This guide serves as a cheat sheet of sorts, bulging with tips and tricks proven to impress, astound, and appease drill instructors depot-wide and rocket you to positions of leadership and privilege like no other. It targets those in the civilian sector ballsy enough to step on my yellow footprints. Lastly, this guide is by no means exhaustive. It contains enough of what you need to know to turn a thirteen week, sand-in-your-crack spit-in-your-face training cycle into hedonist bliss.

1. The words “I” and “we” and “they” are no longer in your vocabulary. It’s now “this recruit” and “these recruits” and “those recruits.” Third person speech and third person only. Everyone else will be referred to by full title and rank. For example, I am drill instructor Gunnery Sergeant Kohler. Not “you.” “You” sounds like “ewe” and that’s a female sheep. You won’t make that mistake twice.
2. You will be at the position of attention whenever you speak to a drill instructor. The position of attention is the basic military position. This indicates that you are alert and ready for instructions. Bring your left heel against the right. Turn you feet out equally to form an angle of 45 degrees. Keep you heels on the same line and touching. Your legs will be straight but not stiff at the knees. Keep your hips and shoulders level and your chest lifted. Your arms will hang naturally, thumbs along the trouser seams, palms facing inward toward your legs, and fingers joined in their natural curl. Keep your head and body erect. Look straight ahead. Keep your mouth closed and your chin pulled in slightly. Stand still and do not talk.
3. And I do mean stand still. Don’t eyeball the area. Don’t wiggle your fingers. Don’t play with your uniform. Don’t scratch your face. Don’t brush the sand flea off you ear. Don’t move.
4. Your bed is now called a rack. The bathroom is now the head. The floor is now the deck. The wall is now the bulkhead. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are now morning chow, noon chow, and evening chow. Ask the drill instructor just once if “I can use the bathroom before dinner” and see what happens.
5. “Aye sir” “Yes sir” and “No sir” will be your only responses unless more is demanded.

What’s that? You didn’t say anything. Say aye sir!

6. When a drill instructor says something, you say something. And you will say it with volume and intensity. When in doubt, scream “aye sir!” as loud as you can.
7. Everything you say and do will be loud and intense. When you scream, there will be spit flying out of your mouth and veins bulging out of your neck. If you want to give the drill instructor a kiss, simply talk soft and sweet and he’ll hook you up.
8. You will render the proper greeting of the day whenever you’re near a drill instructor. A proper greeting is “Good morning- afternoon- evening- sir!” As a general rule of thumb, if you can see him, you should scream. I don’t care if he’s low crawling across the parade deck in his underwear. Just do it.

Stop damn moving around! Now scream aye sir!

9. Run everywhere you go. Move with a sense of purpose, like the mission you’re about to accomplish is the most important thing in your life. I don’t care if you’re restocking shit paper. That shit paper will get 100% of your attention and energy and will be the most squared away shit paper in the company.
10. Volunteer for everything. When the drill instructor says he needs recruits, your ass will be flying through the air screaming “This recruit sir!” at the top of your lungs.
    Volunteering will get you in good with the drill instructors, so when a real shitty job comes along they probably won’t pick you. But then again, they probably will, just because they know you can get the job done without screwing it up.

When I say something you say something! Open your disgusting mouth!

11. You will not offer excuses for anything. If you break your leg halfway through the obstacle course, don’t point at the wound and whine when the drill instructor calls you a pussy and screams at you to finish. Just spring to your feet, ignore the blinding pain and jagged edges of ruined flesh, and pray the Corpsman stops things before a bone fragment punctures your femoral artery and you bleed out like a Christmas dinner hog.

So we’ve got a volume problem, huh? We don’t wanna scream? Open your fat face!

12. Regardless of your position in formation, the squad bay, or on the PT field, you are being watched by the drill instructor. There is nothing you can get away with that hasn’t already been tried by thousands of recruits before you. If you’re on the opposite side of formation and decide to dig in your filthy face, you—

    I said stop g**damn moving! I just finished saying you’re always being watched and you wanna scratch? Well, you ain’t done! Keep scratching! Make it feel good!

