Don’t call me ‘POG’: The push to end the Corps’ most damaging divide
Gunnery Sgt. Hector Vicente has 20 years of Marine Corps experiences under his belt, but what he heard one morning from his junior Marines made him wonder how well he knew the Corps.
While at the barracks aboard Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, one weekend, a group of his junior Marines from the entry-level school for personnel administration stopped by on their way to the beach.
“Gunny, we were out last night at Buffalo Wild Wings and some Marines walked by and called us ‘boots’ and ‘POGs,'” one private first class said. “Why would a fellow Marine do that?”
It wasn’t the name-calling itself that bothered Vicente, who, as a career support Marine, knew that the terms were often thrown around within the Corps as part of its coarse culture. It was the fact that one group of Marines was trying to belittle and humiliate another group of Marines in public.
“It truly saddens me when a group of PFCs ask me why they would be called ‘boot’ and ‘POG’ while they are dining at a restaurant,” Vicente said. “That act to me is truly disheartening.”
The service rivalry between infantry Marines, or grunts, and support Marines, sometimes called “persons other than grunts” or “POGs” for short, is a ubiquitous part of Marine Corps culture. It’s fed by grunts’ pride in their elite training and dangerous work — and the perception that support Marines enjoy better living conditions and easier work, particularly when deployed to combat zones.
Many Marines take the name calling and friendly jabs in stride, but some worry that the increased popularity of social media over the last few years has given rise to an uglier and less well-intentioned form of mockery that is especially hard to navigate for the most junior Marines.
And while grunts and support Marines have often served side-by-side in equal danger outside the wire over the last 13 years of combat operations, earning mutual respect, the dynamics of rivalry could change as the Marine Corps enters what may be a period of peacetime. Some are calling on Marine unit leaders to address the rift before it intensifies.
Combat-tested
When Master Sgt. Mario Locklear left the wire during his 2010 and 2012 deployments to Afghanistan, the line between his work and that of the infantrymen he supported quickly became blurred. Then a motor transport Marine with Combat Logistics Battalion 6 out of Camp Lejeune, Locklear would sometimes stay awake for 60 hours at a stretch during long convoys, constantly on alert for rocket attacks or the improvised explosive devices that could detonate at any moment under the vehicles.
His unit sustained some kind of attack on every convoy they made and once his vehicle was hit by three rocket-propelled grenades in an ambush that turned into a firefight.
“When you’re out there, time goes by really quick. You watch the sunset two days in a row and you don’t even realize it,” Locklear, now an operations chief for Marine Wing Support Squadron 272 out of New River Air Station, said. “You have the anxiety of getting shot at or blown up any moment.”
After those experiences, he said, the “POG” moniker didn’t seem to stick for his guys anymore.
“When motor-T started running just like the grunts were, people opened their eyes to that and said, ‘hey, motor-T is just as dangerous as infantry,'” Locklear recalled. Over the course of the wars, he said, occasionally supply Marines, female engagement teams and even admin Marines and cooks would find themselves patrolling with grunts outside the wire.
“Before the war, you didn’t see it, it didn’t happen,” Locklear said. “Now people take a different view of it. You’ve still got the young, immature and naive infantryman, saying ‘We’re tougher than everybody else.’ The more senior guys who are tougher and have seen it, say, ‘Motor-T was right there with us.'”
Support Marines have also received their share of valor decorations over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two recipients of the Navy Cross in the last decade, Gunnery St. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez and Cpl. Todd Corbin, have hailed from motor-T, while one, Capt. Ademola Fabayo, was a combat engineer officer.
“In our student lounge, we have several citations of [admin Marines] who have Navy Commendation Medals with ‘V,’ Bronze Stars,” Vicente said. “People in our MOS who have performed in combat.”
Even in combat zones, a bright line still exists between grunts and most support Marines. While infantrymen often remained outside the wire, operating from austere outposts with few comforts, support Marines would return to larger bases equipped with showers, dining halls and other amenities.
