On the final Sunday before my company started the Crucible, dozens of recruits from multiple companies bought snacks and energy drinks from some vending machines inside one of the buildings used for religious services and classes at Camp Pendleton. Most of the recruits still had their debit cards from a recent PX call, and there were no DIs in or near the building, so recruits literally bought out most of the Red Bulls, Snickers, etc. that vending machines were stocked with within a couple hours.

The unbelievable part is that no one got caught red handed and that the DIs had no idea. However, a few recruits found a half smoked cigarette on the ground, and they decided to light it with MRE matches and partake in some smoking and joking. Again, they somehow weren’t caught red handed, but were instead snitched on by an unknown recruit. When the smokers were interrogated, the DIs found out about the recruit raid on the vending machines that had just taken place.

By the end of Sunday square away time, DIs were terrorizing their squad bays with endless ammo can squats and whatnot to find out who was involved. Ultimately, only like 10 recruits total were implicated despite literally half of a given squad bay being guilty in some cases. 4 recruits from my platoon were dropped back 4 weeks, and 1 of them went RSP. It was actually quite a scandal that would’ve made the companies involved look pretty bad since they let their recruits hold onto their debit cards, but only a fraction of the recruits got caught and it was probably swept under the rug.