Summer, 1978. Quantico, Virginia. Marine Corps training during second-class (junior) year cruise. A week at Quantico raiding defenses and eating MRE's was interspersed with a week flying jets at Pensacola, a week driving a ballistic missile sub, and a week in Newport, R.I. at surface warfare school. Quantico was particularly a blast running through the woods shooting blanks and diving into bushes. The Marines loved me because I had a skin head - lost all the hair from having gone to Army Airborne School earlier in the summer. At Airborne School there must have been 300 Air Force Academy cadets there (zoomies) and just a handful of Navy mids. We got the brunt of attention from the Airborne sergeants. A side note - I'm terrified of heights, so when they saddled me up with a parachute and hauled it 300 feet in the air at a giant tower and then dropped me like a G.I. Joe toy, I thought I'd had a heart attack. A few weeks later, after jumping out of several C-124s, C-141s and C-130s, I got my wings and left. For the next year I didn't have one single date (it was the 70s, and here I am with a shaved head!). Back at Quantico I got chewed out by a female Marine captain who did a white glove inspection of my weekend room (let me get this straight - you guys are trying to recruit us into the Corps, and you make us clean a room we're in over the weekend? Are you insane or just "Semper Fi"?). She literally put her white glove on the Venetian blinds and put it under my nose as if to show me the grime. I think I said something like, "keep going, they're still dirty." She didn't have much of a sense of humor. We ended up scouring that room for hours while swearing we'd never go Corps.