This rivalry between the services looks very amusing to the rest of us. In college at NMSU, I met Frank (no resemblance to other Franks, or anything produced by Oscar Meyer) who was the son of an AF General. He was rebelling against parental authority by joining the Marines. He had attended a massive Gung-Ho training mind control class at Quantico, VA prior to coming to Las Cruces, and was noted for doing strange things that he thought of as patriotic, like waking us up at 2:00 AM typing a request for a Landing Party Manual.
One of my roomies was a guy who had been passed over for Captain at White Sands Proving Grounds and had decided to get his MA in Engineering. He had served a couple of tours in the Army and felt that Frank was what later to be called in the movie MASH a "regular Army Clown"(like Hot Lips Hoolihan). He celebrated his observation by making up a short verse about Frank:
Oh, have you seen,
The Boy Marine,
His feet are tender, his horn is green,
There was, at that time and place, in 1963 at Regents Row Dorm, a spectacular creature who inhabited the women's wing of our dorm. She had a trendy beehive hairdo that looked like it had escaped from The Grand Old Opry, she wore shorts with heels and tights and was as well rigged both fore and aft as any White chick I had ever seen, and wore nothing that did not include at least five of the colors of the rainbow, which earned her the name "La Papagaya", or Scarlet Macaw, from my Chicano and Mexican colleagues.
And then it came to pass, that Frank looked in his underwear drawer and saw his tighty whities, and he was not pleased. And so it happened that he went downtown and bought a package of RIT and dyed his skivvies in the dorm laundromat. They came out the proper shade of greenish brown or browish green, the exact color of a common desert toad. And so did the formerly gorgeous apparel of La Papagaya, who used the same machine in a following load. When Frank pulled his unmentionables out of the dryer and the empty box of RIT was discovered, he was billed by the resident assistant for over $150, and yelled at by La Papagaya, whom, it turns out, shared the harsh voice of her namesake fowl along with the coloration.
On another occasion, I took the Boy Marine along on a guitar buying expedition to Juarez. While I was away regateando at the guitar factory, Frank was inhaling gin rickies at La Favorita, a bar featuring dancing girls and recorded music. Frank had been told that gin rickies were the thing that Marines drank when engaging in contests with their natural enemies, the Sailors. When I returned, Frank had vanish and my roommate told me that he had mistaken a Juarez policeman for a Naval officer. The policia in Juarez were chosen from a select list of large giants who were renowned for their abilities to lift Volkswagens and Fiats. Perhaps Frank mistook the chota (cop) for two naval officers, as he must have been seeing double, considering the number of gin rickies he had inhaled. La Favorita never skimped on the cheap Mexican gin.
Alas, the multa (fine) was more that both of us had, and so we had to return to las Cruces to beg enough coin to bail Frank out. Being as it was midnight by the time we located Frank in the local juzgado (hoosegow), or "brig" in Marinish, it was too late to return that evening and so we did not make it back until 11:00 the next day, a Sunday. Frank returned without his wristwatch and several purple bruises and was remarkably quiet for at least three weeks, and never returned to Juarez after that.