USCG Training Center Cape May

Cape May is the Coast Guard's only boot camp, making it the Parris Island of a branch that 60% of Americans don't know is military — which means your family will tell people you're at 'some kind of navy thing in New Jersey' for the entire eight weeks. The Jersey Shore beach town is RIGHT THERE, tantalizingly close, with Victorian B&Bs, craft breweries, and tourists eating funnel cake while you're doing flutter kicks on a grinder 200 yards away. The salt water taffy is within smelling distance and you cannot have it. Cape May the town is genuinely one of the prettiest beach communities on the East Coast, and you'll experience exactly none of it until graduation day when you emerge, freshly minted, into a world of sunlight and boardwalk fries like a sailor-shaped mole person. Every Coastie remembers Cape May the way Marines remember boot camp — involuntarily, vividly, and with a strange pride that only makes sense to people who've also been screamed at about the proper way to fold a towel. The shared trauma is the real uniform. The Company Commanders are as intense as any Drill Instructor, and if you say that to a Marine they'll laugh, and if you say it to a Coastie they'll nod, and both of them are right.