    You’re going to be caught. You’re not sneaky, and the drill instructor will slay you at his earliest convenience if you try some dumb bullshit.

13. Accept the following as fact and recruit training will be that much easier:
    • Your girlfriend is cheating on you. Probably with your “best friend” who you told to “look after her” while you were gone.
    • No one actually cares you’re in boot camp. While you sweat, strain, train, and tremble through weeks of rigorous recruit hell, they’re shopping, going to movies, getting laid, and drinking beer whenever the hell they want. Because they can.
    • You will experience the entire spectrum of human emotion, often in as short a time as a two hour combat endurance course, for example. These emotions include, but are not limited to, debilitating hopelessness, mind numbing apathy, or the intense desire to end your own life while sand encrusted snot strings cling stubbornly to your cheeks as you scream for water, ice cold delicious water, and reach out desperately for the nearest drill instructor who is gulping greedily from his Camelbak drinking tube, to please please help me for the love of God I can’t drag him any further and he kicks stinging, gritty sand in your face because it’s the first time since training day one you’ve opened your dirty man-pleaser and screamed.
    • You will never be good enough to be in my beloved Corps. But that doesn’t mean stop trying, pig.
14. Don’t take anything personal. When the drill instructor calls you a weak, nasty piece of garbage who has no business in Marine Corps recruit training, shrug it off (emotionally, of course), strive to be better and carry on smartly. Take no offense when the drill instructor kindly enquires about your family, then promptly and with intense conviction states his tag team plans for your mother and sister, but only after he beats your dad’s ass and kicks your little brother in the nuts. But if you find the steely gaze of a drill instructor upon you, with his cold, calculating eyes, always watching, always judging, sizing you up for the next slaughter, take heed. You see, he truly, deeply, and completely hates you with every fiber of his being because you’ve taken him far, far away from the Marines he loves, the Marines he’s trained and fought alongside. You’ve replaced them, instead, with your eighteen years of attitude, immaturity, disrespect, lawlessness, jackassery, and undisciplined wa—

And you’re still f**king moving around, you disgusting, brainless bitch!

There’s a certain badassery that comes with owning a motorcycle. Think Peter Fonda in Easy Rider and Marlon Brando in The Wild One. All these years I’ve been pedaling my ass across the country I never fully understood my throttle twisting friends… until recently.

In early June I purchased my very first motorcycle. It was a fluke, really. I saw the bike for sale on the side of the road on the way to see another bike. The deal was too good to pass up and before I knew it I was popping clutches and wobbling around on my new bike like a baby giraffe. Riding a motorcycle is addictive.

Within a couple weeks, after I jumped through enough hoops for the motorcycle permit, license, and registration, my buddy, Dave, and I took a two hour trip south to Tybee Island, GA. It was successful, more or less, acquiring a pair of parking tickets and getting caught in a torrential downpour in the process.

But alas, all good things must come to an end. Not so much an end really, but a damn screeching halt for the time being.

You see, today, I got hit by a truck. A Dodge Dakota, to be exact. Black. I didn’t see much else because my body was busy spinning wildly through the air after impact. But I saw the aftermath. The lower left portion of his windshield was smashed in from my right handlebar. From there, running the length of the driver’s side door and partially to the truck bed, was a ragged tear from whatever it was on my bike that raked the side.

I was trying to exit left from the Wal-Mart parking lot. Traffic was heavy, averaging 45-55 mph, and four vehicles were stacked up in the turn lane leaving the main road. I had been sitting there a few minutes when the driver of the foremost vehicle waved me past. I popped the clutch, grabbed some throttle, zipped into the turn lane and immediately merged… just as the Dodge Dakota emerged from alongside the line of cars waiting to turn into the parking lot. I got clipped.

I remember seeing a flash of black right before impact. There was no tires squealing or horns honking. Silence. Blue sky. Clouds. I relaxed as the truck hit me. It spun my body counter clockwise off the bike and onto my back as the bike skidded about fifty feet down the road, throwing sparks and carving asphalt to a shuddering halt.

