Terminal Lance #185 “Experience”

If Marines are good at one thing, it’s playing video games. Specifically, the military first person shooter type. It’s hard to avoid it when you’re stuck in your room with nothing else to do. As we already figured out, most Marines would rather nail their dick to a table than do MCI’s, so the alternative is usually passing the time with some good old-fashioned vidyagames. Naturally, the recent batch of military first person shooters tend to appeal to most 18-24 year old males, such as Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare.

The misconceptions of civilians is almost always amusing. If they find out that you’re unnaturally good at first person shooters, the natural assumption is that it must be because of your brutal military tactical training being evoked. This, is of course, completely absurd. For starters, military training is basically useless in most video games. In real life, you don’t run around as fast as you can dual-weilding shotguns, oblivious to enemy gunfire, racking up killstreaks and throwing knives into people. Of course, Battlefield 3, despite its efforts at creating a realistic war environment, really isn’t any better.

In any case, I suppose you could just entertain their wild ideas and roll with it, but I suppose I’m just too honest for that. I don’t think there’s any shame in having some humility about your service, as a lot of it is kind of ridiculous.