canklecat

Both, but mainly Marines. I served with both as a Navy Corpsman. They're all nuts, and I mean that as a compliment. Best duty I ever had in service.

One of my friends who's 20 years younger served in the USMC and was badly injured in training -- which is statistically how most service connected injuries occur. Mine was minor, I fell during rappelling and tightline training, but only fell about 20 feet onto soft sand. He was knocked off an APC and run over by another vehicle during a high speed maneuver training session. He still jokes around with that "Pain is weakness leaving the body" line, but I can see him struggling after a long day on the job. He's co-owner of a local micro-brewery and tap room, and there's a lot of manual labor involved. He's a great guy. I always loved the grunts.

When I was assigned to the Marines as a corpsman, we went through a second boot camp, a five week mini-Marine style boot camp lite. Not nearly as rough as real Marine boot camp. We had liberty most days and weekends, and being married I got to go home most evenings. But the physical fitness requirements were pretty much the same.

Our PT instructor was SSGT Munden, who's remembered both fondly and with a bit of respectful fear by many corpsmen who trained under him at Pendleton in the 1970s-'80s. He was the real deal, the sole survivor of an ambush that wiped out his rifle squad when he was only 19 or so. He seemed so much older than we when I met him, but it turns out he was only in his late 20s. He'd holler stuff like "Pain is beautiful, bud!" and "If it doesn't hurt, you're doing it wrong!" To this day I hear his voice in my head when I'm grinding up hills on my bike. He died last year, not yet 70, much too young for one of the genuine tough guys.

We had a group of four guys, all Navy Corpsmen, who were en route to SEALs training. They'd just completed BUDs training, and thought the Marine-lite five week session would be a vacation before they got to the real SEALs grueling course at Coronado. But a couple of them admitted the Marine PT training was tougher than they'd expected.

We had a friendly rivalry with the SEAL trainees, and one of 'em taught me a trick for maximizing our pullups. The mandatory minimum was 20. He and I could do 50 or more. But the trick was to subtly use momentum, similar to a gymnast on the bars. We'd swing very slightly at the bottom of the cycle, and immediately go up again. If you hang too long before the next pullup the biceps and forearms get that familiar burn and sudden failure. The technique was actually terrible on the joints but we were teenagers and didn't care. SSGT Munden finally made us quit doing that and wouldn't allow it during our final PT test. We were struggling to do 20 proper pullups.

Nowadays in my physical therapy sessions, I do it the right way. Full range of motion, going for quality of each rep rather than quantity, working the muscles rather than the joints. I was hit by a car last year while I was riding my bike, and it broke and dislocated my shoulder and aggravated an old neck injury from a 2001 car wreck. After 6 weeks in PT, gradually working up from resistance bands to weight machines with 50 lbs, I finally did a pullup. As in one pullup. At age 61, I'll take it. That's a start.