Anything other than go to dances, drive around town trying to find a dog, hang out with civilians, get mixed up with shady characters, etc? It seems like they had a whole lot of time for other things, but spent practically no time doing any actual military training.
"They just don't realize." "Donnie can go in there and make them love me".
There were episodes where Gomer did maneuvers and field exercises, but it didn't happen every week. By the way, those are some of the funnier episodes in my opinion.
shareHaven't seen this series for years, but I can easily remember a whole episode where during bazooka training, they seemed to misplace one of the shells.
Then there was the three-part episode with sea maneuvers, with one episode fully devoted to Gomer bungling on getting onto the boat beside the ship.
Many of the early episodes dealt with aspects of Gomer's basic training.
They did have a few episodes with war maneuvers. The funniest might have been Gomer guarding the bridge, refusing to let anyone cross without the password "Qualabatoo."
Another one of those had Gomer set up to be captured so he'd give wrong information to the "enemy" but he was not as dumb as Carter thought and accidentally gave them the right information.
I think from the outset the producers realized they couldn't have a long-running series totally wrapped up in military happenings. They also had the problem of needing Gomer and Carter to stay together, which couldn't very well happen if Carter became an officer, or if Gomer moved on to some specialty school. They couldn't have had Carter running the motor pool with Gomer one of his mechanics (which would have been somewhat logical) because Gomer couldn't have kept fouling up on a skill we already knew he was good at.
So we had lots of episodes about the personal lives of these Marines. When you think about it, McHale's Navy had lots of episodes that virtually ignored the war going on around them.
One thing that stands out in my memory is the number of times Carter and Gomer got involved with civilian crooks. They must have had a couple of dozen episodes where the police were involved because of some sort of thievery going on. I can recall warehouse thieves that tricked Gomer into helping them, the friendly guy who stole the big radio Gomer and Duke were hauling back to camp, and even the little old lady on the bus who kept trying to pinch Gomer's wallet. Actually, just recalling these in general, I think most of the ones involving crooks would be on my list of favorite episodes.