The Stories, Screwups, Rumors, and Recruits We Never Forgot
This article is part of Brothers In Arms, a collection of stories about military service, Vietnam, veterans, the VA, and the brothers we remember.
Every Marine remembers the official parts of boot camp.
The rifle range.
The obstacle course.
The drill instructors.
The graduation parade.
But decades later, those aren’t always the stories we tell.
Instead, we remember the rumors.
The practical jokes.
The recruits nobody ever forgot.
The near-disasters.
The unbelievable things that somehow really happened.
Some of these stories are funny.
Some are painful.
Some have probably grown a little with age.
Every one of them reminds me what it was like to be eighteen years old and trying to survive Marine Corps boot camp.
Welcome to Boot Camp Legends.
The Great Escape
Not the one with Steve McQueen
Every Marine remembers the Mess and Maintenance phase of boot camp. If you weren’t peeling potatoes, scrubbing floors, or policing the area, you were probably assigned some other glamorous duty.
A few recruits, however, were excused for medical reasons and sent to sick bay without a drill instructor escort.
One morning my buddy Richard and I discovered a loophole.
We each faked a mild skin rash.
The Senior DI took one look, handed us a pass to sick bay, and sent us on our way.
As we walked across the base, we wondered if the corpsman would laugh at our fakery and send us back to the platoon.
As it turned out, we need not have worried, those bored Navy Corpsman could have cared less.
Nobody was watching us.
Nobody was following us.
For the first time since stepping onto those famous yellow footprints, we were completely on our own.
Instead of reporting back to the Company area after sick bay like two good little recruits, we made what was probably the dumbest decision of our boot camp careers.
We bloused our trousers, unbuttoned our recruit collars, and casually strolled into the base bowling alley as if we belonged there.
Inside was heaven.
Cold beer.
Juicy hamburgers.
French fries.
Candy.
Soft drinks.
“Pogey bait” as Marines called it.
We ate until we couldn’t eat another bite, enjoying a brief taste of civilian freedom while the rest of Platoon 2085 was sweating through another day of boot camp, scrubbing pots in the mess hall or sweeping up ciggy butts.
Looking back, I can’t believe we were never caught.
Had a drill instructor walked through those doors, our Marine Corps careers might have taken a very different direction.
Instead, we quietly slipped back to the quonset huts, climbed into our racks, and acted as though nothing had happened.
It was probably the stupidest thing I did in boot camp.
It was also one hell of a hamburger.
The Shotline and the GG Shot
Every Marine remembers shot day.
It was the day our platoon marched over to sick bay for what seemed like every vaccination known to medical science.
Boot camp was my introduction to one of the military’s great contradictions: we double-timed everywhere just so we could hurry up and wait. The chow line, sick bay, classes—it didn’t matter. Run like hell to get there, then stand around waiting for something to happen.
One reason Marines have always joked about their “love-hate relationship” with Navy corpsmen probably began right there.
The corpsmen had the process down to an assembly line.
We were herded into a gauntlet where corpsmen stood shoulder to shoulder on both sides, each armed with multiple syringes.
Keep moving.
Next!
Stick.
Next!
Stick.
Next!
Stick.
Just when you thought it was over, they introduced us to the new jet injectors—the famous air guns that supposedly hurt less than needles.
“Don’t flinch,” they warned.
Of course everybody flinched.
The corpsmen seemed to enjoy that part just a little too much as little rivulets of blood ran down recruits’ arms.
Then came the grand finale.
Every Marine from my era remembers the GG shot.
The GG shot was Gamma Globulin—a thick solution of concentrated antibodies derived from human plasma. It was used to provide temporary protection against infectious diseases, particularly hepatitis.
But that’s not what recruits remembered.
We remembered the needle.
Gamma Globulin was thick stuff, and a large amount had to be injected deep into the muscle of your backside.
And they did it with a large-gauge needle.
Let me repeat that for emphasis:
A LARGE-GAUGE NEEDLE.
Whether the needle was actually a foot long or merely looked that way through the terrified eyes of an eighteen-year-old recruit is open to debate.
Memory has a way of making these things larger than life.
The injection could leave you feeling like somebody had buried a golf ball in your ass. Walking hurt. Sitting hurt. And some Marines compared the aftermath to one hell of a charley horse.
Naturally, after receiving this little gift from Navy medicine, we assumed the Marine Corps would give us some time to recover.
Surely they’d let us take the rest of the day off after that?
Not a chance.
It was straight back to the drill field.
As the sun beat down, recruits started dropping like dominoes.
Whether it was the vaccines, the heat, the nerves, or some combination of all three, I couldn’t say.
The drill instructors weren’t particularly sympathetic.
To them, it was just another day in boot camp.
To us…
It was the day we survived the GG shot.
Every Marine from my era remembers shot day. Nobody remembers it fondly.
The Bird Shooter
About eight weeks into boot camp, I had accomplished something every recruit strives for.
I had become invisible.
I wasn’t the fastest.
I wasn’t the slowest.
I wasn’t the recruit constantly getting screamed at.
Life was good.
Then one afternoon, the barracks echoed with the words every recruit dreaded.
