There were the recruits being called up to the quarterdeck, push-upping or crunching to untold woofs from the mad hats. There were the recruits on the deck, scrubbing away with their scuzz brushes, like confused termites labouring about impenetrable wood.
Boot camp was everything you might have gathered from films you’ve seen.
The progression from Parris Island to Geiger to the Palms signalled, on the face of it, a slow return from barbaric intrigue to the tedium of civilisation. Our time at the Palms was preceded by three weeks of marine combat training at Camp Geiger, North Carolina, and, before that, 12 weeks of Marine basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina. For many, the wider location became “Twentynine Stumps” or “the Stumps”. My schoolhouse was the Marine Corps Communication-Electronics School, which was abbreviated as MCCES, pronounced “mick-sess”. From the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007, I was trained as a lance corporal in my military occupational specialty of tactical data systems administration (a specialty I would later jettison after earning my officer commission in 2008). Years before Helmand province, Afghanistan, however, there was Twentynine Palms, California.
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