Mortarman

You checked into the weapons platoon with a NAVMC 3500.44 task list you have never read, a MOS school certificate from the infantry training pipeline, and a nickname the section will assign you inside 72 hours whether you like it or not. The 0341 Mortarman at the Pvt–LCpl level is the ammo bearer and A-gunner on the gun line — the Marine who humps the baseplate, carries the bipod on his shoulder, stacks rounds by fuze type and propellant lot, digs the gun pit to spec, plants the aiming stakes at the section leader's direction, and runs the crew drill until the section chief stops correcting the same mistakes. The tube and the math belong to the gunner and the fire direction center (FDC) right now. Your job is to make sure the gun is never the reason the section misses a fire mission. The M252A2 81mm mortar is the primary system in the Marine Corps infantry battalion weapons platoon, and the M224A1 60mm LWCMS (Lightweight Company Mortar System) crews attached or organic to rifle companies. You will crew both before your first PCS. The 81mm baseplate weighs thirty-four pounds. The bipod assembly weighs roughly fifteen pounds. A single 81mm illumination or HE round weighs between nine and fifteen pounds depending on the variant. When you are humping ten rounds plus your personal kit through ground the 7-ton cannot reach, the mathematics of load management become very physical very fast. The Marine who has been skipping the hump days and coasting on garrison PT finds this out at the worst time — at the back of the column at MCAGCC Twentynine Palms during an ITX rotation, in the dark, when the section leader is watching. Garrison time at the battalion is a rhythm of tube maintenance, MCMAP, range support, working parties, motor-T prep, and the company gunny's working-party roster. Field ops and the ITX rotation at Twentynine Palms are where the actual job lives: the gun pit gets dug to the section leader's dimension specs, the bipod clamps torque to the standard, the sight unit gets bore-sighted and collimated before the first fire command, and the aiming stakes go in at the designated azimuth before the section chief has to say it. The fire mission drill is the crew's performance metric — "READY," "CHARGE TWO," "DEFLECTION 2750," "ELEVATION 1240," "ROUND," "HANG," "SHOT," and the timing discipline the gunner and A-gunner have drilled until they run it without talking over each other. The MEU deployment cycle (Marine Expeditionary Unit — Battalion Landing Team) is the operational backbone of the three Marine divisions. As a boot 0341, you will work through the MEU Predeployment Training Program (PTP) workup, the subsequent six-to-seven-month MEU deployment afloat on the Amphibious Ready Group (ARG), and the post-deployment reset. The workup is where the section gets evaluated on MEU-SOC certification tasks — mortar fire mission proficiency, ship-to-shore movement with crew-served equipment, helo-borne mortar section insertion, and the various MEU tactical mission profiles. The afloat phase is different from garrison in one specific way: there is no room to swing the baseplate on the ship, and the crew drills happen in whatever compartment the BLT has been assigned for weapons training. You will know every member of your gun crew very well by month three of the deployment. The physical standard is the base requirement, not the destination. The section leader tracks PFT and CFT scores against the gun team's ability to carry the ammunition load on real terrain. A Pvt who scores 2nd-Class on the CFT is the Marine the gun team leader reshuffles out of the ammo carry before a deliberate operation — not because the rules require it, but because the mission does. First-Class PFT and CFT under MCO 6100.13 is the floor, and the section's informal standard is that the ammo bearer carries the same load the gunner does without it becoming a topic of conversation.