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Mark served in the active Army and Army Reserves for a total of ten years before joining the Marine Corps. He served in many leadership roles including being my first platoon sergeant when I entered the fleet Marine force in 1998.
Mark did several deployments including peacetime and combat.
Mark retired from the Marine Corps in 2008 as a staff sergeant. He is a family man and loves spending time with his grandchildren.
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Creators & Guests
What is The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast?
The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast was born out of a place of grief. Having lost my best friend from the Marine Corps in the early hours of 2023, I realized that this feeling was all too familiar. I wanted to do something, not only for the loss I felt, but for the loss I knew many families were enduring day to day.
We believe that a major way to relieve the stressors of life is to talk, laugh, cry, and share our experiences without fear of offense. We hope to attract veterans and first responders as well as anyone who is interested in knowing more about what it’s like to be in our shoes while we wear or wore those shoes.
GUEST INTRODUCTION: Mark served in the active Army and Army Reserves for a total of ten years before joining the Marine Corps. He served in many leadership roles including being my first platoon sergeant when I entered the fleet Marine force in 1998.
Mark did several deployments including peacetime and combat.
Mark retired from the Marine Corps in 2008 as a staff sergeant. He is a family man and loves spending time with his grandchildren.
PODCAST INTRODUCTION: PODCAST INTRODUCTION: Hello everyone and welcome to The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast. I'm your host Troy Gent.
Ghost Turd Stories' mission is to use humorous and challenging stories from veterans and first responders to reduce the burden of families whose veteran or first responder took their our life.
Ghost Turd Stories' vision is to use humorous and challenging stories to prevent suicide among our ranks and reduce the burden on families whose veteran or first responder took their own life.
We hope to attack veterans or first responders as well as those interested in knowing more about what it's like to be in our shoes while we wear or wore those shoes.
LET US WRITE YOUR STORY! COMMERCIAL: At Ghost Turd Stories we tell and write the stories of veterans and first responders for their families and friends. We love storytelling and believe that there is nothing more inspiring and nothing that gets people to take action like a great story.
Family and friends want to know the sacrifices we made, the services we rendered, and the people we lifted so that they can be inspired and learn about the legacy we left.
Our podcast is the face of our company but we want every family who cares to know about the experiences their veteran and or first responder went through for them. We interview veterans and first responders, collect pictures, write their stories, and compile them in a book for their families and friends to enjoy.
Oftentimes it is difficult for us to talk to our loved ones about what we did, saw, and heard while serving. At Ghost Turd Stories, we bridge the gap. For pricing, visit linktr.ee/ghostturdstories and click on the second tab directly under the podcast link called Let Us Write Your Story!
TROY GENT: Welcome Mark. Just so everybody knows, Mark was my first platoon sergeant after boot camp and the school of infantry in third battalion seventh Marines. That is how I know him. It is great to have you. Go ahead and explain when you joined, why you joined, and a little bit about your service.
MARK ROBINSON: Yeah, sure. I am a dual-service guy. I graduated high school in New Jersey in 1982. I wanted to get out of New Jersey as fast as I could so I joined the US Army, went down to Alabama for boot camp, and found out that New Jersey wasn’t all that bad. I’m only kidding Alabamans. Don’t get on me but yeah.
I did three years. I was a radio multi-channel communications operator, which basically meant I was at the cutting edge of microwave satellite communications for the military.
I didn’t like the Army because it’s a corporation of too many people. There’s too much going on. Nobody really treated me like I thought I was worth so I decided to join the Army Reserves to still stay in something and to stay service-connected. I enjoyed my Army Reserve career because I went back to Jersey. I could live at home but when Saudum went into Kuwait in I think it was 2000. No, I’m sorry. Ninety. I didn’t want to go to combat with my Army Reserve unit because even though we had a lot of fun training, those guys were a little bit lax.
I went across town to a Marine Corps recruiter and joined in 1991. Actually, I joined the delayed entry program in 1990. Yellow footprints of Paracylene on January 1st, 1991 and started being a Marine for the next seventeen years. I think in total I have like twenty-three plus years of either being a soldier or being the world’s elite Marine.
TROY GENT: I think you said that your favorite part about Army basic was the smoke breaks.
MARK ROBINSON: One hundred percent and I don’t think they do it anymore because god forbid you smoke, right? The drill sergeants would take smoke breaks and you as the trainee, that’s what we called each other, could take a smoke break with the drill sergeant. Instead of having to listen to them yap, do all this, and then actually having to learn how to do stuff, you could sit there and literally smoke and joke with your drill sergeant.
Then I joined the Marine Corps and uh, yeah. There was none of that.
TROY GENT: In 1982, you went to Army basic. In 1991, you went to Marine Corps boot camp. What contrasts were there between the two? Go into that.
MARK ROBINSON: What an awesome question. I was more physically fit at seventeen years old because I was an athlete in high school. None of the physical stuff in Army basic training was a challenge to me. Like absolutely zero but the mental stuff was a little tough because they never really treated people like they knew anything.
At least when I got to the Marine Corps my senior drill instructor and my heavy realized that I was prior service. I had done drill sergeant in the Army, so I knew the game. They just had to take me and use me to make the rest of the platoon do what they needed them to get done, sort of. That is what your squad leaders and guides were for.
