Searching for any "devil dogs"

[SeaKnight]

Looking for any Marine Corps veterans who served in the Great War or in the Carribean during the same time period....need info on what basic was like at that time.

[Joseph P Carey]

The best I can tell you is what my Dad told me. He went to PI Boot Camp in 1937, though, and he was sent to Cuba, some few years before the World War started, to teach Artillary to the Cuban Army. He was actually discharged from the Marines in October 41, but rehitched in the month of January 42. I guess he just did not wish to miss the big show when it finally came.

He was always a Marine, and now he is probably dealing cards to his other Marine buddies that fell by the side for so many years gone by, as he rests in Arlington amongst his firends forever.

What my Dad said of Boot Camp was somewhat simular to what I experienced in 1964. There are always some that will go outside the bounds of what a boot should be taught, and the standard operating procedures of trainning a boot, like the incident at Ribbon Creek in the 1950s. The trainning has always been harsh, and smoking cigarettes with a bucket over one's head is not something that came about in recent years, neither is the holding out of one's piece with your arms straight, in his case an 03, until your arms feel like they can not do it any loner, but yoiu do. Duck-walking in full pack is not a new consept. And, banging on the door of the Drill Instructor's shack, and requesting permission to speak is nothing new to the Corps. These things are things that I shared with my Dad in stories of the Old Corps. It was in no great difference from the way I was taught and trained at PI.

Like the fact that that the Marines have not changed their basic uniforms in the last forty years, their standards have always remained the same, right down to the training of recruits. God bless the Marines, no one else ever will!