Eventually I’ll stop sliding and then see what’s broken. The sky was as blue as ever. Clear silence. I rolled to a stop.

I’m okay. I think I’m okay. I need to move something. People will think I’m hurt if I don’t move. I folded my hands across my chest. Took a few breathes. Took inventory. The clouds did nothing to mask the heat beating down on my body. Damn those clouds.

Get up. Get on your feet. I sat upright and stood without effort. There was a thickness in my left side, a sluggishness, and a burning in my right and along my back. No sharp pains though. A good sign. Probably nothing broken. It’s been a few years but I know road rash. A little something mountain biking has shown me a time or two.

I folded my arms across my chest and stared at the broken parts and pieces of my motorcycle littering the street. Shit. This is gonna cost a few bucks to fix. A fire truck arrived. One cop. Two. Then three. An ambulance. I decline medical attention. I felt fine. Except the burn. And why isn’t my left arm working the way it should?

A man ran to me and said his wife saw it all. She saw my head bounce off the pavement. I don’t remember that happening. But I wasn’t in the position to disagree. I’m fine.

After forty-five minutes of paperwork and storytelling, I nursed the bike ten miles home with mashed parts squealing and butthole puckered the entire way. And then I bought some beer. And watched a movie. And tried not to bleed on my new couch, which wasn’t entirely successful.

I’m alive.

The change is, indeed, forever. Even after only one month, most recruits have developed the necessary survival skills to endure recruit training. It’s the first step of many which distances the future Marine from his prior civilian associations. He’ll speak differently, walk differently, socialize differently, and eyeball his once familiar civilian world with suspicion and mild disgust while he wonders how he could have ever been so nasty.

But the lure of hometown friends and hometown habits are strong. Within days of being home after boot camp he’ll surely skip a shave or two, maybe sag his pants a bit lower, or even fall victim to the same downward spiral he enlisted to escape from. Luckily, thankfully, time off after boot camp is short and the young Marine is soon whisked away from hometown temptations for further combat training and his occupational school.

He’ll miss home. He’ll miss his civilian friends. He’ll miss his girl. But training a hard-core killer is no relaxing task, and as the tempo picks up he realizes he doesn’t think about home so much as he used to. He’s making new friends now, the kind who understand his language and miss home too, sometimes, when there’s down time. He’s making the kind of friends who struggle beside him, sweat and hurt and sometimes bleed beside him, and those are the ties that bind beyond his senior-year-prank-run-from-the-cops or any high school house party.

He’ll visit home again before his first deployment overseas. Maybe it’s Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Okinawa. It matters little. He’s leaving because his country calls and no one back home can seem to understand. Why does he want to go? Why can’t he just do his job here, where it’s safe? But those questions fall on increasingly quieter ears, because the distance between who he is now, a young Marine, a kid really, facing life or death, and who he was as a civilian leech of society, is getting wider by the day. For some, that distance is already too great to turn back.

Every deployment changes a Marine. It makes him remember it’s a big, Marine Corps green world out there, and life back home never so much as hiccuped while he was gone. He may have been safely behind a computer screen his entire deployment, crunching numbers and churning out roster after report, or he could have had his boots on the deck, patrolling and dodging bullets and seeing death all around him.

It matters little, because when he returns home again no one will understand. He tries at first, doing his best to describe what a face looks like after it’s been peeled from a skull, but soon realizes their ears are quieting too. He stops. And immediately misses his Marine friends, buddies they’re called, because they were there too and understand. They don’t need the details because every time they close their eyes they see that face peeled off a dirty white skull in a bloody grin.

It’s time to go now, where loyalty, brotherhood, dedication, and devotion aren’t just punchlines and actually mean something to the men who use them. The man he was is in the rear view mirror, shrinking to unrecognizable points. There’s a twinge of sadness in his heart for the things he leaves behind, the things he had known for so many misdirected years.

But, oddly, he begins to smile. Because soon he’ll truly be home.

I’ll try to keep it short.

1. If you’re reading this post via my email notifications, you can now effectively manage your subscription preferences (where once you were subject to a forced mailing list with no way out). This includes selecting or opting out of any category you wish, as well as unsubscribing altogether. This functionality had never worked in previous notifications. Additionally, you can subscribe directly to email notifications on your own if you aren’t already.