The biggest difference between basic training in any other branch and boot camp is them literally taking everything that you have ever done before and crush it down to nothing so that they can remold you in their likeness. At twenty-six years old, I get to Paris Island and I know everything, only I don’t know nothing because I’m not a success at anything in life. That’s why I am here.
It was draining at twenty-six because I was older than the average recruit but it was also a lot mentally because I knew the stuff I was doing was legit. It was just wasn’t Marine Corps legit, which means, in the long run, it’s not legit at all. If the Marine Corps doesn’t sign on to it, you might as well not even know it. You know what I mean?
TROY GENT: In Army basic, how did it work when they’d smoke, you’d be joking, and then you’d just go back and it would be… They would just turn it back on.
MARK ROBINSON: Well, we know that there are a lot of theatrics to recruit training in whatever branch of service. Even the Navy has some weird things they do. In the Marine Corps, at least the theatrics, as far as I can tell, nowadays, until you get your eagle globe and anchor (back in the day, until you got to iron the club patch on your breast pocket) there as nobody that was really pulling for you.
It was a totally different trip where you could be right in doing something but because you did it too fast or you did it before you were told to do it… I was like this is a different beast altogether here.
I never went to sleep in Marine Corps boot camp without hearing at least one recruit cry in his sleep for at least the first or second phase. I never had to worry about that experience in Army basic training. Never.
TROY GENT: You spent six years in the Army Reserves in the 80s and into the 90s. What was that like on the weekend drills? Why did you go into the reserves?
MARK ROBINSON: Yeah, so long story short, just about the only thing I have done in my life that I think I have been worthwhile at is military. You don’t have to be such a great shot in the old Army. If you could point the gun in the right direction and maybe kick up dirt on a target, it would fall down, you were a success.
When you get to the Army Reserve, you are drilling on the weekends so you’ve got to force a whole lot of training into two days, and then you have your two weeks during the summer. All the fun parts of what you do when you are on active duty, you can actually focus on in reserve units. You don’t have enough time to sit around and do things like clean your weapon for six hours. Those six hours have to be putting rounds down range, honing your skill, your craft, or whatever it is.
I really did like the Army Reserves. It was also nice to be in my hometown. I would travel to the reserve base and then we would go down to Fort Dix, New Jersey for the two weeks in the summer. It was more focused and it made sense to me when Desert Storm happened and they started calling up reserve units.
I was like, “Wait a minute. Why are they calling up reserve units? They got active duty.”
The reserve units generally are the ones that are more prepared to actually do the speed bump when wars kick off because Troy, I’ll tell you, some of the best training I got in the military was those focused weekend sessions that we did. We would shoot. If you were MotorT, or whatever the Army calls their MotorT, you would work on your vehicles. You would do nothing but that. You’d break for chow and you’d go back and do nothing but that.
I was an Army Reserve infantryman so we shot. I’ll tell you what, there is no better fighting force to be the first thing to hit the ground running than people who do it all the time and are actually looking for a chance to do it for real.
TROY GENT: I’ve never heard that perspective before. That’s great. That makes sense.
MARK ROBINSON: It’s a trip and if you don’t live it, you’re like, “Yeah those fat guys over there. They really can’t.”
But think about it, dude. When America says, “I’m about to really bring it to you,” those reserve units, those that are in the middle of the country like tankers, those guys get it done. I’ve got a lot of love for the reserves, believe it or not.
TROY GENT: That’s awesome. So you went to boot camp in the Marine Corps because you wanted to fight with the Marines vs the Army.
MARK ROBINSON: You’ve only got as long as you’ve got with me but I could talk about this for the next month and a half, bro.
The ethos of the Marine Corps… I mean, forget about that “every Marine is a rifleman” thing. I mean, yeah. It’s catchy. You really get to know what another human being is capable of in the Marine Corps, bro. It brings goosebumps to me because I’ve seen people that you would think are the hottest and squared away.
When rounds start rounds start coming at you or things start blowing up in places you didn’t expect them to, you’ve got one or two things that you are going to do and for the most part, because Marines are just used to crap situations, it’s like they attack that. They go to it. They might find out that they sound have gone a different direction but then they will fight their way out of that.
There’s not a lot of indecision when the rounds start coming at you for the most part. Do you got time for a quick story?
TROY GENT: Yeah, we got time for all kinds. That is what we are here for.
MARK ROBINSON: Were on deck in Afghanistan in 2006ish? Yeah, January 2006. We’ve been working up eighteen months to get ready to take the fight to the Taliban or whoever is up there in the hills.
We get there. We go on our first vehicle convoy. We were going to the governor’s mansion in Asadabad that is only about half an hour but with your checks and twenties. Whatever you called it.
TROY GENT: What was your billet at the time?
MARK ROBINSON: I was the platoon sergeant for first battalion third Marines, second platoon… What company was I in? Sheesh. Alpha company. Alpha one-three? Yeah.
TROY GENT: And you were a Gunnery Sergeant?
MARK ROBINSON: No, I never made it to Gunny. I spent ten years as a staff sergeant, bro. I am the most seasoned staff sergeant the Marine Corps has ever had.
