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Dear Angela:

My fiance is a newly baptized member of the LDS Church and he has been away at Marine boot camp for a year now. Since leaving, he has struggled with church attendance and now he finds his faith wavering in many of the basic principles of the gospel. I love him and I can't imagine my life without him, but I also don't want to religiously raise my children alone. I plead with him to read the scriptures, pray and attend church — but he says the whole thing "makes his skin crawl." He has another Christian friend in the barracks who has urged me to leave him alone, because these things can't be forced and I'll just end up pushing him away. But I worry if I say nothing, nothing will change. Any advice?

— USMarine Corps Angel

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/8656 ... -camp.html

Has Angela just outed the fact that her stories are made up?

United States Marine Corps Recruit Training, commonly known as "boot camp", is a 13-week program of initial training that each recruit must successfully complete in order to join the United States Marine Corps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta ... t_Training

Or is the Marine telling his fiancee a bit of a whopper?

I wondered the same thing when I saw boot camp for a year.

He's been away for a year.

She believes him when he says he's at bootcamp.

He's been hoping and praying that nobody will tell her that bootcamp is only 13 weeks.

My understanding was that they go through boot camp and then go and learn a job. Do some job training programs last a year? Any chance that the letter writer is just confusing the terminology here (Whatever the job training is really called with "boot camp")?

A year seems like a long time for training of any type, though.

fetchface wrote:My understanding was that they go through boot camp and then go and learn a job. Do some job training programs last a year? Any chance that the letter writer is just confusing the terminology here (Whatever the job training is really called with "boot camp")?

A year seems like a long time for training of any type, though.

Maybe he is just really bad at boot camp and has had to redo it multiple times. Like Jethro Bodine (Beverly Hillbillies) never being able to graduate elementary school.

Guys, never assume that the wives and children of service members grok the intricacies of military terminology, and even less so the girlfriends and fiances.

What is more likely, that the Ask Angela lady is completely fabricating her incoming letters, or that some young girl doesn't know the difference between boot camp and all the schools and deployments and such that follow it?

By the way, my daughter is a 4th-year ROTC cadet right now, on the verge of getting her commission in the Army, and this morning as I was describing how to find the building I was in, I told her to look for the one with the artillery piece mounted outside of it as a static display. She asked if an artillery piece were a kind of tank.

I sort of assumed that a 4th year cadet would know better, but I was wrong. I realized that nowhere in the ROTC curriculum is armor or artillery discussed in detail. I know about this stuff because I'm interested in it, and read about it. She isn't, and doesn't. If a 4th year ROTC cadet doesn't know this stuff, what makes any of us think an 18 year old kid's girlfriend is gonna know it?

Sethbag wrote:She isn't, and doesn't.

My wife is a wife of a regular (now of a pensioned one...) for 20+ years. She used to work in the army as math/phys/language teacher for 10+ years.

Nowadays, solving a crossword puzzle, she asks me if the lieutenant or the sergeant were the higher rank...

I've enjoyed the comments from sethbag and ludwigm.

The more important question is: What should she do?!?!?!

just me wrote:I've enjoyed the comments from sethbag and ludwigm.

The more important question is: What should she do?!?!?!

Marry the guy if she really loves him and he loves her, and fuq the church.

If she can't marry the guy and be OK with this not being all head over heals with the church, then she should let him go and not put him through the crap to follow.

by the way, my ex-SIL divorced my BIL after he apostatized from the church. She said she couldn't be married to a guy who didn't believe in the church. Now he's remarried to an awesome (nevermo) woman and happy as a clam, and his ex-wife is a very miserable upper 30s single parent TBM woman in the southern midwest of the US, wondering how come she can't find the Peter Priesthood to replace her ex-husband that she was sure she'd find, if only she clung to the faith at all costs.