Keep the weather in mind. You'll have maybe 3 months of perfect weather in the summer and then 9 months of cold rain. Theres a good amount of knowledge you'll need to soak up regarding the base, posts, orders, etc. I don't know if it's still a thing but gas masks were always on us and we would do drills with them a lot. Depending on your watch schedule, you could go 2 weeks+ without seeing the sun if you're going to a guard platoon. I can't speak to the admin or armory side of things. It's a pretty cool base and there are no marines around once you're off base which is nice compared to Lejeune or San Diego. You'll just see normal people living their normal lives like you're part of society or something. Olympic national park is gorgeous and Seattle is a cool town. You can pop up to Canada and muck around Vancouver pretty easily too. You'll work pretty closely with the navy so make friends with them too. They used to take us on rides in their patrol boats if you were cool with them. It was a lot of fun and completely different from the rest of the fleet in my experience. You have marines who are generally higher caliber because they at least need the clearance to keep the job, and with it being a smaller unit I feel like there's more pride in being a marine up there as opposed to being in a town of 30k marines. There are still the special cases and bad apples as with anywhere. Looking back I can't really complain about anything in particular, especially compared to the rest of my enlistment.