TROY GENT: So you were sergeant when I got to the fleet but yeah. You made staff sergeant.
MARK ROBINSON: Yes sir. I got promoted by Lt. Shnider and Major Trapp.
TROY GENT: That’s right. Okay.
MARK ROBINSON: Yeah and my daughter. But anyway, we get to Asadabad. We are going from the fob in Asadabad out to the Govener’s mansion or Govener’s compound in downtown Asadabad. We are riding down Past River Road and you know, you can always tell when you are getting shot at because just like in the pits, it sounds like a hand clap, right?
Rounds are coming at us, we hear it in a vehicle so we get out, dismount, and do our checks and circles. One of my Marines points up to the mountain side and is like, “Hey staff sergeant, they are shooting at us from over there.”
You have this out-of-body experience where you are like, “Wait a minute. I just did an eighteen-month workup where we slept in the mud. We did all this stuff. We shot on a range complex. We hilloed. We did all this stuff….”
For him to not know what to do when he sees people shooting, I mean it’s funny but it’s sorta like, “Come on man!”
That’s my one story of somebody not actually running to the fight in the Marine Corps. Once he got the go-ahead, he did what every Lance Corporal with a saw does in the Marine Corps. They lay down fire. I guess that is all he was thinking of because of the rules of engagement.
TROY GENT: Towards the end of my deployment in Afganistan, the rules of engagement got ridiculous. We had this guy on a motorbike try to see how close he could get so the next run he could have a bomb on him. We had been told that we couldn’t take warning shots anymore.
He got so close, I told my guys that I should have shot him off the motorcycle. I would have freaking gone to the grave for him. You know, when rules of engagement get that restrictive, no one knows what to do. You know?
MARK ROBINSON: At some point, the people that are actually doing the dying and the bleeding and getting blown up, when they don’t have any say in what these rules are…
I don’t want to get any more political than I need to but it’s like the gun control thing. People without guns are telling us what is good. People without the knowledge base are the ones who make the rules and I know our system is designed for that where the civilians always in charge. But for God’s sake man, sometimes you just got to say, “Let a warrior be a warrior,” if you want to win. You have to reign them in at a certain point but you also got to let fighters fight. You’ve got to let them do it if you want to win. I will leave that there.
TROY GENT: Okay, yeah. I agree.
Do you remember any particular stories about drill instructors on recruits and recruits doing stupid things? Yeah, go ahead.
MARK ROBINSON: Yeah, here we go. When I went through boot camp, we were issued one pair of black Cadillacs and one pair of jungle boots. I was the guide for platoon ten thirty-four, first battalion Paris Island. I couldn’t keep the stick, the flag, the place it should be on the toe of my boot.
After we did drill, we would stop and you are supposed to drop the flag and it is supposed to always land in the same place. You’ve got to hold your hand a certain way to make that happen. I just couldn’t grasp it. You know, of course, I had drill from the Army so I couldn’t grasp much of anything but I couldn’t get that stick to fall near where it needed to.
One day before final drill, the sick drops, my senior drill instructor is standing next to me with his NCO sword, looks down, sees that the stick isn’t next to my foot, so he takes his sword and sticks it in the webbing of my jump boot.
I am a twenty-six-year-old dude. I went into the Marine Corps late. I am pretty fast on the uptake and I’m like, “I don’t think this is what is supposed to be happening in boot camp. I think I might have just got hazed,” but you know. I was twenty-six. My drill instructor was twenty-eight or twenty-seven. We were the same dude, only he had rank and I didn’t, so I wasn’t going to let him get to me.
That was one of my first realizations that they were going to go a little bit further than they needed to there to train me. I turned out to be the successful ten-year staff sergeant. Who knows. Maybe they did the best they could.
Second story. We had a recruit and I will say his name because he was Air Force. Recruit Prince could not march. We were getting ready for an initial drill. Everybody’s falling in line. Everybody is coming along. People who probably couldn’t even walk before they got to Paris Island can march except for Prince.
During one of our fifteen-second head calls where everybody runs in and goes to the bathroom in the trough, I look over. I’m buttoning up because back in the day, we had the cammies with the button fly. I say, “Hey recruit Prince. Get your head out of your bleep. You’re making us all look like bleep.”
Before I could finish buttoning up, Prince pushed me and I almost fell into the urinal trough.
I finish buttoning up. I turn around and as soon as my fist connected Prince, the junior drill instructor, the new hat that just got out of DI school, came in, saw me, and called me and Prince into the drill instructor hut. The senior drill instructor, he sees me and Prince there standing nose-to-nose and the junior drill instructor was like, “These two were just fighting in the head.”
The senior drill instructor says, “Guide, hit recruit Prince.”
“Sir, this recruit does not desire to hit recruit Prince.”
“Prince, hit the Guide.”
“Sir, this re-”
Before Prince could finish, he punches Prince and Prince goes down. Me, like I said, I’m twenty-six, he’s twenty-eight. I could probably take a punch from him. I‘ve been hit before. I’m getting ready for it. This dude knees me in my nuts and I land on his rack.
TROY GENT: On the senior drill instructor’s rack?
