My son's friend in the Marines has already served in Operaqtion Iraqi Freedom with the 5/3 from Camp Pendleton. They were getting ready to deploy back to the shithole as he calles it. But now as of today have new orders! They are to recieve mountain combat & survival training. Then a stint at 29 Palms for some fun. He thinks they will be heading for Pakistan or some other high altitude Stan of somekind. "All of those places are mega shitholes and will be hard to operate there. At least half of the Hogies in Baghdad hated Saddam. In the Assramistans of the world, these fucks LOVE Osama and that will be a huge obstical to overcome".

What do you guys think?

What's he gonna be doing at 29 stumps?  Soaking up some rays?  Damn Hollywood Marines. [:D]

Is he going to Bridgeport MWTC for the mountain training?

North Korea has some VERY high mountain ranges FWIW. I have been on the border of China and N. Korea, where I was at was extremely rugged, and off to the distance you could see the ranges of N.Korea, they were even bigger!

Bridgeport was a lot of fun, did the Navy Wilderness Medicine COurse and the Battalion Level Summer Mountain Operation Course. One of my friends took the rope suspension technician class and a few guys I knew took thw Assault Climbers Course. Hope he's in really good shape. It initially hurts just walking to the chow hall(Sea Level Camp Lejeune to 6700 foot base camp is no joke) First day they PT's us til we nearly dropped. And that wasn't hard to do considering we had only 7 hours to acclimate to the altitude,(Read that we had not yet acclimated.)

Hump, hump, hump, hump with weapons, packs and extra rope and medical gear(SKEDs). I was attached to a Weapons Co last year and we humped our .50s everywhere we went. The 81mm mortar and Javelin platoons got MULES! We didn't get no mules. We had three engineers go down from hypothermia in August.(!) It gets cold there early.

If he's going now I assume he's doing the winter package. The survival course is a no shitter, if he's slated to do that he'll lose more than a few pounds.

The worst part?

Open bay shitters.


"You done with that shit paper?"


Dig it.
[url]http://www.mwtc.usmc.mil/[/url]

Korea was the first place that popped into my mind.  In any case, looks like most of our trouble spots for the forseeable future will be in mountainous countries.  I imagine we'll not be done in Afghanistan for some time.

I went to Mountain Warfare at Bridgeport back in '89. The one thing I most fondly recall about being there (it's also known as "Pickle Meadow") was freezing my DICK off. It gets very, very cold up there. Anybody else who attended remember the instructor's little trick with the pretty bunny?

My dad used to be the senior Enlisted Marine at Bridgeport from 1962 to 1964.
We lived in Bridgeport, used to fish at Lake Topaz and on the Walker River.
He always wanted to retire to Bridgeport.

Yeah, my roomate has three pet rabbits and got into an argument with the Sgt doing the "bunny lesson" the next day at the rope corral. The Sgt showed us how to calm the [s]meal[/s] rabbit, then did the stick on the ground under his foot method. When he brought the rabbit's ass over it's head, it didn't work, so he jammed the rabbit between his thighs and started twisting the head. That worked just fine.

My platoon commander sucked the eye out of the dead rabbit's skull, the mortar platoon commander got the other one.

Good thing you guys weren't using gerbils. [;D]