The Dirty Thirty

The last couple of weeks have been an adventure. By a couple of weeks I mean eternity and by adventure I mean walking through Hell and being served cold coffee. The drinking in the barracks has gone from a few Marine to mostly all because I guess the main theme here is "You know what? Im bored...want to consume a magical liquid that makes bad memories go away?" I hung out with my clinically alcoholic friend who has recieved "The Drunk" award. No seriously it exists, it's a flipper that everyone who wins it signs their name on it when they are wasted and right something "Meaningful."
Scarim came down for the weekend and we had an absolute blast going from one freezing place to another. We were literally the only ones on the beach. Two black guys and a skinny white guy on a beach trying to make the best of their three day weekend. We went to a Bar called Sharks and Scarim asked for a beer
"Can I have a bud light?"
"Sure can I see some ID?"
"Yeah a sprite will work."
I have a great time when I'm with Scarim, he saved my life in boot camp because his ability to make me laugh was effortless.

Now that I have classed up my time is dedicated mostly to sitting around in my room, talking to myself and then maybe studying if I am not tired from talking to myself. What do I learn about in class? I am aloud to say the following
"I Study weather, Enemy and Terrain." Prety cool hah? Thats left open for interpretation. There is one legend about our school house about the "Dirty Thirty." Not so long ago there was a Navy class in the same building as me and the whole class decided to take Top Secret material out of the classroom and copy this material on some flash cards and talk about it outside of class. The next day all thirty classmates got sent to a different MOS no questions asked. Now, feel free to ask me any questions about my class...
Class is hard...but by the time I am done I will have half a semester of Foreign Policy and Communications under my belt. The class deals with a lot of public speaking so naturally I feel well at home. I have become a Squad Leader and I get along with my aquad because they like to hear my jokes so when I ask them to do something they do it without complaints. There are slightly more responsibilities but it's well worth it to be able to tell someone what to do rather than be told what to do. I love class though, It is the only time I feel like I am actually doing something normal...learning. Everything else is pretty gung ho marine corps do or die or get killed not following the rules. BUT as the good lord said
The one lesson in life to learn is to not try at all that way when you dont succeed there is no let down...or was that Homer Simpson?

The saddest day of his life...

Standing outside in 30 degree weather Ssgt. Millard was starting to realize we were all having remorce on our decision to join the military and spend our Friday nights standing at parade rest for an hour.
"I hate dealing with stupid shit. Maybe if we all got our acts together and realized we should clean our rooms correctly and get to accountability on time we wouldn't have to do this. My wife is pissed off at me for missing dinner. It's okay I will let my second marriage fall apart because of the Marine Corps again...it's okay. I get out of the Marine Corps in 7 years 6 months and 5 days. I am just going to drive on base and turn in my I.D. That will be the saddest day of my life. Why? Because the Marine Corps is a family that I am going to say goodbye to. I will always have that Nephew that makes those stupid decisions that get him in trouble. I will always have that niece that gives her self up to other men easily. But what? They are still family." At this point none of us wanted to hear any of this. It had been my longest week in the Marine Corps and the last thing I wanted was to hear a speach from a guy who punished our 53 man and woman platoon. I went up to my room and was so frustrated with how the week had played out I just sat there and stared at the wall for about ten minutes. I could hear my friend Robert Sanders screaming, crying, hitting the walls because he was so angry. If there is anything that is hard in the outside world it is ten times harder in the Marine Corps...that's why it's the Marine Corps. The lonely factor plays a big role here at NMITC (Navy Marine Intelligence Training Center). All we do is go play pool, watch movies, go on the computer, and most people drink alcohol to make those bad memories "go away." There is not much I can say that will show you exactly how life is here. EVERYONE drinks, they try to justify it by saying life is so depressing here it's the only thing that can get them out and away. That's fine, one day they will see the real reason they were drinking never goes away. I feel that this place is draining on my soul, I am getting completely numb to certain and inevitable situations. That's okay, I will go back to Fairfield and people will say "You've changed man" as if that were the only thing to say. People will look down an ally and see kids shooting craps and they say "Times are bad". See what I am getting at? People are outside of this base going to concerts, falling in love, finding God, getting educated, traveling. Everyone is taking a journey and earning their right to be old where as I am here being forced to have wrinkles in my forehead. Alexander Dumas once wrote "All human wisdom is summed up in two words - wait and hope." Now I can not tell you much about our classes but I can tell you that we are professional public speakers. Our first speaches were ice-breakers to tell everyone a little about ourselves. My speach went something to this effect
"On March 6th Craig Schultz went on a date with Jeanne Goodwin and went to a quaint Chinese restuarant in a city by the name of Alemeda. Laughs had been made tears may have been shed but drinks were definitely drunk. Craig Schultz put on his usual performance of being the comedian he was so naturally born as. After dinner Craig asked Jeanne to come back to his place. To make a long story short, Nine Months later they had a son named Spencer. And this is how my life began..."
The class thought I was the funniest thing since Jerry Seinfeld and they all said "Schultz you should have been a stand up comedian." Yes, I should have been. All a comedian does is share his pain with the world through jokes. I guess this is why I have been viewed as "funny" in the Marine Corps. Am I doing fine in Virginia? How did O.J. Simpson do on trial? Well...pretty good actually.

