Fondest memories: 1) telling everyone I was going and 2) telling everyone I completed it.
In general, I remember flying from the Kansas City processing center, the "greeting" getting off the bus at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. When we got to the barracks, the drill instructors put a colonel's son against a post, one at the nose and one at each ear until he broke down. (He got built up by the end of training.) A recruit from Arkansas got caught with others smoking and blowing smoke up the stove chimney. The drill instructor had them field strip a cigarette, chew and swallow it. He was the only one who enjoyed it and did not get sick. Same recruit had a corpsman put smallpox vaccinations up and down his arm. They told him that if he told, he would get them on his face. He could not make roll call, other recruits told what had happened. The drill instructor was heard on the phone with the head medical officer being not politically correct.
We had a new drill instructor join us a few weeks later. During Force Recon, after he watched us at the washrack, he jumped off the roof, did a full roll and came up neat and spotless. He was also able to take buckets to the top of a Quonset hut, unseen or heard. After lights out, anyone going to the head got doused with a bucket of water.
I will never forget in November, at Camp Pendleton, Calif., our unit being told to prepare for a world war as President John F. Kennedy had been killed.
I remember this and more.