Buddy Plan" foursome, so, RIP Johnny, Joey, and Wes...Don
 
Man that's a hard story. I've been looking for my friend for years now. With a name like John Murphy it isn't an easy task. He was an officer in the Army and resigned his commission to enlist in the Corps. He was a lot older than the rest of us, but he hung in there with the best. Got to go to infantry training school with him too. While on liberty I taught him how to drink whisky, he didn't do so well in that. Those were some good times.
 
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