11/01/2026
YUT!!
Marines, as the joke goes, eat crayons. If you’ve spent any time in or around the U.S. military in the last decade, you’ve probably heard some variation of it. Whether it’s that a Marine doesn’t know what else to do with crayons, or perhaps just likes the taste, give a Marine a box of Crayolas — from Pine Green to Periwinkle to Radical Red — and they’ll end up in their stomach before too long.
This meme is now ubiquitous in some quarters. Social media is filled with mostly self-deprecating references to Marines being “crayon eaters.” Not just one, but multiple Marine veterans have started lines of edible crayons. The Marine Corps even produced a video in 2018 making light of the joke for National Crayon Day. Whether you like it, resent it, or embrace it, the joke has become a fixture of modern-day U.S. military culture.
But like many widely-shared military memes, this particular joke seems to have emerged out of the ether. Just as Killroy was one day, simply, here — and then everywhere — in World War II, it seems like Marines were just one day known as crayon eaters.
The internet is a vast place that rarely forgets anything, though, so Task & Purpose decided to take a journey deep into its depths to try and track down when, exactly, Marines started eating crayons.