2. ShareThis has been added. This enables you to share any post you like via email or social web service without leaving the page. No account registration is needed to use this service.

3. New photo gallery software is installed and running in a new location on the site. I’ve got a couple albums uploaded for 2008 to include plenty of pics of my platoon of recruits.

4. There’s a new category called Gallery which I’ve assigned to posts with a significant amount of pictures. ‘On the lighter side’ is one in particular, and those posts have links leading to their appropriate mini galleries in the miscellaneous album. All my Found porn posts have a gallery of their own where you can find a collection of all the images.

I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on the code that makes up jaymekohler.com. You may even have seen some different themes pop up a few weeks back, but I decided to keep the one I built from scratch.

The five year anniversary of jaymekohler.com is May 23rd, and I’m debating whether or not to compile my posts into something printed for distribution. Did I say write a book? No, so don’t get crazy over this thing. I’ll try to dig up some old screen shots for embarrassment’s sake.

I’ve got almost twenty new posts in draft status waiting for publication. This proves I’ve been accomplishing something in the past two months, just not being very timely about it. Being a new DI keeps me plenty busy, averaging fourteen hours a day on the recruits and 4-5 hours a sleep a night. My weight loss has exceeded twenty-five pounds and I have cheek bones again! I didn’t realize how grotesquely fat I was until I started losing it. More details on the physical toll of drill instructor duty to come (yet another unfinished post).

My birthday/Cinco de Mayo was a complete bust. I worked all damn day and didn’t even get so much as a Corona. But instead of rambling on like some sad, sorry bastard letting it drag me down, I decided to recognize all the ways I’m [Mexican] brown on the inside. It wasn’t too difficult.

Keep your chins up, jaymekohler.com readers (be it collective or individual). I’m not dead yet.

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Platoon knowledge and discipline are my focus. I’m pleased the recruits feel I teach knowledge well and I’m fair. Unfortunately, I’m lacking in the discipline department. I need to start slaying more bodies. I should be hated, feared, unapproachable, evil.

My incredible sarcasm is also biting me in the ass. Recruits find my sarcasm hilarious even though it’s delivered to the sides of faces in a shower of spit. So when they giggle or smile from something I say to another recruit, it leaves me no choice but to jump up their asses for it. It’s only making my job more difficult.

If I wasn’t a Drill Instructor and not thinking as a Drill Instructor does, I would consider a vast majority of these comments as positive reflections of my performance thus far. Unfortunately, I am a Drill Instructor. Despite not necessarily practicing the things that are being pounded into my head every day, I know what I should and shouldn’t be doing to be a better Drill Instructor. Summation: I’m still garbage.

So, in their original text with unedited punctuation, spelling, and grammar, I give you every recruit comment. Please direct questions through the comment board.

He’s new, but from what I’ve seen he’s knows his stuff, and has been around knows his knowledge, were lucky to have him.

Should be called a discipline instructor because he doesn’t miss a thing.

Even though some recruits still can’t grasp the meaning of don’t move, he still manages to teach us knowledge that will get us through boot camp. He is also intense yet flips the knowledge we need to succeed which is what I like the most.

Good drill instructor.

Doesn’t really get on the nerves of many of these recruits, but can when we don’t sound off or stupid things like that.

A kill hat with a good sense of humor but sturn and strict on timing and will let you know and everyone when your wrong.

Tough as well as smart. It’s hard to get anything past him when he’s on patrol. He’s very quiet too so I try to be as disciplined as possible when I think he’s near. Even when no ones around it feels like he’s near.

We still cannot understand him on occasion.

Corrects and screams at those who jack everything up so they don’t do it again. He’ll catch a recruit moving a finger at attention. Good discipline.

Great guy annoying as hell when he wants to be. Great at making me lose bearing.

Really good with knowledge he breaks it down and helps get our ditties sharp and crisp.

Brings motivation and energy.

I just see him as a diddy teacher.

