I work with a lot of guys who are former Marines, many of them retired from the Marine Corps. As much as I love my Army brothers, once a guy gets out of the Army — he reverts back to his civilian persona pretty quickly and there is usually more civilian in him than Army.

Not so with a Marine. Those guys are still more Marine than civilian for the most part. Most of the former Marines I work with probably still have a pair of BDUs (or ACUs) hanging in their closet, with spit-shined boots sitting on the floor. Most of these guys look like they could put that uniform back on tomorrow and be deployed at a moments notice.

These are my kind of guys, and a big reason I have such a high regard and respect for Marines.

A few recent office events that reinforce that:

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Our VP of Sales (former Captain in the Marine Corp) was telling me about his nephew who recently returned home from a 15 month deployment to Iraq with his Marine unit. It was his second tour, and he was excited about being home and thought that he wouldn’t be going back to Iraq for quite sometime (if at all).

10 months after getting home he received orders that he would be re-deploying back to Iraq.At first his reaction was anger and bitterness, and he stormed out of the house to “go for a drive”. Our VP says that his nephew called him to talk about it while he was out clearing his head.

Our VP was telling me that his nephew’s first reaction was that he didn’t want to go back, and that he was mad about a third tour. However, 1 day later, our VP talked to his nephew again, who was now eager and ready to go. He said that the more he thought about it, that this was exactly what he had enlisted to do — go to war with his fellow Marines.

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Our offices are on the second floor of our 2 story office building, and my space of the building (large open cube farm) looks out onto the front parking lot through a full wall of large windows. Some of our field engineers (mostly former Army and Navy guys) notified building management that the large US Flag on the flag pole in front of the building was tattered and needing repair.

Last week around lunch time, we noticed that someone from building maintenance was taking down the old Flag and getting ready to put up a new one. We were all watching from the windows, making sure that proper flag etiquette was followed in accordance with the US Flag Code (it was).

As the old flag was being lowered, one of our Program Managers (a former helicopter pilot in the Marine Corps) stopped his car in the middle of the parking lot, got out of his car and stood there at attention until the old Flag was removed and the new Flag was fully raised.

That kind of respect for the Flag is a rare — unless you’re a Marine.

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An email exchange between one of our San Diego employees (Engineering manager) and the same Program Manager mentioned above:

SD Employee: Out of Office Notice: Leaving for Austin tomorrow, returning next week.

Former Marine(who is the program manager for that employee, and was unaware that the employee was coming to Austin): What for?

SD Employee: Managers Training Boot Camp.

Former Marine: YARCH!!! Left, Right, Left, Right……There, I saved you the trip. Now get back to work.

If you don’t know why that’s funny coming from a still hard-charging former Marine, I probably can’t explain it to you. But trust me, it is.

Posted by Robbie Cooper on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 | Trackback |