Survey your man card

In 2005 as a newly promoted Gunnery Sergeant, I found myself working at Headquarters Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia. I’m still not sure how it happened. Just prior to this assignment I served as a Rifle Platoon Sergeant in an Infantry Battalion in 29 Palms, CA with two combat deployments to Iraq. I was a real Marine. Next thing I know, I go from desert to green and sit in a cubicle as an Enlisted Assignments Monitor. Monitor is Marine-speak for the cold, heartless, office weenie who decides what duty station to assign to the real Marines. He makes these decisions by rolling a hot set of dice and throwing darts.


Many people assigned to office jobs become soft in both body and mind. Because I was once a real Marine (and with the hopes of parole back to the briar patch upon conclusion of this tour), I PT’ed (conduced physical training) regularly and vigorously. I still carried a dime-sized piece of shrapnel in my left bicep. It was lodged there by an Iraqi grenade while in a gunfight on the Syrian border the year prior. One result of this wound included a reduction in the number of pull-ups I was capable of accomplishing. At the time twenty pull-ups produced the maximum score. Before being wounded I could routinely crank out twenty. Now, I was capable of only doing around eleven.


One of the Marine Corps’ leadership principles states “Know yourself and seek self-improvement”. As a Marine, an infantryman, and a Gunnery Sergeant I was compelled to train until I could again achieve twenty pull-ups. The combat wound could not be a crutch upon which to lean, with what I considered sub-standard performance. As such I worked on pull-ups fervently.


One day at the pull-up bar outside of the office, I was getting after it. There was a female Marine Captain there who was wrapping up a PT session. We introduced ourselves to each other and found we had several mutual acquaintances. I could tell straight away she was a competent, sturdy professional. Before breaking contact, she hopped on the pull-up bar and knocked out twenty dead hang pull-ups. (This occurred several years before the Marine Corps made pull-ups mandatory for female Marines. At the time females performed an event called the Flexed Arm Hang). She dropped down from the bar and headed inside saying “I’ll see you around Gunny”. I responded “Aye Ma’am” while sheepishly struggling to do another less than respectable number of pull-ups.


At the end of the workday, I headed out to the parking lot and randomly fell in step with the same Marine Captain. She asked how my first week at HQMC was going and we made small talk. Incidentally we also happened to be parked next to each other. She throttled her Harley Davidson motorcycle, strapped on her helmet, and said “Catch you later Guns” before driving off.


I buckled into my Dodge Neon with two car seats in the back, looked at myself in the rear-view mirror, and said “You need to survey* your man card”.


Within eighteen months I was once again doing twenty pull-ups and I bought a 1966 F-100 Ford pickup truck.

(*Survey: Taking a broken or unserviceable piece of gear to supply and exchanging it for a serviceable replacement.)

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