“‘Oh, gotta head back to Leatherneck, gotta get some good chow and a shower,’ grunts would catcall,” Marine Capt. Jeff Clement, a logistics officer, writes in his recent book “The Lieutenant Don’t Know.” “As if a hot shower at the end of the convoy somehow reduced the risk we faced … or erased the memories of friends loaded on medevac helicopters.”
It all comes down to respect, said retired Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Caravalho, a former motor-T operator who earned a Purple Heart during a 2010 deployment to Afghanistan when his convoy was ambushed.
“We have to respect what infantry does. They’re the ones at the front lines … they’re proud of it and that’s how it should be,” he said. “But you have to be proud of your big trucks too. Mutual respect on both sides.”
The needs of the Corps
Gunnery Sgt. Tommy Smith, who worked as a recruiter in Texas for a three-year period that ended last year, said about 85 percent of prospective recruits who walked into his office had dreams of becoming a Marine grunt that were fueled by the portrayal of infantry Marines they’d seen in movies and television and a “gun club” mentality common to the state. Smith’s job, he said, was to reconcile these dreams with the reality.
“We only got three quotas in the quarter for infantry, and I’ve got six guys who want to be infantrymen,” he recalled. “So I’ve got to persuade them to go to a satisfactory [military occupational specialty].”
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, some, like former Marine Cpl. Mark Finelli, famously left high-paying corporate jobs in order to enlist in the infantry out of a desire to serve and defend the nation. Anecdotally, that same impulse — and the elite reputation of Marine Corps grunts — keeps combat arms jobs in high demand more than a decade later.
Though part of the elite culture of the infantry is the notion that other Marines aren’t willing to make the same kind of sacrifices and face the same kind of danger, the reality sometimes is that there isn’t room in the Corps for all the would-be grunts.
“We’re in a very patriotic country at the time,” said Master Gunnery Sgt. Dinky Byers, a career recruiter and current recruiter instructor for Marine Corps Recruiting Station Baltimore. “We speak to a lot of young men and women where we really don’t have to talk about infantry a lot, because there are so many of them that seek that field.”
Every recruiting station has different allocations for various job fields that are determined by Marine Corps headquarters, Byers said. If a prospective recruit comes in and asks for a job field that isn’t available, he or she has two options: wait until something changes, or to opt not to enlist after all. Ultimately, the needs of the Marine Corps determine what’s available.
A spokeswoman for Marine Corps Manpower and Reserve Affairs, Yvonne Carlock, said there were 7,033 total infantry jobs filled for Fiscal Year 2013, compared with 25,167 jobs in support specialties. For FY 2014, there were just 5,992 slots filled in infantry fields and 20,008 in support roles. The lower numbers likely represent the ongoing Marine Corps force drawdown.
Sgt. Bryan Nygaard, a public affairs specialist at the Baltimore recruiting station, said he was one of the recruits who came in asking to go infantry, having been inspired by the 1949 John Wayne film “Sands of Iwo Jima.”
“You’re never going to see a Marine Corps movie about an admin shop,” he said. “It will always center around the infantry.”
At the recruiting level, he said, the task was to emphasize the significance of being a Marine over any particular job field or specialty.
“There is a mission to filter jobs, because if we had everyone in the infantry we wouldn’t have anyone driving trucks or getting bullets or anything like that,” he said. “There are only so many people that will deploy on their first enlistment.”
A destructive rivalry
Most of the support Marines who spoke with Marine Corps Times said they weren’t bothered by friendly trash talking. Some even embraced the moniker “POG” as a term of endearment. But many said they found things became ugly when casual banter in the field turned into mockery and harassment on a number of popular Facebook pages with names like “POG Boot F—s,” “Senior Lance Corporal” and “Just the Tip, Of the Spear.”
Those pages, run by anonymous moderators, bill themselves as equal opportunity offenders, and their harassing or demeaning posts about female Marines have attracted the most attention from watchdogs. But many said the way the groups ridiculed Marines in support communities was also creating bad blood.
