What is boot camp really like?

A Marine recruiter stands up, takes off his dress jacket and tells a 17-year-old from Flint to turn around. He drapes the jacket over the kid’s shoulders and points him at the mirror.

“He said, ‘Listen, this is what a man should look like.’ And asked me if I felt like a man.”

Hear it at 36:41

The kid was Curtez Riggs, who went on to retire as an Army First Sergeant and found Military Influencer Conference. Army. You can guess how the jacket went over.

“I [shrugged] my shoulders. I chucked that jacket off and me and my cousin laughed out of the recruiting station.”

Hear it at 36:41

He walked into the Army office next door instead.

We ask a lot of people the same two questions: why did you join, and was boot camp what you thought it would be? In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, eighteen of them answered. Sixteen are Veterans, one is a recruiter still in uniform, one stood on the drill instructor’s side of it for the Navy. Four branches, the 1970s to the 2010s. Almost nobody joined for the reason on the poster, and nobody got the boot camp they pictured.

Nobody joins for the reason on the poster

Some did. Dr. Cornelius Jones, who served as a U.S. Navy recruit division commander and recruiter and is an author, shipped to Great Lakes on October 26, 2000.

“The USS Cole was attacked on October the 12th of 2000, and I just felt compelled to do what generations of young men before me had done.”

Hear it at 14:46

That is the poster. Now the rest of the room.

Raivadus Gill, an Iraq combat Veteran and founder of Operation Battle Cry, was working at a parks and recreation center when a coworker told him there was no way he would finish boot camp.

“He said, ‘I bet you a steak dinner that you can’t get through boot camp.’ I said, ‘All right.’ Literally, I signed up like a month later.”

Hear it at 34:32

Edward Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant who spent 20 years in signals intelligence, traces it to about the first grade.

“I want to say it was GI Joe cartoon, if you want the truth.”

Hear it at 5:37

Jason Lee Morrison, a Marine Corps Veteran and Recon Marine, came back to the States in 1995 and watched Full Metal Jacket. Most people take that film as a warning.

“I joined the Marine Corps because it scared me the most.”

Hear it at 16:42

Erik Schreiner, a Marine Corps Veteran, joined in the 1990s after he and his best friend signed each other up as a prank.

“I joined the Marine Corps so I could go off-roading. I kid you not.”

Hear it at 3:01

Bobi Pike-Oates, a retired Air Force Senior Master Sergeant, wanted to be a city police officer in the 1970s. The height rule said five foot seven. She was five foot three. A friend suggested the Air Force. Letoi Adams, a U.S. Army Veteran, wanted to see the world on somebody else’s dime. Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran and machine gunner, wanted out of Las Vegas so badly that when his recruiter offered a ship date 25 days sooner, he took it.

“He goes, ‘But you lose your sign on bonus.’ I was like, ‘I don’t care.’”

Hear it at 13:45

The bonus was $10,000.

And SSgt Nicholas Milsap, an active duty U.S. Marine Corps recruiter, remembers the question his own recruiter asked him in Mississippi, after he had lost a college scholarship.

“He was like, ‘Well, what are you running from?’ I said, ‘Being broke.’”

Hear it at 18:49

A bet, a cartoon, a movie, a prank, a height chart, a bank balance. One attack on a ship.

The Air Force recruiter was never in

Milsap did not walk in wanting the Marines. He sat on a bench outside the Air Force office for half an hour, and nobody was at work. A Marine recruiter in dress blues eventually asked him which branch he wanted, and why.

“I was like, ‘The Air Force.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, why?’ And I was like, ‘Cuz I’m smart.’”

Hear it at 18:02

He has now been a Marine for twelve years. Randall Parkes, a Marine Corps Veteran, drill instructor and founding MARSOC Raider, shopped all four branches in 2000 on his grandfather’s advice and reports the same thing: the Air Force recruiters “definitely were not there.” In a supporting role from one of our earliest episodes, Nate Rosas, a U.S. Army Veteran, says he tried the Air Force first too, “but they were never there.”

Three people, one empty office. Two of the three became Marines.

The Army offered Parkes his choice of job, his choice of duty station and a $10,000 bonus. He took that offer back to the Marine recruiter to see what the Marines would do about it.

“He points to the [eagle, globe] and anchor and he’s like, ‘Look, man, this is all I can give you.’”

Hear it at 9:09

Then the recruiter told him where the door was, in fewer and shorter words. Parkes signed.

So Riggs was chased out of the Marine office by a hard sell, and Parkes was won by a recruiter who offered him nothing. Same pitch underneath: you want to be one of us or you don’t. Riggs says the Army recruiter was gentler and kinder, and he is clear-eyed about that too: “now I know I was being sold.”

What the recruiter left out

Riggs enlisted to be an aeroscout. At the processing station he learned the job no longer existed. They had cavalry scout, with an airborne option.

