re: Question about marines

The only time I ever had a lot of interaction with Marines was when I was at Ft. Knox at the US Army Armor School. The Marines send their tankers there to train to crew tanks. From what I saw of the Marine recruit tankers, the only difference between them and Army tankers was their headgear, how they rolled up their BDU blouse sleeves, and the odd way their DI's called cadence when marching. Army formations when marching sing cadence (Jody calls, etc.) and the drill Sargent actually give verbal commands like "to the left, march!". But the Marine recruit tankers never sang cadence and their DIs did not give actual word commands when marching. Instead they'd do some sort of series of unintelligible grunts almost like some sort of code that told the formation what to do. It was odd to say the least.

Maybe it's different for non-combat arms MOS troops, but there's not really much difference between combat arms Army soldiers and Marines from what I saw. At least that was the case back in the early 90s.