Not every person who joins the Marine Corps intends to make it a career. Some use it as a stepping stone to another career. Managing editor Tami Roleff talked last week with a Marine deployed with Regimental Combat Team-7 to Afghanistan who plans to use his experience in the Marine Corps in his next career…
Corporal Gary Martz, 26, worked as a mechanic before deciding to change careers. “I found out that it’s not all that great a career. Fantastic hobby, but not the kind of career that I was looking for.” So Martz decided to follow his heart. He’s had a love affair with guns since he learned to shoot a Remington .22 rifle when he was 7 years old. Martz described one moment of which he’s especially proud, in which he killed two deer with one bullet. “I was sitting on a hill, I aimed at the first one and there was another one standing behind it that I didn’t see. And when I shot it I dropped both of them.” Martz said his favorite weapon is the military rifle, “M-4, a semi-automatic carbine.” Martz extended his enlistment in order to deploy to Afghanistan, but plans to leave the Marine Corps in September, after he returns home from deployment in August. Then he intends to earn an associate’s degree in gun-smithing at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona. And after that? “I’d like to be a county sheriff, Loudon County, Virginia.”