MARK ROBINSON: Oh yeah and you never touch that, right? I ended up on the floor after he pushed me off the rack and I don’t know what was more degrading. The fact that I saw Prince get punched in front of me but he took it like a champ. He went down. I didn’t even get the benefit of the punch. I got kneed in the groin and I’m like, “This place is meant to get to you, bro. It’s meant to get to you.”
It was interesting at the start because I went in with the gray man, you know, be the middle of the pack. Don’t be known for great stuff. Don’t be known for bad stuff. Just be one of seventy-five because I think that is what the platoons were when I went through.
As soon as I got there, they recognized that I had been in the Army from your SRB. I was the guide in receiving. I got to my first platoon. I must have been Guide off and on for about eight iterations in boot camp because I kept getting fired. I couldn’t keep my hands off the other Marines because they were just not moving. You know what I mean?
TROY GENT: So what would you do? Would you push them? Threaten them?
MARK ROBINSON: Yeah… Well, yeah. They were more threats but let’s put it this way. Prince wasn’t the only one that got punched but he was a bigger dude. He could take it. Some of the people in recruit training, you didn’t have to overly hit. I’ll put it that way but some people are just hard-headed, man. A good story about me being hard-headed…
I was the guide for platoon ten thirty-four. We went out to Leatherneck Square. That was on Paris Island where we did our combat hitting skills. I used to do stuff back in Jersey, YMCA stuff so I know a little bit with my hands but I am a twenty-six year old man going up against these kids. I’m a Guide going up against these guys and I am doing it.
This little wirey guy from Follow Series, his senior drill instructor puts him into the ring with me. I’m looking at him and I’m like, “Awe man. I’m going to tear this guy up.”
I remember the drill instructor saying, “Fight!” and I remember my senior drill instructor standing over me. They’re trying to revive me and I was like, “What the hell happened?”
The senior drill instructor said, “You just got knocked out.”
Come to find out, we go up to Liguene for SOI, this dude, me and him become friends. He used to box golden gloves in New York and he was wirey. He looked like somebody that would be no problem for me but oh, man. I was out before I knew what the hell happened, bro. It was crazy. Good time though.
I was at a point in my life where I had done really much right. Up until I got to Marine Corps boot camp… I wouldn’t say I was on my last leg. I had a baby girl and marriage that was on the rocks if not already over and I just didn’t know it.
I wanted a change. I wanted a course correction and Marine Corps boot camp gave me an opportunity to say, “Hey, you tried to do everything else. Make this work because who knows? If this doesn’t work, what are you going to do next?”
You know what I mean?
TROY GENT: Sure. So you graduated boot camp and then what was the first unit that you went to?
MARK ROBINSON: The first unit I went to was Second Battalion 4th Marines Fox Company Two Four Camp Lejune, North Carolina. They had just come back from a deployment to… I want to say Liberia. Something went on to where they were puffing their chests out when I got there.
I am a twenty-six year old Lance Corporal because I got meritoriously promoted after boot camp. I was meritoriously promoted in SOI. So I am a Lance Corporal and they make me a team leader, bro. This is the guy who wanted to be the gray man. All I wanted was my riffle, I wanted a pair of boots, and I wanted to be left alone.
All of my Marine Corps career I’ve always been in charge of at least a platoon of SOI guys for boot camp.
TROY GENT: When you didn’t want to be.
MARK ROBINSON: Dude! All I wanted to be was left alone. Man, I wanted to hide out. I wanted to be the guy that was like, “Hey, can I get your Skittles from your… Oh, I can’t. Ok, well.”
That’s all I wanted! But then again, you excel when you do what you are supposed to do. Bill Bellicheck had this saying for The Patriots. “Just do your job,” and that is why they won so many Superbowls. It was because all these little scrawny guys were just doing their job and they were winning.
The Marine Corps is that way. Just do your job. You become a rockstar if somebody can depend on you to just do what they tell you to do. For a twenty-six year old dude that had worked in self-storage, I did just about any job under the sun, I was like, “All you want me to do is what this guy tells me to and then when I get to a certain place, I tell that guy to do what he is supposed to? I’m your dude! I am in!”
I get to the fleet and my squad leader, Corporal Stroud (Great guy. I hope he is still around.), makes me a fireteam leader, and all these guys that are in his squad just came back from Liberia. Real-world action. Marines that have been there and done that.
I’m like, “Well, I know that all I have to do is what he tells me to do,” but then again, you know how the Marine Corps is. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. If you are new on deck, you might have well not done anything, right?
So the first few months in the fleet was me trying to impose whatever little will I had at five foot five, one-hundred and ninety-five pounds, on whoever didn’t want to do whatever I wanted them to.
TROY GENT: What was that like? You were a boot but you were a team leader. Did the other team leaders and squad leaders treat you like a team leader or did they treat you like a boot?
MARK ROBINSON: They pretty much kept me at arm's length. There is a lot to that though. I can’t blame them because I’ve never really been one that needed to have a click or be a part of a click and if you noticed platoon sergeants hang out with other platoon sergeants. Most squad leaders hang out with the squad leaders. You know, it’s a high-arcy thing.