One Marine gunnery sergeant in a support specialty said he saw photos of himself in uniform taken from his Facebook page and posted to these sites on multiple occasions. Marines he didn’t know made fun of his awards and even accused him of stolen valor on one occasion. Ultimately, the harassment got so bad that he shut down his Facebook account for good.
Vicente, the instructor at Lejeune’s personnel administration school, said he had also encountered new levels of negativity on social media and was disturbed by what he saw.
“I think that it’s completely out of control,” he said. “The fact that someone can sit behind the computer and hide and bring discredit to the Marine Corps is a shame. Maybe you ought to take a hard look at yourself.”
Even well-known grunts said there’s a line that most Marines know not to cross.
Former infantry assaultman Max Uriarte, the creator of the hugely popular Terminal Lance web comic, has done his share of poking fun at Marines in support communities. In his strip “Welcome to the Fleet” he shows a new Marine in a support specialty being welcomed warmly by a noncommissioned officer and offered a barracks room to himself, while a new infantry Marine is grimly ushered into a broken-down barracks building by a lance corporal who orders him to police-call the parking lot and adds, “I hate you.”
Uriarte, who also spent time in the Marine Corps on the support side as a combat cameraman, said living conditions were objectively better for support Marines, where there were typically more leaders, better quarters, and lower cutting scores, making it easier to get promoted.
Uriarte said he disliked the “predatory nature” of social media hubs that singled out Marines for disparagement based on their job or experiences. But he said he appreciated the rivalry and banter and encouraged Marines to own their role and position, whatever it might be.
“If you’re a POG, I would just own it. ‘Yeah, I’m a POG and it’s awesome,” Uriarte said. “I have more respect for people who just own what it is they’re doing than who try to be something that they’re not. Let the grunts have their misery because that’s what they want anyway.”
Marine veteran Braden Griffy, a rifleman who deployed twice to Iraq before leaving the Marine Corps in 2006, said he had his own problem with “POG.”
“When you think about just the term ‘POG,’ a lot of people say that it means people other than grunts,” he said. “And I think it’s disrespectful because they’re still Marines. It should be personnel other than grunts.”
Griffy, who used to be affiliated with the page “F’n Boot” before it was taken down by Facebook, said he definitely thought the name-calling had gone too far online. The underlying foundation of respect that most Marines maintained for each other was lost in translation, he said, particularly for the more junior troops.
“Really the only people who buy into that stuff lock, stock and barrel are the younger guys; it reminds me of preps and jocks from high school,” Griffy said. “This is ‘Jarhead,’ not ‘Saved by the Bell.'”
Peacetime Marines
Some Marines expect the rivalry between combat and support troops to intensify as the Corps enters a postwar era and opportunities to earn distinction in combat evaporate. It’s an opportunity, they said, for junior leaders to set the tone.
“I think it was probably worse back before the war started,” said Locklear, the New River operations chief, who enlisted in 1994. “There was no proof of who was tougher; it was the stereotype of the grunts who got harder training. Everyone else before the war was POGs.”
Griffy, who enlisted in late 2000, said he also remembered a nastier, grittier culture in the Marines before the war began and operational tempo picked up.
If leaders want to head off a return to a more divisive time, Griffy said they need to deliver the message through Marines that infantrymen personally respect — their fellow enlisted grunts.
“Every unit has some staff sergeant or some gunny who every Marine looks up to,” Griffy said, “Those are the guys that you really have to get to start teaching the younger guys what’s acceptable and what’s not. It’s going to have to start from the inside.”
Vicente, who says he teaches all his Marines to have pride in the work they do and to shrug off any negativity or bad blood, said he also believed NCOs hold the keys to Marine Corps culture and set the tone for more junior troops.
“As a staff NCO, I believe it’s a responsibility to educate all Marines about MOS and their reasons for being there,” he said. “We all need each other. It’s OK to have a little rivalry, but don’t make it personal.”
Source: Marine Times
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