I comment a lot on military questions subs like r/MilitaryFAQ to give advice to people looking to join. But I feel hypocritical sometimes because I'll offer pretty established advice, but stuff I didn't personally do but actually turned out fine. Any of y'all make moves that you'd normally tell some idiot not to do, but in your case turned out well? Here's mine:

• Enlisted with a college degree, but had zero trouble getting into OCS right at my two year minimum, which we often tell kids not to count on.

• Barely prepared for Marine Boot, then barely prepared for Marine OCS. I'm amazed I didn't fail either because mostly all I did was Poolee DEP functions for Boot and unit PT before OCS.

• Got fired from my deployed billet because I spent too much time on my secondary billet: was assigned as watch officer in Iraq but also a token Civil Affairs guy. Kept contriving legit reasons to be gone for days on CA stuff, so the OpsO kicked me out of the TOC saying "you're useless to me, just go play with your Hajis." So I basically went semi-rogue, had an awesome tour and got an NCM for it.

• Carried a foreign weapon on deployment: people always tell COD kiddies that want to enlist that you can't just pick up an AK on deployment. In 2004 in Iraq I saw EOD guys and a couple SeaBees with Soviet stuff they ganked, so I got ballsy and acquired a British Sterling submachine gun and carried it around just to be Joe Cool for a few weeks. No fight on that tour so all I did was test fire it into a berm during an exercise, but I felt badass (in a nerdy Boot way).