New to the platoon but has kicked everyone’s ass on quarter deck. (Good thing)

Methods of teaching make it easy to remember what a recruit needs to know. He knows his recruits and specifically targets ones who need help.

A good Drill instructor he know how to make us laugh at what he calls us and at the same time pushes us to the next thing.

A great DI he is very helpful at teaching us the knowledge he really helped me learn it before it was time for the test with his classes.

The shit.

Always watching every movement.

He is also a very good instructor he makes sure that you specifics are correct.

Also likes to give us knowledge which this recruit enjoys. Also this recruit like the speed of his countdowns just right not too fast or too slow.

Nice and fair. No special treatment. Quarter deck’s everyone for the same reasons. Good with teaching knowledge.

Hard ass. Enjoys pitting recruits. Does his job well.

He cool and all but he gotta stop showering me wit spit.

Has a sharp eye for recruits that are doing the wrong thing on line and in formation.

Good Di helps out a lot and tries to teach platoon in a good way. Glad to have GySgt Kohler as a DI.

He was weak when he first came, but now he’s getting demanding, recruits are getting scared of him now.

Teaches knowledge great, works hard and diligently. Wants this platoon to succeed.

Needs more experience. Doesn’t always know what he’s doing.

GySgt Kohler is good, he cracks me up all the time, because somethings you can’t help but smile at the comments he makes to the recruits are sometime hilarious. He does a good job of helping keep the platoon inline but he is not excessive with his discipline. He does his job very well.

Discipline enforcer best described. Catches about everything, fair consequences.

Seems as if he just runs around a lot kicking random knowledge out when ever he doesn’t have us playing games.

Teaches us knowledge the best and has a way of pounding it into our heads and breaking it down barney style for the recruits.

He is a good DI and he is always teaching us knowledge, he also knows when to make a good joke.
Excellent instructor with knowledge, fair, keeps to the motto: time and place for everything, teaches us ditties we need to know at a pace even an idiot can learn, good at helping you speak up.

Sees everything. Sometimes focusing on discipline, but more often than not, on completing the task at hand in order to move to the next.

Firm and consistent. Loves his job.

Fine.

He is cool. He helps us out a lot with our ditties. I like the way he teaches. I hope he sticks around.

He is good to go, no complaints, gets his point across and is fair all the way around.

He seems to want to teach us knowledge he passes and pushes. He is also fair and pitts the people who need 2 get pitted. I happen 2 be one of them but I got pitted for a right reason. I think DI Gunnery Sgt Kohler earns and gets a lot of respect from the platoon.

Good at going over knowledge. Remember the most information when he does it.

Seems a little out of it on the IT side of things until he starts writing in his book. Dangerous to recruits because he’s hilarious and prone to making them smile when it could mean the quarterdeck.

Don’t really know much about him yet. But he seems to know his shit.

It always seems like he has eyes in the back of his head that catch the slightest mistake.

What I like about Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Kohler is just the way he is. When it’s time to relax, it’s time to relax, when it’s time to train, it’s time to train, and he trains very well. Awesome leader.

Very good di. Its very well he knows when to quit but also how far to push recruits to the limit.

Very good according to this recruit. He lets us get head calls almost all the time. Very good at being serious and helpful with knowledge.

Our typical cousin. He gives a lot of information… To be continued…

Very comical and critical this recruit thinks he takes an excealent approach to being a drill instructor.

He good at what he does he knows how to push people to get it right cuz if you don’t ur getting quarter decked or seeing the pit.

A good motivator he helped push me threw the confidence course.

Can tell he’s new – but catching on for sure!

Does a good job at teaching knowledge and making sure recruits are doing what they are supposed to be doing. Catches (or at least verbalizes that he catches) recruits moving on line/scratching/etc. Best of all DI’s.

Is great at teaching ditties cause sum of the thing he puts with them makes you remember them.

He’s cool he doesn’t realy make us work physically to scream I do cause I respect him.

Good instructor makes knowledge easy to learn!

Great personality but can tell he is a new green belt full of helpful knowledge from hands on experience from his Marine Corps lifestyle and career.

Pertickler about quality willing to go the extra mile to see to it that we become the best Marines possable.