The other side of Kosovo

Guten Tag all,

Life here in Virginia can get quite boring when your waiting for your class to pick up and all you get put on is working parties. HOWEVER! There is a place by which we call Counter Intelligence that goes through many field exercise and the Intelligence Specialists (ME) get to help out this exercise. We wake up at around 0515 and step it out about a mile and a half to the Counter Intel part of the base while wearing our civilian attire. In this exercise I got to play an Iraqi villager in a mock town in Iraq obviously. I can honestly say I have never had so much fun in my entire life. The day was extremely cold though making our exercise somewhat miserable at times. My buddy Sanders and I got to have our own little house. As you can see in the picture below we are proud of our Iraqi home especially my friend steve here who was angry because his girlfriend of 5 years cheated on him. After getting familiarized with our house which was actually pretty nicely set up and we heard stories about people having sexual relations inside the house. Those select stories made us look at the beds in our house in a whole new light. We had little a little Cafe', Jail, Church, Gas Station, Grave Yard, and City Hall all in this little mock village. The coolest part was working with these paid civilian actors for the whole exercise to make it as authentic as possible. I met some of the funniest people in my life doing this. We all talked in an Iraqi accent making everything even more funny than it possibly could have. Whenever we had free time we would BBQ and just stand around telling jokes which I had the privelage of taking a video of. Its kind of hard to understand but there are more videos further down of what we actually did as far as working with the Marines. One of the things I loved to do was go up to a marine and say "Why is Marine looking at Female? Is rude. You know this yes?" I would then tell our Constaple or City Cop and he actually got really into it at one point and was trying to address a Marine and the Marine would not respond. So the Constaple threw his sandwich at the Marine and we both started yelling at him telling him to get out of our country and stop looking at our women. The Marine almost lost his bearing and wanted to do physical harm to us. Sometimes the Cheif of the Navy who ran the whole exercise would come up to me and tell me to do random things like stand in the middle of the road with my AK-47 and just stare at the Marines. I loved saying things like "Go back to America with your Pornography and Rap music." Whenever a Marine came up to to socialize and get information from me I told them my name was Hac Jabar and I was a famous singer in Kosovo. We would do random patrols with the Marines and usually turned into us getting mad at them and telling them to get out of America which was more than fun to act out and made the 12 hour exercise go by so fast. We had some pretty cool scenarios for them for instance we had a News crew come in and Interview the Marines about all the gunshots they have been hearing. Some things were pretty intense and were actually well acted out. They have whole scripts for these exercises so its like being in a play where the Marines are the interactive audience. The most intense thing we did was we have a sheep herder get arrested for carrying hidden weapons in his house and got caught. We acted out him getting dragged to Jail and getting beaten to a pulp. None of the Marines did anything, they just listened. The instructors were very dissappointed in their Marines. But the best part of this all was sitting in the Cafe' waiting for our next plan of attack on the Marines. We had more than enough time to talk to all the different people. It's cool to see how all the people came together here in this fake Iraqi town in this fake Iraqi Cafe'. We learned about all their walks of life and all the mistakes they made and what we should and shouldnt do in order to be what one might call successful. It was a cool experience to hear what everyone had to say. We were all different and were all there for different reasons but it came down to us acting like Iraqis to help Marines. It seemes like we were the ones that needed most of the help considering it was like listening to an episode of Dr. Phil. All I can say is that learning about other peoples lives is a great way to find out about the human ego. Its also interesting to be playing an enemy of a brotherhood I am personally apart of. It makes you look at life in a different way. Sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the mirror and see who is looking through what. THUS...counter intelligence...thus LIFE.