It didn’t matter to me because at twenty-six years old, I’m older than the platoon commander. At twenty-six years old, I’m older than most of the platoon sergeants. I can be on my own. I’m an independent type of guy so it didn’t bother me. What bothered me is that nobody in the enlisted ranks, at different levels of leadership, wanted to take the Lutenit and make him better. That bothered me, Troy, and I will tell you why.
I’ve got a little brother that’s smart as a whip and athletic. I saw all of my platoon commanders as my little brother from the time I was a Lance Corporal. I just…
How can you throw this guy into that level of responsibility where he may have to take these forty-five guys into combat and be right and not try to help him learn how to be right to get there? You know what I mean? If you ask my peers, “Oh, Robinson? Oh, he was an SD. He’s always over there with the platoon commander trying to - “
Yeah. I looked at my platoon commanders as my little brother. I wouldn’t put them out there on the line without any type of training. I tried to nurture them and let them know what was going on about the real world as much as I knew about it. But everybody was like, “Nah, that’s just suckin’ up.”
No, it’s not. It’s making sure that your unit is functioning at a level that it should be functioning. That was the way that I saw it. That became an issue with my peers but so be it. I’m good with it.
TROY GENT: I am going to ask you a question a little later about the platoon sergeant and platoon commander relationship.
So you were given responsibility in boot camp, SOI, and as a team leader when you were new in the fleet. You just wanted to have a riffle and kind of be left alone. Every time that happened, what was going on in your mind? Were you like, “Awe crap. I don’t want to be doing this.”
You did it anyway but did you have a bad attitude the whole time or what was that like for you?
MARK ROBINSON: If you think about what Marines do, like since the beginning of time, and it’s not us it’s politics, we always find a way to get into a place where we’re going to be overmatched, bro. They put us in situations to do things that honestly the average person would be like, “Why would you do that with this group of guys?”
As a leader, to me, it was like, “Yeah, this is a whole lot of stuff they are throwing at me but one, I can handle it, and two, who else is going to do this stuff?”
Who else is going to sit there and say, “Ok, you come up with a fair freakin’ fire watch roster,” assigning working parties fairly, justly. Everybody is about their buddies. Everybody’s about doing things to fit in and be cool. I’m like, “I got no buy-in to be anybody’s friend so yeah. I can do this. You need an interior guard? I don’t care who says that this is unfair. You, you, and you are gonna work the zero-dart-stupid shift.”
Leadership is literally making crappy decisions fairly and I’ve been doing that my who life. It was something that I don’t want to say I was born to do but something that I have the ability to do pretty easily.
TROY GENT: We can’t grow unless we are put in situations where we are stretched and forced to do things that we don’t know how to do.
MARK ROBINSON: One hundred percent.
TROY GENT: When I got to the fleet as a boot, it kind of felt like there was this transition going on and this fear with the seniors. Like, “Well, I can’t make them do push-ups cause then I might get in trouble for hazing.”
There was like kind of a weird energy I noticed. When you got to the fleet, what was it like? Hazing? Pushups? Getting thrashed still? Go into that, if you would.
MARK ROBINSON: Yeah, so we used to go to the treeline probably more than we needed to when I came in. Even when I was in the Army, it seemed to me like you knew that if you went out and there was a bunch of Marines somewhere, you would tread a little bit lightly because if they feel offended, a Marine is going to bring the fight to you.
I was in the Army down in Fort Dix, New Jersey outside the of the Army hospital there. There was a fire drill. Everybody had to come out of the building. I was standing there with a whole bunch of soldiers. I had my smokey on because I was a drill sergeant. I looked over and there was this guy in camies with his sleeves rolled up differently than me and he had the tripoint hat on.
I am looking at this dude while everybody is smoking, joking, and acting as undisciplined as five-year-olds. I look over at this dude and was like, “We probably don’t need to mess with that guy.”
There was just an orra about him. It might have been the way he looked in his uniform because he was a little bit tighter than we wore our uniforms. I’m like, “Yeah, that guy right there, I can be a part of that crew.”
You didn’t mess with Marines when I came in. Even Marines didn’t mess with other Marines. I know I jump around a lot but I am going to tell you a thing about what hazing was.
Drill instructor Sergeant Russel was the only drill instructor in my series who wasn’t in my platoon and put his hands on me in recruit training. The whole thing about, “You don’t touch other recruits,” is yeah. The SOP says you’re not supposed to touch anybody but you never touch another recruit because they don’t have any loyalty to you and the whole team can go down if he alligates on you, right?
If you remember, and I hope it was still this way when you went through, there was a time that you threw the grenade during recruit training. You’d throw one live grenade and then you would move on and do some of the field skills.
So all day long they’d have us in this shack basically. It was a big overhead. We were learning all these grunt field skills and it comes to the point where we have to throw the grenade. Now, the grenade class consisted of you identifying, looking up on the PowerPoint by death slide and looking at that grenade, knowing what the nomenclature was, and before you threw the grenade, you would stand in line and wait the troop up to where the grenade throw was.
They would have a box and you would have to put your hand in the box, feel the grenade, and you would have to tell what that grenade was from the class that they gave you three hours ago. If you didn’t, you’d have to go to the back of the line.
