Round 'em up!

So, here I was full of promises about writing on this week's USMC Educators' workshop, and here it's Saturday already. The main problem was, as I was telling one of my fellow educators, that I really, really enjoyed myself, and, people, let's be honest here, what kind of an angle is that for a cynical, snarky blogger such as myself?

You will all be happy to know, however, that I did finally figure out how to make marines laugh. Or at least one of them. On Tuesday, we started with a tour of "The Basic School", where we were first shown the different types of weapons and vehicles the newly commissioned officers used in their field training. One of the vehicles we got to explore was a humvee, which, according to the captain who was our tour guide, cost about $200K without bells and whistles (read: communication equipment), and about $400K fully loaded. Call me Scrooge, but when you consider that most humvees last no more than one six-month deployment, I thought that was a bit of a bad deal, so I said, "Wow. That's pretty wild. Especially when I've heard their resale value is pretty crappy."
Not only did the marine captain laugh, he actually tacked onto my (pretty lame) joke, and said, "Yeah, you know, once you drive them off the lot, they're pretty much worthless."
Success.

Interestingly, of all the things I noticed the most this week, it was what a weird bunch of people us academics truly are. There were about 60 educators, twenty marine officers, and they still struggled to keep us all on the same page. And it wasn't because they didn't have a tight schedule, oh, they did. It also wasn't because they weren't paying attention, because, trust me, they were on us like white on rice. No, it was because every single academic truly is an absent-minded professor.

Take our arrival at The Basic School for instance. We disembarked from the two buses at the edge of the woods (or treeline, as marines like to call any collection of trees), and immediately started to drift all over the place. Some made a beeline for a row of port-a-johns, others wandered off towards stacks of footlockers, others drifted towards the rifle range, while other stood around and stared at an odd bug on the ground, the leaves on the trees, or just out into space. So when our tourguide called out, "OK, round 'em up, people!", he got maybe five people to actually take a few steps in his general direction.
Raising his (truly phenomenal) eyebrows, he tried again, "People, let's round up and get started."
Ten more people joined the now loose circle around the man, but most of us were still wandering around, talking to each other, asking if we'd put on enough bugspray, and if we should leave our water on the bus or not.
Finally, the marine gave up, "Hey! Educators! Round 'em up means you all form a TIGHT circle around me! Not that you continue walking around."
Now we got it.

A few hours later we were allowed to participate in a sand table exercise, or STEX. This basically means you sit on bleachers surrounding a gigantic sand box that is laid out to look like a piece of land with military positions, roads, trees, and water. You are then presented with a tactical situation (this is the enemy position, you have to take it) that you need to solve. The educators were split into groups, and asked to resolve just such a situation. Think of it as super Stratego. Well, the captain who led the exercise started off by asking the very simple question, "What is the enemy's strength"
For those of you who are interested, the answer was also very simple, namely, they're dug in on a hill.
However, the educator who raised her hand instead started provided a long, complicated, multi-paragraph answer that I'm pretty sure used such phrases as "geo-political", but never actually addressed the crux of the matter: the gigantic mountain.


Two days later, on Thursday, we were given a tour of OCS, the officer's candidate school. Unlike many of the other branches, the marine corps' officers' school is very much like enlisted basic training, only worse, at least if I'm to believe the marines who have been through both, and yes, those do exist. There is an insane amount of physical exercise, lots of yelling and screaming, parade drilling, leadership exercises, weapons training, and very little sleep. One of the things that we all noticed immediately was that the candidates were not allowed to use any pronouns, but especially "I" or "me". So instead of saying, "I would like to use the bathroom", they have to say, "This candidate would like to use the bathroom". Of course, if they were to say that to a sergeant instructor, they would get their heads chewed off, so that request would most likely go something like this, "Sergeant instructor, this candidate would like to ask a question. This candidate would like to know if s/he may use the head". And if they're lucky, the sergeant instructor lets them.

Of course, being the academics that we are, we first of all decided that Sergeant instructor is far too straightforward, especially considered the vast amount of euphemisms we'd learned about that week. We therefore came up with "Marine Educators", to better reflect the important job carried out by these fine men and women. And then we came up with some smart comebacks we thought the candidates could use, such as, "Marine Educator, sir, this candidate believes that the marine educator got up at the wrong side of the rack this morning", or "Marine Educator, sir, this candidate believes that the marine educator needs a hug", as obviously that would work.

So yes, we're a very silly bunch. Although you will be happy to know that when we were asked to "round 'em up" on Thursday afternoon, every single one of the sixty or so educators was within three feet of the captain in about ten seconds. So even though we are silly, we can be taught!