Lately I have not been very pleased with the Marine Corps for reasons I don't feel like explaining right now. So if someone was to come up to me and ask me to give them five reasons why the Marine Corps is a great military branch, I would be very hard pressed to come up with five. But I could at least come up with one, there has always been one thing that I have always loved about the Marine Corps and that is the friends you make.
But they are so much more then friends, from the moment you step onto those yellow footprints at Parris Island, South Carolina to begin the hardest three months of your life; you start forming the tightest type of bonds possible with the people around you. For me the girls I went through boot camp with became my sisters, a title they will always have. When I was still at home I never could have imagined how much it would hurt me to leave them when we graduated, on the way home I should have been excited that I was free, but as I sat there the only thing I could think about was how much I missed those sixty three girls that I had spent the last three months with and how much I wanted to go back to them because I did not feel right without them and on my own.
I still remember how sad I was and to this day if I really think about it, I still miss them.
But you cannot dwell on those feelings, the Marine Corps does not allow you too. They give you a week of boot leave, a week to recharge your batteries and become human again before once more you are thrown into a situation where the only thing that keeps you sain are the bonds you form with the people around you. This time it was at MCT. A month of what felt like never ending training, forcing your body once more to go to and past its limits. But once more the people around you became more then just friends, they became family. Became your sisters and brothers, the ones there and suffering through the same things with you, they could truly understand how you felt and what it is was like unlike everyone else around you because they were there.
For me, these people were there with me when it was so cold outside that you felt like your whole body was made of ice, where you could no longer feel your hands or feet and your body had gone past shivering and onto muscle cramps and just down right agony. Where even in these conditions you were ordered to lay on the ground and crawl over ice and through slushy water just because it was 'good training' these people became my family and once more I missed them when we left. Only a month this time but once again I did not want to leave them, the ones I had spent the last twenty four hours of every day with. I wanted to continue to be with them.
But once more, we were separated from each other and you were thrown into a new situation. Your MOS school, where there was barely any stress, hardly any pain and in truth could not be put in the same category as the last two situations you had just made it through. But we still formed the same bond but this time no with the majority of people around you, but a select few.
We may have not been under horrible conditions but I still feel like we built the same bond with the select few people around you that became your friends because you may have not been forced to survive together but you were forced to grow into the title Marine together. Forced to find who you were in this Marine Corps and forced to try to make the best of it.
The friends I have now are the friends that were with me in MOS school, we live together, work together and sometime in the future we may bleed together. We will always be there for each other because we understand each other, better then the people we knew in the civilian world. Because they did not do what we did. Did not suffer as we did. They know us, there is no doubt of that. But there is a part of us they will never truly understand.
They don't understand why we want to deploy.
They don't understand why we can laugh and joke about things that most people would find morbid.
And they don't understand how we will always need each other.
Because they don't understand that we are more then friends, we are family.
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