THE Spencer Schultz

p.s. the videos will be up soon...the computer here is half man half bear half pig so it's hard to do much on it. But please taste the new pictures they are quite nice this time of year.

Imagine if you will...

I heard a rumor that after Boot Camp life in the Marine Corps gets so fun that you can not contain yourself and you sneeze lolli pops and poop dough nuts. Well ladies and gentlemen of the civilian world let me be the first to tell you that this is not the case. Marine Combat Training took place in bi polar weathered Camp Pendelton. It must have been a perfect time of the year in that area because the mornings were freezing and the days were extremely hot. The combat instructors were cool but made fun of me a lot for my extremely stylish glasses as shown in the picture below. They asked me if I could see into the future and asked how the weather was going to be in a couple of days. Those jokes never got old and I laughed to the point of tears every time.
We shot so many types of weapons that by the time I was done I did not care that my primary job in the Marine Corps had nothing to do with holding a gun. The coolest thing I got to do was throw a grenade that makes a nice boom. The final test at Marine Combat Training is called the FEX or Field Exercise which consists of hiking 9 1/2 miles to a big patch of dirt where you have to dig a whole and then sleep in it for a day and a half. After that you hike down to a mock
base that resembles the ones we have in Iraq. You do patrols and do what they call QRF or Quick Reaction Force which means when we get attacked by Iraqis we get called to run out there and shoot blanks at them. The night of the FEX it started pouring rain into our tents and we fell asleep in puddles. The next morning all the combat instructors told us we looked miserable and welcomed us to a grunts life. I didnt understand the welcome considering I didnt sign up to be a grunt. Marine Combat Training was by no means fun in any way, shape or form. The only cool thing was that one of my combat instructors was from Vallejo, CA who was a scout sniper and he was a wise man. I felt like Frodo talking to Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. But Marine Combate Training was not the end for me. Soon after I graduated I flew off to Norfolk VA.
Arriving into Norfolk was great because it was freezing cold and I was wearing my California boy attire. The ride to Virginia Beach took about twenty minutes to get to this beautiful base. This base is actually not beautiful at all. It reminds me of the first scene in Silence of the Lambs where Clarice is running through the woods in Quantico. I figure any place that reminds me of Silence of the Lambs can not be a good thing. The living facilities are quite nice though, I would say on par with a small apartment/big dorm room. It's nice to be living in my room however I room with a Lance Corporal who used to be a Sergeant that got demoted because he got in too many fights. I wake up in the middle of the night because his alarm clock goes off and he sleeps right through it because of his experiences in Iraq he has aquired being a heavy sleeper. Lucky me. As you can see I am in a nice part of Virginia however the Virginia females are just not the same as the ones from California. When I introduced myself to my class all the females were laughing and came to talk to me after. They reminded me of a petting zoo, treating me like I was an animal surrounding me like I was fresh meat. I can honestly say I am not attracted to any females in the Marine Corps. The Navy however, has some good looking females but I am under the impression they dont like what I have to offer.
Every morning we march to this place called the NMITC or Navy and Marines Intelligence Training Center which requires a security clearence to get into the building. You get an ID badge that makes you feel special for about a half an hour then you get over it. I have not classed up yet so I don't do anything besides pre classes which are funny because the Sergeants who teach them have the most dry humor in the world. My class which is the Black Team picks up on January 5th. I have only heard that classing up is depressing because classes last all day and you have to study a lot. The good thing about classes though is that it involves a lot of public speaking and you can incorporate a lot of humor into them so I do so whenever I can. We still PT here all the time and learn Martial Arts while the Navy runs around the track about four times and calls it a day.
This place kind of feels like High School sometimes because people actually date here which seems like a complete joke. I have not taken one couple seriously here so they kind of don't like me. I ask them questions like "Are you two lovers?" And they look at me like I am a Nazi asking a Jew for his papers. I hope to have more stories and pictures for you in the future but please stay tuned because I hear there is a twist to next weeks episode.

Spencer "The FUNK lord of USA" Schultz