Remember
Full Metal Jacket and the jelly
doughnut? Gunnery Sergeant Hartman yells:
“They paid for it, you eat it!” He’d
already thrown the unlocked foot locker’s contents on the deck and is chewing
out Private (Lawrence) Pyle, a “fat body.”
It used to happen to me all the time, except I never pushed my luck by
hiding food. I never saw an individual
get caught like that. Usually, the Drill
Instructors would call a surprise inspection and nab several privates at a
time. All the combination locks would be
locked together and we’d have to play “Football” with “Bends and Thrusts
Forever” until the whistle blew and the fighting heap would attempt to unlock
them. Dumping the foot lockers of 10-15
recruits may have taken too much time in the cleanup.
What
else was in there? The time frame for
Pvt. Pyle was roughly B.C. (Before Camouflage) and so was my time in MCRD in
San Diego in 1975. I remember the other contents
well and they bring back a lot of memories - most of which aren’t
pleasant. Marines remember them well
too: Em-Nu, a black paint in a nail polish
type bottle used to darken brass like chevrons; corn starch and a paint brush for
starching covers (hats); boot bands; skivvies; Barbasol shaving cream; clothes pins (we always washed our clothes
by hand); Kiwi boot polish, black and
neutral (neutral for polishing the deck before final inspection; cover block;
and other standard issue things suitable for DI hurling.
Then
there were the ill-used items. Listerine
(yellow) served as a mouthwash – sometimes.
The other times, stressed out privates would drink it. The same would have been the case for brass
polish like Brasso except for Dura-Glit, a British polish used for tie
clasps and belt buckles. Suicide was
almost impossible because the liquid was absorbed by cotton balls. We were permitted only Trac-2 razors because suicide became much harder. (One private actually came close on my Fire
Watch. It was a bloody mess and I had to
clean it up.) I still use my Bassett
nail clipper after all these years and I actually use it as it was
intended. Our Drill Instructors would
use them as surgical instruments during inspections. I vividly recall the private’s wart. “Clop!” and it fell to the floor. Remember the Mohel scene from Seinfeld?
Our
old olive drab Marine Corps foot lockers - I remember them well. How many hours did we stand on them awaiting
inspection like Private Pyle did when Hartman found his unlocked? That jelly doughnut cost Pyle plenty even though
he managed somehow to graduate from boot camp.
When I was there, our foot lockers also contained ordinary items with unpleasant,
novel, and sinister uses that ex-Marines vividly recall
and about which the movie-going public knows nothing.
