STUPID/FUNNY SHIT I WITNESSED OR TOOK PART IN WHILE IN THE MARINE CORPS

• People pulling the skin of their balls out of their pants and saying, "Hey look, I sat in gum!" Actually, I saw pretty much every dick joke referenced in Waiting and a few more besides.

• A friend of mine got shot through the middle of the hand, and we medevaced (medically evacuated) him by humvee to Abu Ghraib. He then tried to creep out the soldiers there by staring at them through the hole in his palm and laughing.

• The game where you put on a flak and let someone frog kick you in the chest

• All manner of MRE bombs as well as a MRE heater and tabasco sauce mixture that turns into homemade tear gas.

• Actual tear gas being used in pranks.

• Burning through stuff with thermite grenades for fun.

• Everything every boot has ever worn on every weekend ever. Always hilarious.

• A prank war that ended with someone's coffee getting shit in. Highlights along the way included setting a dead chicken on fire and throwing it into a small tent where a person was taking a shit and then taking said burnt dead rotting chicken and putting it in the other guy's sleeping bag.

• A squadmate removed a flash bang from his vest, somehow managing not only to pull the pin, but to also drop the spoon and allow the grenade to go off in his hand. He lost 3 or 4 fingers and, after his medical discharge from the Corps, went on to have some honorary position with the Angels baseball team. He was a moron, and probably still is. He also once grabbed his automatic weapon by the barrel right after an extended period of firing it, burning off much of the skin on his hand and preventing him from patrolling for a week.

• A friend took apart a flash bang while lounging around at an observation post (OP) near Fallujah. He then proceeded to light the black powder and other ingredients on fire, burning off both of his eyebrows and some of his hair. He was then presented with the dilemma of how to explain that to our superiors, so he told them he was walking and fell face first into a fire. And he was just dumb enough that they believed it.

• Snipers catching a camel spider and keeping it in a box with plexiglass on top of it and feeding it bigger and bigger things. His name was Jihad.

• Catching a hedgehog that we dubbed "Murderball" and making him our mascot for about 5 minutes until our lieutenant made us get rid of him.

• My fireteam and a sniper team set up a slip-n-slide in the hallway of an old abandoned hotel that we had set up an OP in.

• Patrolling through Fallujah on Halloween with Halloween masks on. (this was probably pretty stupid...I couldn't see shit)

• People using ammonia and bleach to clean their rooms while wearing gas masks, not realizing that gas masks are not as effective in such a closed environment.