@JTam Yeah, that is too true. My best friend from the Marines made friends with a kid from the Wing when that wing was training up as a provisional rifle company for a deployment to Iraq. They were basically going to be base guards for the Chairforce. During their workup, they trained as much like Grunts as they could. They only got about four months before they pumped.
Anyway, we're eating Chinese one night- He would come over and hang out to watch Anime with my buddy- and we got to talking about his FEX that they had just finished.
"Yeah, you guys know a lot more than we think," he said. "Like, I didn't know you had to know all that MOPP stuff, and land nav, and comm. We thought we were doing really good, and then we had to do our big FEX, and 2/8 was our Op-For. And they kicked our ass so bad. Like, I don't think they were even trying. They just cleaned us out."
Not a perfect quote, but not far off. Once the Wingers got to play with the big boys, they couldn't hang. Totally different mindset.
@Grumpy Gnome Yeah, I could never have done SF either. Line company Grunt- I was all about it. Don't know if the training would have threw me, but the swimming requirements for Recon would have tanked me. When STA opened up indocs, I was only a Sharpshooter, so I didn't qualify. By the time I got Expert, STA was closed. Tried for the Survival Escape and Evade course that goes on at Bridgeport, but at the time I was "too important to the platoon to lose." IE, I was the radio operator and scribe (damn my good penmanship). I was the ONLY volunteer in the platoon but they wouldn't send me. I honestly just wanted a course.
My dad kept trying to get the recruiter to convince me to go anywhere but the Infantry. He failed- miserably. Hell, I walked up to himm in the school lunchroom and said, "I want to be an Infantryman in the united States Marine Corps." Dad never had a chance.