“PRIVATE SCHAEFER! REPORT TO THE DUTY HUT!”
My stomach dropped.
What had I done?
I ran to the duty hut, stopped outside the door, and banged loudly just as we’d been taught.
“Sir! Private Schaefer requests permission to enter the duty hut, Sir!“
“Enter, Puke!“
I stepped through the doorway…
…and was immediately greeted by a fist in the stomach.
Before I could catch my breath, somebody grabbed me by both ears and dragged me into a rigid position of attention in front of the Senior Drill Instructor.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed another recruit curled up on the floor in the fetal position.
Whatever had happened, he wasn’t having a good day.
The Senior DI pointed at him.
“This maggot says you dared him to shoot the bird in the platoon photograph.”
For those who never served, “shooting the bird” means raising your middle finger in an obscene gesture.
Every boot camp platoon takes a formal group photograph for the Marine Corps yearbook. Apparently, this genius had decided it would be funny to hide his hand behind the recruit standing next to him and extend one finger toward the camera.
Unfortunately for him, the photographer caught it.
Unfortunately for me…
I happened to be the recruit standing beside him.
The recruit insisted I’d dared him to do it.
I was absolutely dumbfounded.
“Sir, the private has no idea what he’s talking about, Sir!” He’s lying!
Whether the Drill Instructor believed me or not, he apparently didn’t believe the other guy either.
After several tense minutes, I was told to get out of the duty hut and return to the barracks.
No apology.
No explanation.
Just…
“Get out of here.”
I never saw that recruit again.
To this day, I don’t know whether he was recycled into another platoon, discharged, or simply wished into another dimension by the drill instructors.
I only know one thing.
After surviving The Bird Shooter, I was perfectly happy to go back to being invisible.
That day taught me one valuable lesson: invisibility was underrated.
The Lindbergh Escape
One of the things every San Diego recruit noticed was just how close Marine Corps Recruit Depot sat to Lindbergh Field, the city’s commercial airport.
During close-combat training, the chain-link fence separating us from the runways seemed almost laughably low. On the other side, airliners were constantly taking off and landing. To a homesick recruit halfway through boot camp, freedom looked like it was only a few yards away.
Naturally, the rumors started.
The drill instructors told us that every so often a recruit would decide he’d had enough, jump the fence, and make a run across the active runways in a desperate attempt to escape boot camp.
The stories only got worse from there.
According to Marine Corps legend, the control tower personnel had standing orders to report any escaping recruit immediately. Some versions even claimed there was a bounty for spotting them.
Then came the horror stories.
One recruit supposedly got run over by an airliner.
Another was said to have been sucked into the engine of a commercial jet.
Were any of those stories true?
I honestly don’t know.
Like most boot camp legends, they grew a little bigger every time they were told.
I liked to think of it like the old Alcatraz story, one guy actually escaped.
What I do know is that nobody from Platoon 2085 was interested in finding out.
Watching those airplanes disappear into the sky, I won’t deny that the thought crossed your mind.
But after hearing the drill instructors’ stories, climbing that fence suddenly didn’t seem like such a great career move.
Looking back, I suspect the real purpose of those tales wasn’t to tell us history.
It was to make sure none of us became the next story.
Why We Remember These Stories
Ask ten Marines about boot camp and they’ll all remember the rifle range.
Ask them what they still laugh about fifty years later…
…and you’ll hear stories like these.
The escape.
The shots.
The practical jokes.
The recruits who became legends.
Boot camp wasn’t just where we became Marines.
It was where we collected stories we’d spend the rest of our lives telling.
Every veteran seems to have at least one boot camp or basic training story that never made it into the official history books.
What’s the funniest, strangest, or most unbelievable thing you remember from boot camp or basic training?
And if it sounds too crazy to be true, even better. Share your story in the comments.
Continue Exploring
Why I Became a Marine
The decision that changed my life forever—from a teenager in Missouri to the beginning of my journey into the Marine Corps.
The Yellow Footprints
Every Marine remembers that first terrifying walk onto the painted yellow footprints where civilian life officially came to an end.
Boot Camp Didn’t Prepare Me for Vietnam
Boot camp taught me how to become a Marine. Vietnam taught me how different the real thing could be.
Back to the Corps
Returning from Vietnam, rediscovering America, and finishing the final chapter of my Marine Corps enlistment at Camp Pendleton.
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Explore more stories, memories, military mischief, boot camp legends, and Vietnam tales from the archives.
Every Marine remembers boot camp a little differently, and every platoon had its own characters, stories, and legends. Add your memories, correct mine, or tell us how your experience differed—but keep it respectful. Good-natured interservice rivalry is welcome. Personal attacks are not.
These stories come from my memories of Marine Corps boot camp at MCRD San Diego in 1968. Nearly six decades have passed, and memory isn’t a military logbook. Conversations, details, and sequences are recalled as honestly as I can remember them.
Some stories in Boot Camp Legends are things I personally experienced. Others—like the tales of recruits making a run for Lindbergh Field—were stories and rumors passed among recruits and drill instructors. I tell those as Marine Corps folklore, not verified history. And like most good sea stories, some may have grown a little in the telling.