Brings motivation and energy.

But seriously, it’s time to shitcan your tired, antiquated tube television and jump on the HD bandwagon. The neighbors are starting to talk. Nobody wants to make it a Blockbuster Night if it means squinting at some washed out, rabbit eared, 19″ monstrosity that generates more heat than the microwave.

I’m here to help you wade through all that technical jargon, make sense of the things that really matter when choosing the right HDTV (hint: it’s in the eye of the beholder), and help you not sound like a jackass when you finally walk into Best Buy to drop some Benjamins. More than a few Benjamins, in fact. Somewhere between four and thirty-two of them, Mr. Moneybags.

There are really only two determining factors when buying an HDTV:

1. The distance from your couch to your (new HD)TV.
2. Your budget.

Your viewing distance will determine what resolution (i.e. 720p or 1080i/p) your eyes will even be able to detect.

Have you ever been admiring all the shiny things in the electronics department and noticed the HDTVs don’t look all that “high def?” In fact, they probably look like crap! Aside from typical TV snow that happens from bad coaxial connections (a common culprit when many display televisions are spliced off the same cable source in stores), think back and remember about how far you were standing from aforementioned HDTV when you remarked on it’s picture quality (or lack thereof). You were probably only standing a few feet away, right? Staring intensely at every pixel, trying to get a grasp of all the detail the commercials have been promising?

News flash, dumbass. You were standing too damn close. It’s okay though. I made the same mistake. Keep reading. That’s why it’s taken me this long to buy an HDTV.

Your first step is to measure the distance from where you plan on having your HDTV to the couch (or chair or jacuzzi or whatever the hell). Now take a look at the chart below and find that distance on the vertical axis.

Click to enlarge

Your next step is to move horizontally along that line until you intersect with your desired HDTV size. You have one in mind, right? I know you do. Where does that point intersect? (The only two curves you need to worry about are light blue (720p HDTV) and green (1080i/p HDTV).)

I’ll use my own requirements as an example. The distance from my entertainment center to my chair is 10 feet. My budget was $1000 and I had my heart set on a 42″ 1080p HDTV. So, with that information. I moved up the vertical axis to 10 then across the horizontal axis until it intersected with my desired screen size. Once I found that point, I could then determine what resolution I would need by seeing which resolution fell below that point. Hence, a 42″ HDTV being viewed at 10 feet could either have 720p or 1080i/p resolution.

But what’s the big difference between the two resolutions, you ask? A 1080i/p HDTV is about $300 more than it’s 720p counterpart of equal size, which could be better spent on Coronas or lap dances if you ask me. To make a long story not even remotely shorter, I settled on a Westinghouse 32″ 720p LCD. It was a size familiar to my old 36″ tube TV and saved me almost $500 over a 42″.

The key point to remember is if your intersecting point falls above the light blue 720p curve, then 720p is all the resolution detail you need! Your eyes won’t be able tell the difference. But if your intersecting point falls between the light blue 720p curve and the 1080i/p green curve (meaning it’s below 720p but above 1080i/p), you need to buy an HDTV with 1080i/p resolution.

Please direct questions through post comments.

References
1. Maxing Out Resolution: Optimize Your Seating Distance for Your Screen Size and Resolution
2. 1080p charted: Viewing distance to screen size

You have to hope this study is flawed, but the evidence seems irrefutable. Several months ago, scientists at Europe’s annual human reproduction conference suggested that the results of a recent analysis revealed the presence of female hormones in beer, and suggested that men should take a look at their beer consumption. The theory is that drinking beer makes men turn into women.

To test the theory, 100 men were each fed six pints of beer within a one-hour period. It was then observed that 100 percent of the men gained weight, talked excessively without making sense, became overly emotional, couldn’t drive, failed to think rationally, argued over nothing, had to sit down while urinating, couldn’t perform sexually, and refused to apologize when wrong.

No further testing is planned.

Upon closer review, I realized the entire ad was adorned in miniature nut sacks! And not just any nut sacks, but musicians, artists, and sportsmen!

Who in the hell is this campaign targeting?