The Few, The Proud, The Extreme
Written: Jul 02 '01 (Updated Jul 02 '01)
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Pros: A fine book about a fine organization
Cons: Could use an update; doesn't include The Crucible
The Bottom Line: To anyone who loses faith in America and Americans—and wants it back—go to one of those graduations at Parris Island. Or read Ricks.
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| willardrules's Full Review: |
On 12 and 13 March 1998 my wife and I attended our son’s graduation from Marine Recruit Training at Parris Island, SC (Plt 1018, 1st BN, C Co). We had all read Making the Corps before Bill left for PI in mid-December, and in our correspondence would refer back-and-forth to various incidents and lessons related by the author, Thomas Ricks, in his nicely detailed account of the 13-week recruit training program.
A Marine recruiter had recently told me he’d been having a pretty good year. While the other armed services were recovering from sex scandals or having second thoughts about coed basic training, the Marine Corps held their ground, and were labeled "extremist" by a liberal feminist who also happened to be Assistant Secretary of the Army at the time.
They couldn't have bought better publicity.
To understand why, one only has to read "Making the Corps," an account of Marine Corps Recruit Training by Thomas E. Ricks, a Wall Street Journal Pentagon reporter. So impressed was Ricks by the confidence and elan of enlisted Marines he’d met on assignment in Somalia in 1992, he decided to learn how they got that way.
"The average Marine lance corporal speaks with more self-confidence to a reporter than does the average Army captain," Ricks, a nonveteran, noted, "I wanted to see how an organization could take 50 or so American kids--a group steeped in a culture of individualism and consumerism, many of them users of recreational drugs...and turn them into Marines who saw themselves as a band of brothers...." What he saw and learned is recorded in this book, along with commentary on the widening gap between Marine Corps culture and the rest of American society. More about that later.
The heart of "Making the Corps," and what makes it such captivating reading, is the story of fifty-five young men who come of age in boot camp. It begins in early March, 1995 as they scramble off the bus ("Now!"), and take positions on the rows of yellow footprints painted in asphalt at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. It is there the dazed, disoriented members of Platoon 3086 learn the first of many hard facts about their new lives. "They are," they are abruptly informed, "simply 'recruits.' They will have to earn the title 'Marine.'"
Not all will. In spite of having met stringent enlistment requirements, some fourteen percent of the 20,000 recruits who arrive at Parris Island annually drop out or are sent home for various reasons before completing training. So it is with the members of Platoon 3086, one of whom flames out spectacularly after five weeks on the Island, shouting at his Drill Instructor: "You can take your Marine Corps and shove it...." The former recruit is soon riding a bus home, Ricks notes.
For those who make it, the story ends thirteen weeks later at graduation ceremonies, where some of the parents in attendance barely recognize their own sons, so great has been the physical transformation from civilian to Marine. More profound changes are less visible. Ricks observed 3086 throughout its time on Parris Island. He provides a satisfyingly detailed look at the obstacles these young men have to overcome, and follows several members of the Platoon over their arduous three-month ordeal.
For instance, we meet two Bostonians with similar names who become the heart of the Platoon: Andrew Lee, "the small, wiry, inarticulate leader by example" who completes 99 sit-ups and 30 pull-ups during week three's strength tests (Are you hard, Lee? "Yes sir. Hard as chewed gum, sir."); and Charles Lees, a Samoan-American graduate of Holy Cross "who has the intelligence to teach his slower comrades, the maturity to know how do to it, and the physical strength to ensure that they listen." Designated one of the Platoon's "fat trays" when he arrives at Parris Island, Lees will eventually drop seventy-six pounds during recruit training.
Among the more problematic members of Platoon 3086 are: Paul Buijs--a thin, seventeen year-old from the Netherlands, who insists in private conversation he's a Pacifist. "It is not clear why he left the Netherlands to join the Marines," says Ricks; Alabaman, Jonathan Prish, "who brought with him evidence of his white supremacist past in Mobile in the form of seven tattoos... including 'White Pride' and one made of three crossed sevens which together resemble a swastika;" and former gang member, Earnest Winston, Jr., "a black recruit from the violent inner-city streets of southeast Washington, D.C. [who] has nothing if not an instinct for survival."
In Making the Corps, Ricks also profiles the men and women who do the training, the Drill Instructors. Gone are the brutal, foul-mouthed DIs portrayed in the movie, Full Metal Jacket; Marines who had a taste of the old school may disagree, but the '90s version hasn't entirely lost its edge. While many of today's DIs believe they are the cream of Marine NCOs, Ricks points out it is the recruiters, who represent the Corps at the retail level, who actually have that distinction--though DIs come a close second. "To make a twenty-year career in the Corps, an enlisted Marine generally must either do recruiting duty or a tour as a DI. The difference is that the DI is far more closely watched," says Ricks. In today's new climate, DIs put their careers on the line every time they go to work; one false move with a recruit and they're on the beach.