“My dumb ass signed the dotted line without a second thought.”

Hear it at 38:24

Jason Brooks, a medically retired Marine who became a Recon and SERE instructor, signed up for satellite communications. After boot camp a sergeant read out everyone’s job.

“He goes, ‘You’re NBC.’ I said, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a newscaster.’”

Hear it at 4:21

It stood for nuclear, biological and chemical. A paperwork mistake. He stayed anyway.

“Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, was woken at six one morning and driven to a recruiter, who asked where he went to high school. A Christian school, as it happened.

“He goes, ‘You ever thought about being a chaplain assistant?’ And I was like, ‘No, I don’t know. Sure. If you think it’s cool.’”

Hear it at 26:19

Then the bus stops

For the record, what the services say this month. The Marine Corps says recruit training lasts 13 weeks, at Parris Island, South Carolina, or San Diego. The Army describes Basic Combat Training as four phases over 10 weeks; an Army report from March 2025 names Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood and Fort Sill among the posts that run it. The Navy says boot camp lasts 9 weeks at Great Lakes, Illinois. The Air Force lays its training out as Week 0 through Week 7.

That is the brochure. Gill got to Fort Sill knowing, in his words, nothing about the military at all. For three days of in-processing everyone was polite, and people kept telling him to wait until he crossed the tracks. Then the drill sergeants picked the new arrivals up in a cattle bus, friendly as greeters.

“Literally the cattle bus hit the tracks. This drill sergeant turned into the devil.”

Hear it at 36:55

He nearly owed a man a steak that afternoon.

Anisa Palmer, an Iraq combat Veteran of the 82nd Airborne, grew up on an island, in flip-flops. The Army sent her to South Carolina.

“Boot camp in South Carolina was in the winter. Brutal. So, I had hypothermia and pneumonia at the same time.”

Hear it at 2:38

Her drill sergeant came to the hospital to ask if she was going to graduate. She did, IV and all.

Now Jacob “Stitch” Duran, a U.S. Air Force Veteran of the Vietnam era who became a cutman in boxing and the UFC. He grew up doing farm work, carrying twelve-foot ladders:

“I get to Lackland Air Force Base and six weeks of basic training was a piece of cake.”

Hear it at 6:08

Every Marine reading this just nodded. But he is not comparing branches. He is comparing boot camp to what came before it, and that turns out to be the whole game. Travis Jewell, a Marine Corps Veteran and mortarman who went through in the 2010s, says the yelling was nothing new: his father was a deputy sheriff. What he was not ready for was a drill instructor who had noticed how short he was and ordered him to put a twin mattress in his cargo pocket.

“He was like, ‘Make it fit now. Marines adapt and overcome, Jewell.’”

Hear it at 14:28

It did not fit.

Parkes was a recruit in San Diego on September 11, 2001. He half believed the news was a trick, until one detail.

“The drill instructor who was the kill hat took his cover off and talked in his regular voice.”

Hear it at 16:57

The view from under the hat

Parkes went back as a drill instructor at Parris Island, and says it took him a full training cycle to become the character.

“Being a drill instructor, it’s like you’re the world’s worst paid actors, and it’s tough.”

Hear it at 29:02

He got good at it. Near the end of one cycle, with his platoon getting sloppy, he put on insect repellent, had them march in place in the grass until the sand fleas came up, then held them at attention and restarted a 30-second clock every time somebody twitched. He calls the sand flea “the world’s smallest drill instructor.”

He has been a San Diego recruit, a Parris Island drill instructor and a First Sergeant back in San Diego, so we asked the question Marines fight about in bars.

“Parris Island is definitely harder.”

Hear it at 35:58

The weather, he says. Hollywood Marines may file their complaints with him.

Jones saw it from two angles as well. As a Navy drill instructor he looked at some recruits and wondered who had let them in. Then he went to recruiting and met the same kind of kid at the front door.

“If this kid doesn’t get into the military, they probably are not going to survive.”

Hear it at 42:11

Milsap, the one guest who does this for a living right now, knows exactly what you think of his profession.

“I think the biggest misconception about recruiters is that we’re kind of like used car salesmen and we’ll do anything to convince somebody.”

Hear it at 1:13:17

We will let Riggs and his aeroscout contract respond to that.

So was it what you expected?

No. Not for one of them. Easier than the farm, colder than the island, stranger than the movie.

Greg Cope White, a Marine Corps Veteran, waited decades to write The Pink Marine, his book about Parris Island. He says the wait was the point.

“If we wrote these stories the day after boot camp, we’re going to be victims in those stories.”

Hear it at 2:03

Which may be the real answer. What boot camp is like depends on how long ago it was. On day three it is the devil on a cattle bus. Thirty years on it is the best story you own, and you will tell it to anyone who sits still. Including, apparently, us.