Drill instructor Sergeant Russel couldn’t stand me. When I was down in Paris Island we won initial drill not because I was anything better than anybody else at drill but I knew how to march because I had been in the Army and I knew how to march because I had taught drill as a hat in the Army. It was nothing to me.
He hated me because one of his platoon lost to our platoon in initial drill. So I line up to the grenade throw. I put my hand in the box. It was the oval grenade. I don’t know if it was the M7. I can’t remember anymore but I put my hand in there and I had a brain fart and I couldn’t remember what the name of the grenade was.
I get it wrong. He sends me back to the line. Back in the old days, I don’t know if it was when you came through but if a drill instructor wasn’t speaking to you and you weren’t in the squad bay shining your boots or going to the head, you couldn’t speak to another recruit. So I couldn’t ask anybody what the hell the grenade was.
After another half an hour of waiting to get up to the line, I put my hand in the box and it was the same grenade and I still didn’t know it so he sent me back. He was getting a kick out of it because I was the guide from ten thirty-four that won initial drill. I go to the back of the line again.
The third time I get up there, I put it in there and it’s the same darn grenade, Gent. I smirked and I remember looking straight and I remember looking to the side but I didn’t turn my head. He had actually punched me. So I go to the back of the line and I finally get up there. Either he put another grenade in that I could identify, the beer can one. But anyway, I get to throw the grenade.
Fast forward, I want to say a year and a half, I am up at Camp Lejeune. I walk into one of the dining facilities. Who is sitting there but drill instructor Sergeant Russell? He was a sergeant. I was a newly promoted sergeant. So I walked over to him.
He’s reading a newspaper and I said, “Hey, you! Weren’t you a hat down at Paris Island?”
Sergeant Russell folds the newspaper, looks up at me, and he says, “So what the bleep if I was?”
Gent, I said, “Yeah, I thought I recognized you,” and I left. I thought, “Hey if this guy is so mean and so much of a dog on the bone that he is going to look at somebody who remembers him from Paris Island and is ready to fight on command, I don’t need to mess with that guy.”
Hazing wasn’t a thing. I mean, yeah. The verbiage “Hazing” was there. We had options of how you could get somebody past a deficiency. You could either write them up and everybody knows that writing up takes time and doesn’t do anything except for possibly ruin somebody's life. Or, you could say, “Hey dude. You are going to do this and if not, I am going to beat you blank.”
The feeling of pain is such a motivator, bro. Like everything else the Marine Corps does, it takes things to the umpteenth. You know when you hear about things that happen at the eighth and I like putting shoe black on people’s body parts. That’s just stupid stuff that has to be squashed but you know how Marines are.
“My drill instructor was the biggest, baddest one.”
“Oh no. Mine was.”
So when you get a little bit of authority, “Well this guy over here, when we got promoted, we used to pin on their blood stripes.”
“Well when we got promoted, we used to run down the hall and pin on blood stripes.”
Before you know it, you are using a sledgehammer to put somebody’s Chevron’s on, right? It’s just the way Marines are, man. We always take things too far. Is there a need for discipline? Yeah. Is there a need for you to be able to give somebody a second chance without ruining his career? One hundred percent. Is there a need to be abusive to other people? That’s not a Marine thing. That’s a human thing, man. There is, in my mind, no need to be abusive towards another human being.
TROY GENT: I agree. Yeah, I mean I got caught making someone push when I was a Corporal by the duty officer. I thought I was in a good place back where the soda machines were. He said, “What are you doing, Gent?”
I looked over and was like, “Oh crap.”
I said, “Making my Marine push, sir.”
He said, “Alright, good to go,” and he walked off.
I think for the most part, those who could make a decision like that, knew what was better. Like, “I can either ruin Gent’s career or this kid obviously did something that deserved for him to push.”
I didn’t ruin him too much. I just made him do twenty push-ups or something but the motivation to avoid pain is a huge deterrent.
MARK ROBINSON: I know it has worked in my life.
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TROY GENT: You started out with two-four. Did you get promoted to Corporal Sergeant in that unit?
MARK ROBINSON: I was Corporal in two-four and two-four went down to Guantanamo Bay, Operation Sea Signal, in the middle of the 90s. 1994 I want to say. I got promoted to sergeant and that’s when I went from third platoon, Fox Company two-four to state platoon, Survallient Target Acquisition Platoon two-four.
I got promoted to sergeant while we were in Gitmo because state platoon didn’t really have a mission. We were down there basically as interior guards for the Haitian and Cuban migrant expeditionary force that we had down there.
They took state platoon. We called ourselves the imperial guard. We were the PSD for the battalion commander. Our battalion commander at the time was a man you might have heard of. His name was John Alan. His terminal rank in the Marine Corps was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.
I think he was assigned to Obama. He was National Security Director or something for Barack Obama. He ended up getting forced to retire because he was sending some racey emails between him and his biographer or something like that. He got caught up in some salacious scandal.
When I was his personal security detail, I was the chief scout of the state platoon so basically, I followed him around and he was walking through the camps. Me and six or seven other Marines would be his PSE.
At the time, I was going through a divorce with my wife and things were… I mean, I am at Gitmo trying to do this mission with these Haitians and Cubans but my mind was really, “I hope I get custody of my daughter,” which I did. “I hope everything works out.”