Ricks learned one theme dominates the instruction of new DIs. As Sgt. Maj. Philip Holding tells a leadership seminar at the Drill Instructor School, also at Parris Island: "The drill instructor holds in his hands the future of the Corps. Don't ask a recruit to do something you wouldn't do. Think of them as your sons and daughters. Change the way they think about life...We want a warrior who thinks, like those down in Somalia that held babies one day and had to kill the next day, and knew the difference between the two.'"
In a chapter titled, "In the Marines," Ricks reports on how Platoon 3086 fared in the Fleet. The results seem to surprise him, although they shouldn't. Coming off an intense motivational high, many of the former recruits feel let down by the loosening of standards after boot camp. "Most will struggle at times to maintain their new selves," says Ricks. "...[S]ome falter and fall away from the Corps--especially those who maintained ties to home and their old lives. Over 3086's first year in the Marines, six of the platoon's fifty-five graduates will be discharged. Another two will desert. These eight had made it through boot camp and been certified as Marines, yet somehow couldn't hold on." Most will succeed, however.
In spite of many difficult episodes, which Ricks faithfully recounts, Recruits Buijs, Prish and Winston, the three young men who were among the bottom 10% of 3086, graduate with the Platoon. Buijs, "who has done a complete turnaround," does well in the Fleet, and later tells Ricks he'd like to apply to Annapolis; Prish, who serves as a guard at the coveted U.S. Embassy in London, is getting his racist tattoos covered up: "I've left that all behind," he says; in Japan, Winston, who experiences real or perceived incidents of racism during and after boot camp, nonetheless insists "If I wouldn't have joined, I'd been in a grave or in jail somewhere." He is a Marine, Ricks concludes.
At the same time, star recruits, Lee and Lees, continued to do well. Andrew Lee "charges through [infantry training] without breaking stride...He is promoted to lance corporal, placing him two ranks above many 3086ers, a powerful performance in the rank-conscious Corps." A reservist, Charles Lees works for a Massachusetts software manufacturer, but misses the camaraderie of Parris Island and regrets not having gone on active duty. He is in New York on November 10, 1996, the Marine Corps' birthday, Ricks recounts: "Not having an invitation to that city's Marine Corps ball, he observes the occasion by going out to the military cemetery on the border between Brooklyn and Queens and visiting the grave of Dan Daly, one of two Marines awarded two Medals of Honor."
What struck many Americans about former Assistant Secretary of the Army Sara Lister's calling Marines "extremists" was the tone-deaf quality of her remarks. Marines take enormous pride in being "extreme" ("We had good violence, good intensity in there today," says one DI of the Platoon's performance during a combat exercise). Lister, and those who share her views, are simply naive. Still, in what are perhaps the weakest portions of this otherwise solid book, Ricks raises social and cultural issues that are not without relevance to today's Marine Corps and the rest of us. Among them:
--The alienation of the military from civilian society. "In its separateness from the larger society, the Marine Corps especially among the services offers sanctuary from a chaotic nation where honor, courage, and commitment are values often misunderstood," observes Ricks. "But a sustaining strength can also be a limiting weakness." Many Americans believe we are in the midst of a culture war between traditional values and nihilistic, anything-goes social attitudes. There's no question where the Marine Corps comes down on that, yet as Ricks says: "When the military is politically active, when it believes it is uniquely aware of certain dangers, when it discusses responding to domestic threats to cherished values, then it edges toward becoming an independent actor in domestic politics."
--Mutual distrust between the nation's political elites and military leaders. This "ultimately could undercut American foreign policy, making it more difficult to use force," Ricks cautions, and recommends steps be taken to repair the relationship or otherwise engage the military with civilian society: "First, consideration should be given to somehow reinstating the draft." Yet, he concedes, "the resumption of conscription appears unlikely." Indeed, no matter how effective recruit training might be as cultural therapy, it surely must be too expensive to be used as such on a wide scale, absent a war emergency.
Should the military be "just another job" or continue to differ "in critical respects from the society it is sworn to protect"? In the end, these issues are a distraction.
The esprit de corps of those young Marines in Somalia that inspired Ricks to examine Marine Corps Recruit Training is neither the product nor the province of social theorists. It is, instead, the long tradition of honor, courage and commitment--the Marines' core values--which "create the alchemy that converts unoriented youths into proud, self-reliant, stable citizens--into whose hands the nation's affairs may be safely placed," as Victor Krulak, a retired Marine general and father of a former commandant once put it. Or as former recruit Charles Lees said of his Parris Island experience: "It was all the basic things you should learn growing up, but for some reason society de-emphasizes."
One thing even as keen an observer as Ricks is could not fully capture—perhaps only a parent can feel it—is the pride of seeing the graduating platoons swing into view and march on to the Parade Deck just before the start of Recruit Liberty (on Thursday, the day before the graduation ceremony), and hear the Marine Hymn played just for them the next morning. At the same time, one also has to be there to appreciate fully the firm handshakes and hard-earned elan and confidence of the Marines, newly minted or otherwise (the pain is temporary, they say, the pride lasts forever). What Ricks gets exactly right, however, is the integrity of this organization—one of the last innately honorable institutions in our country.
The Marines know who they are and what they're about. We can all sleep better for it.
Recommended:
Yes
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willardrules
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