Occasionally we get calls from the other three services asking if we’ll do artwork for their units. Because we are Marines here at the office, people from the other services seem surprised when we agree to do their unit designs. I’m all for the inter-service rivalry, but it’s all just surface fun, and when it comes down to it, I deeply admire anyone who serves in the military. My wife, after all, who comes from an Air Force family, herself served in the Navy. While my father, two brothers and I all served in the Marines, I have two uncles who served in the Army in Vietnam–one of them, my Uncle Gary, was killed in action. In WWII, one grandfather served in the Army Air Corps and the other served in the Navy, a fighting Sea Bee, who fought on Tarawa and Iwo Jima alongside Marines.

So although we Marines may make fun of the other services about the size of their biceps, and the other services will make fun of us about of the size of our vocabularies, at the end of the day we’re here for each other and we always have been.