I am in a bad place. I would sit and talk with him and he’d ask me, “Hey, where are you from?” This and that. All of that, I am just focusing on me.
Okay, fast forward. I was a staff sergeant working out of 29 Palms sergeant’s course. I get sent to Washington DC for the CCRB (Course Curriculum Review Board). I go there, standing in some hall in Quantico, and down the hall, I see now General Allen. I see him and walk up to him and say, “Hey, sir. I don’t know if you remember me, but -”
He says, “Sergeant Robinson, state platoon second battalion fourth Marines, how did it work out with you and your daughter?”
TROY GENT: Wow.
MARK ROBINSON: How can this guy who’s been in charge of battalions and who has been in charge of all of Europe remember me, my marital issues, and my custody battle from Guatamino Bay ten to fifteen years ago?
Come to find out, General John Allen has a photographic memory. Anything he has seen, anything he has heard in his life, he can recall. He is just a fascinating dude.
What were we talking about? I get sidetracked. You are going to have to keep me on the rails cause I could talk to you all night.
TROY GENT: That’s alright. Was Gaunamino pretty boring or did you…
MARK ROBINSON: It was pencil-in-the-eye boring. We had no mission down there.
The mission was to make sure that the Haitians didn’t get across from Cuba to Miami. It was a stopping spot for us to process HIV riddled Haitians. It was a spot for us to separate family units into one area of the camp and unaccompanied males, like we might see nowadays coming into the country, into another camp so that those two populations couldn’t mix and have unaccompanied males raping or doing worse stuff to the females of the families.
The mission was good. It was just ungodly hot down there and being in the Marine Corps, we slept in GP tents while everybody else had case bands with AC cause, you know, we can’t do things like normal human beings, right?
TROY GENT: What were some of the things that you did to combat the boredom?
MARK ROBINSON: I was probably in the best shape of my life in Guantomino because the scenery at… Is it Capaleti? There is a lighthouse on their airstrip that is right on the edge of the bay. It’s right on the edge of the ocean actually. It was just beautiful.
Now all of the gym equipment was salted and rusted and everything. We had like cement dumbbells. We had to make do with what we had but all I did was work out when we weren’t on our mission protecting the battalion commander or when we weren’t going over to the windward side.
The windward side held the fenceline and all of the Marines that were on the mission to protect the fenceline down there had these sniper riffles. They were designated marksmen but they didn’t know how to use them because nobody was giving them the training on how to use these riffles, right? Who better than the state platoon to go over there and train those guys?
We would go over there and we would teach them up on how to shoot and then we would go back over and protect the battalion commander. We found the mission within the mission but it was boring.
One story about Guanamino Bay that is going to kick you in the lower regions, bro… I was a contractor at the Marine Corps base in Hawaii. I had probably been there for about ten years. It was about 2018. I am sitting down near the marina because every day, me and my boss, great guy named Dan Geltmacher. To this day, he’s the operations chief for the Marine Corps base Y.
He owns two boats down at the marina. One of them was a little sailing boat and the other one was a little bone fishing boat. We sit on this boat, drink Budlight (that went out of fashion, I know, but that is what we used to do), and fucking solve all the world’s problems.
But I am sitting there and one of our office workers, a lady named Kelly, her husband Dave has this Gunny that is his shop manager. Dave is a warrant officer. The Gunny was his shop manager. Dave brings this Gunny down to sit on the boat with us and as he’s walking towards the boat, he stops and he looks at me. I’m like, “Uh oh. I’m not in active duty anymore so I’m not scared of gunnies. What did I do? What could I have possibly have done?”
He says, “Robinson,” and I don’t wear anything with my name on it. Maybe he saw me on base, maybe at the gym? Anyway, he comes up to me and he says, “You are the reason why I am a United States Marine.”
Now hold on, Gent. This is going to hit you, bro. I said, “Why is that?”
He says, “You worked the Cuban migrant exercise down in Guantanamo, didn’t you?”
“How do you know that?”
He says, “When we were coming through one of the hanger bays to process families, you treated my family so well that I told my mom that I was going to be a Marine one day.”
TROY GENT: That’s amazing. How old was he at the time?
MARK ROBINSON: At that time, I must have been in my late forties or mid-fifties. He had to have been a Gunny at thirty-five or thirty-sixish. His family came across during the Cuban migrant crisis. He was one of maybe seven kids I think he said.
Marines had a really different reputation in Guantanamo Bay than the Army did, who was also working the same mission and that’s a different story. He said me but it was me and my state platoon basically. The way we processed and the way we assisted the families to get from the Coast Guard Cutter, to the dry land, to the camp that they needed to by processing through one of those hanger bays. We had different areas we had to go to for processing. He said that I was the reason he became a United States Marine.
TROY GENT: It completely changed his life. That’s awesome.
MARK ROBINSON: I don’t get choked up about a lot of stuff. I was already drinking so I was already emotional, right? But I was like, “Are you kidding me?”
He was like, “No.”
We had our sleeves rolled differently and the rumor, at least back then, was that you had to kill a family member in order to join the Marine Corps. ‘The White Sleeves’ is what they called us.
