Understanding Strengthens Relations - Family of Friends
Lance Cpl. Heather Choate

Although I have been in the Marine Corps a short amount of time I have noticed significant changes in the way I relate with people. Not because I went to boot camp and I think I’m better than others because I’m a Marine, but the lifestyle that I live now is somewhat of an alternate universe to what I was used to as a civilian.

Prior to the military, I was still in high school, working a fairly good paying job for a high school teenager, and my main concern was what my boyfriend at the time and I would be doing that night.

As high school ended I began to notice that the friends in high school weren’t as important as I had thought they were. They weren’t actual friends. They were people I had classes with, people I talked with in the hall, they were all merely acquaintances. Although I did keep my two best friends close to me because we had good solid relationships.

When I left for boot camp they wrote me letters and I looked forward to those letters every day. But as I got closer to the girls I was going through boot camp with I noticed a very distinct difference in the relationships that I had with them and my friends back home.

When I wrote my friends back home it was easy to say what we did each day and how the food in the chow hall wasn’t the best. The hard part was being able to share the experience with them. There was no way they could understand, they were back at home with their friends and families. I could write down every detail of the day and they still wouldn’t be able to grasp the concept. My platoon, however, understood. We were all going through the same alternate universe together.

We had been willingly taken away from the lives we were, for the most part, comfortable with. We were together 24-hours a day, seven days a week for three months. We saw each other at our weakest times and built each other up when home sickness and mental break downs tore us apart. Once boot camp graduation became more of a reality rather than a hope, I noticed that I was somewhat disappointed by the fact that I would be leaving these girls, more so than I was to leave my childhood friends. They had become my family. I had never felt so close to a group of people in such a short time.

At the time I didn’t know that this would become a norm during my military career.

I finally reached my first duty station and within the first month or so of being here on Okinawa I had already gotten close to a few people. The roommate was first, and then I became closer to others. I’ve noticed that the relationships you make in the Marine Corps are so much easier to maintain, simply because we all experience the same lifestyle. The friendships I’ve made in the Corps are more of a brotherhood and sisterhood.

They’re your friends, but they seem to be naturally closer to you than the civilian friends that you have or had because they understand. I love the friends that I have made here and honestly, I think that these relationships will last longer than the ones I made back home. They’re a constant growing bond.

They are real friendships.

Choate is a combat correspondent with the Okinawa Marine.