Making the Corp. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1997 by Amy Waldman

Young American males at the Marine Corps Parris Island boot camp with sitcom-stuffed brains, fat-riddled bodies, and spirits drained of purpose. They are soft in every sense. When they leave, they have been emptied out, broken down, and built back up. They are muscled and strong, able and even eager to endure pain. More than that, they are better people, stripped of prejudices and instilled with discipline. They aspire toward excellence. They disdain selfishness.

That end product -- confident young men capable of handling extraordinary responsibility -- understandably fascinated Thomas Ricks, The Wall Street Journal's Pentagon reporter, when he observed Marines on patrol in Somalia, so he followed his curiosity to the source. When Platoon 3086 was deposited on Parris Island in 1995, Ricks was there, and he was still there eleven weeks later when those who had survived graduated into the Marines' elite ranks. Then he followed many of the recruits when they left the island's hermetic conditions to return to an imperfect, temptation-filled civilian world.

His observations made for a remarkable. Journal article, and now they form the core of a compelling book on the corps. He shows how the Marines remake their charges, and he examines how the institution remade itself from the lows of the 1970s. This is really a book about values: their absence in society, their transmission in the corps, and the growing gap between the two. And it is a wake-up call: That cultural alienation, Ricks suggests, has the potential to become not just a matter of sociological interest, but a danger to society.

The Marines are the smallest and poorest of the military's armed services, but they are also the proudest, an elite that relies not on big boats or planes, but brawn, brains, and history for its identity. "People may be enticed into the Army or Air Force by the prospect of vocational training and GI educational benefits," Ricks writes, "but they enlist in the Marines to measure, better, or change themselves -- and to have an adventure." Some come also because of tradition, and the prestige of what Ricks calls the working class's Ivy League.

Those reasons lure a motley crew to Platoon 3086: a black gang member, a former white supremacist, a pacifist Dutch-American; a bond trader's son, and dozens of working-class denizens who see the Marines as perhaps their last escape from lives dead-ending at Taco Bell. They are all deposited in the swamps of South Carolina, where their hair is shorn and their possessions and pasts stripped. They wade into a blizzard of orders, insults, and constant, grueling activity, deliberately designed to disorient. Saying "I" is a cardinal sin: It shows they are thinking of themselves, not the unit. A thread hanging from a uniform is a sign of disrespect for themselves and their superiors, a lack of attention to detail. The treatment seems cruel, arbitrary, even brutal, but it is carefully structured. "They learn that if they follow orders, their life will be calmer," says one sergeant, offering a rationale the recruits are never privy to. (Ricks himself might have done more to make clear how the seemingly arbitrary hazing and abuse pays off in battle, when disobeying orders or placing your life above others or not doing your best, can be life- and mission-threatening.)

If boot camp is to succeed, it must do more than reshape bodies; it must alter mentalities. Drill instructors, formidable characters who have made the corps their life, do that partly by example: They are tireless, and their dedication to the Marines is bottomless. They do it partly by humiliation and haranguing. And they do it partly by cunning, forcing, for example, the white supremacist and black gang member to share a tent during Basic Warrior Training. They emerge friends. (Ricks notes that while the Marines have not done as well as the Army at ending racial strain or promoting blacks, they have done much better than society. But there is no easy way to replicate in society the close proximity and shared enterprise of boot camp)

Ricks' detailed week-by-week chronology of the recruits' experience tends to reflect their lows and highs, lagging during repetitive exercises such as rifle training, and climaxing during Basic Warrior Training, or "Warrior Week," when the recruits go into the woods for a dose of crawling through the mud and a taste of real combat, and return, says Ricks, "more Marine than not."

Ricks uses this section to provide a history of the corps, which has resurrected itself from the lows of the post-Vietnam era, when it was rife with crime and drugs and riddled with substandard recruits. The Marines, Ricks says, ultimately were rescued by two men: James Webb, a Vietnam veteran and novelist whose books chronicled the alienation between elites and the military and heavily influenced the outlook of those who served after him; and Alfred Gray, the no-nonsense grunt-empathizing general whom Webb, as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, appointed commandant of the corps.