Most nations have this great fear of Marines to the point where they don’t even want to be on the same continent with them, much less on the same pier with them. He said the way we handled them during that brief time between coming to the United States and leaving their home country of Cuba, he says that’s why he became a United States Marine.
TROY GENT: What was the contrast between the way the Army and the Marines processed during the same mission?
MARK ROBINSON: Oh my gosh, bro. You are asking such good questions. Alright. We were processing Haitians and Haitians are generally very docile and peace-loving but when you piss anybody off, especially when their families are involved, they become rebellious. We were processing them and things weren’t going exactly the way the little camp elders wanted them to go.
The Army had the main mission of keeping them in the camps. The Marines were basically there as a react force. Me and my boys are in react. The state platoon commander is up on the second deck of this hanger bay. I have an office adjacent to his.
One of my REAC Marines runs up the ladder well. He’s like, “Hey, Staff Sergeant Robinson! Staff Sergeant Robinson! You’ve got to check this out.”
I get to the catwalk, lean over, and it looks like at least a thousand Haitians are running towards our hanger bay, right? The Army that is there to keep them in the camps, they’re high tailing it through the hanger bay. They looked like a garage sale, bro. All sorts of riot gear is falling off of them.
If you took your trash can in your back yard right now and tossed it down a hill, it would look like the Army going through the hanger bay, right?
I go over to the platoon commander’s hatch and I’m like, “Hey, sir. You got a second? You might want to look at this.”
He looks out there and says, “Get the react force. Put them in their react gear. Put them in front of the hanger bay.”
I’m looking at these people running and they look pissed but I’m like, “Okay, you got it, sir.”
I go down there. I say, “Hey boys.” I am shaking the racks saying, “Get up! Get up! Put on your helmets.”
TROY GENT: How many Marines was this?
MARK ROBINSON: No more than twenty but they were just sitting around there sweating and waiting but now we got a real world mission so everybody puts on their little shin pads. They put on their helmets with the little visor.
They gave the Army these billy-jack sticks that were so huge that the average soldier couldn’t wield it. They gave us these keystone cop little black batons. I was like, “This isn’t going to work but anyway…”
I put them online in front of the hanger bay. The Haitians run down to within like ten yards of where we are, they stop, some of them start dancing and chanting, others started asking who is in charge this that and the other, but nobody came into the hanger bay just because there were twenty Marines standing in front of this big ol’ clamshell with riot gear on.
That tells me that either they think Marines really do have to kill members of their families and they are scared, or all they needed was somebody to stand up to them and they were going to stop their rioting. All they needed was somebody to say, “You’re not going to do that.”
That is a huge difference between Army and Marine Corps training. They could have overrun that thing but they didn’t. They just needed somebody to say, “Hey, we’re not putting up with your crap, alright?”
That is a Gitmo story that will always be with me because I was literally thinking to myself, “Who would have thought that my last days on earth would be on this crappy little island trying to get people MREs.”
You know what I mean?
TROY GENT: Do you know what started the riot?
MARK ROBINSON: Oh, yeah. It was because they were living in crap conditions down there. Don’t get me wrong. We did the best we could to make it livable but we weren’t working with a lot. The situation in Haiti was so bad that somebody would take their infant,somebody would take their pregnant wife, put them on a raft, and try to get across whatever little part of the Atlantic ocean they needed to to get to a better life.
All I thought my job was while I was down there as a US Marine was to make that less freakin’ painful. Make that livable. Make that not be the thing that…
I just a lot of times I go into situations where I put myself in the position of the father or the brother or the husband and I’m like come on. We got to better than this and down in Gitmo I was like, “If I can make somebody’s miserable transit from wherever they came from to wherever they are going to go a little bit better then hey. Why not?”
TROY GENT: I am going to ask one more question Mark on Gitmo. Let’s schedule another podcast interview cause you’ve got lots more to say. Did they have an area outside of the wire or between two areas of the wire where there were landmines and would anybody try to cross it? I mean, I’ve heard the rumors.
MARK ROBINSON: One hundred percent. One of my best friends in life, he’s on I think it might be Wake Island. He’s literally out there in the middle of the Pacific right now as a safety officer for USARPAC (United States Army Pacific). He was EOD down in Gitmo at the same time I was doing the Haitian-Cuban migrant effort down there.
Their job as EOD in Gitmo was to go out of the wire and blow up anti-personal mines so those rumors are true. One hundred percent.
TROY GENT: Do you know if it is still like that? He was getting rid of the mines. Did they come up with different protective measures or security measures?
MARK ROBINSON: Blowing them in place is what I think his job was. I don’t know how prolific the mine effort was down in Gitmo but I do know that the mission… It can’t be over. When do you know you found the last buried mine? When do you ever know that?
Afghanistan was another thing. I mean, you were walking around in Afghanistan. There were mines there from when the Russians used to lay them. You never know.
There is an actual agency and I don’t know what their budget is but their whole existence is to go to war zones or former war zones and demine them. That’s a UN project. Everywhere that anybody who has had any type of ballistic ordinance or has fought, there is a whole UN organization that’s to go deploy there and try to get rid of mines. That goes back as far as WWII, whenever!
OUTRO: Thank you for listening.
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