In the mid-winter night in coastal South Carolina, on an island just north of Hilton Head’s luxury and just south of Beaufort’s history, a bus pulls up under a floodlight that is casting a ghostly pallor in front of the steel doors of a homely and institutional brick building. From the building a uniformed man with a canvas hat bursts forth. Thirty-eight heads on the bus, all male and mostly 18-year-olds, crane to watch the man’s approach. They are curious and apprehensive.
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When the uniformed man reaches the bus, he vomits a string of nearly unintelligible commands, his tone unrelenting and cruel. It takes only 60 seconds for the kids to file off the bus and take formation on the yellow footprints outlined on the sidewalk. It’s their first step in the Marine regimen.
The kids slump and slouch, with papers in their hands and jeans on their legs and logoed sweatshirts covering their chests. Most look pretty scrawny. A handful is more pear-like. They’re not what you’d call a varsity football team.
“You are now at Marine Corps Depot Parris Island, South Carolina (www.merdpi.usmc.mil). You have taken the first step of becoming a member of the world’s finest fighting force, the United States Marine Corps. You should be standing at attention. That means, your heels are together, your feet are at a 45-degree angle, your thumbs on your trousers, your palms rolled back, your fingers are at a natural curl, your head is staring straight to the front, and your mouth is shut. I say again, your mouth is shut. This is the only way you will speak to a Marine, sailor, or civilian aboard this depot. Do you understand?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Do you understand?!”
“Aye, sir!”
No matter what they look like now. In 13 weeks, they’ll look a whole lot better. They’ll say “sir” and “ma’am” automatically; they’ll reflexively stand with feet at 45-degree angles. They’ll keep their backs straight. The scrawny ones will have some muscle and the bigger ones will have some lean. And as for that hair on their heads—30 minutes from now that’ll be on the barber’s floor. For the next 13 weeks, they’ll have no caffeine, no cigarettes, no TV, no magazines and very little individual respect.
 Goodbye hair, hello uniformity. Within the first 30 minutes of their late night arrival on Parris Island, male recruits are shorn of their locks. |
That’s assuming, of course, that these boys make it through boot camp in 13 weeks. For some, it will take longer. They may get sick or suffer a stress fracture. They might break down mentally and require observation and counseling before they continue their physical training, their rifle training, their teamwork training. It could be a long road toward earning the eagle, globe and anchor emblem of the United States Marines. Odds are that four recruits in this group of 38 will never even finish—their marriage to America’s military elite annulled.
“Success in the Marine Corps depends on team work. Therefore teamwork is an essential part of your training here on Parris Island. Starting now, you will train as a team. You will live, eat, sleep, train as a team. The words ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘we’ are no longer part of your vocabulary. You will use words like, ‘these recruits’ and ‘those recruits.’ Do you understand?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Do you understand?!”
“Aye, sir!”
Inside the building, the recruits fill out paperwork, and then line up by a row of phones. Beside each phone is a script for these 1am calls home. These are the only words they get—no more, no less: “This is recruit [last name]. I have arrived safely at Parris Island. Please do not send any food or bulky items to me in the mail. I will contact you in seven to nine days with my mailing address. Thank you for your support and goodbye for now.”
Once a Marine, always a Marine
During his State of the Union address on January 23, President George W. Bush, after some talk of earmarks and health care and oil imports, got to the topic at the forefront for many Americans: his troop escalation in Iraq.
“We’re deploying reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq,” Bush said, bringing the total to approximately 160,000. Of the roughly 1.3 million active U.S. troops, the burden of fighting and dying in Iraq has fallen primarily to the Army and the Marines. Four thousand additional Marines will go to the Anbar Province, “where al-Qaeda terrorists have gathered and local forces have begun showing a willingness to fight them.” He also asked Congress to authorize an increase in the size of active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years—an 11 percent increase.
Marines (or devil dogs or jarheads or leathernecks) pop up all over the place. Art Buchwald, the longtime columnist and humorist who died last month, was a Marine. Actor Gene Hackman was a Marine. So was Drew Carey—hence those awful spectacles, known as Birth Control Glasses on Parris Island. Both of Virginia’s senators were Marines—and the junior senator, Jim Webb, currently has a Marine son deployed in Iraq.
Among the 21 special guests sitting in the First Lady’s Box during the State of the Union was Sergeant Aubrey McDade, Jr., who was recently awarded the Marines’ second-highest honor for repeatedly risking his own life to save other Marines ambushed in a Fallujah alleyway. After that stint in Iraq, McDade came to Parris Island, to be a drill instructor, indoctrinating the next wave of Marines.
The Marines’ 13-week training tops all other military services. Its troops are known for being the first in combat, for being especially disciplined, for being the best.
But that doesn’t mean 18-year-olds are lining up outside the doors of recruiting offices begging for a chance to become a jarhead. To meet the quotas placed on the all-volunteer service in a time of war—32,301 was the Marines’ magic number last year—the Marines still have to get their brand out there.
Over the past 20 years, part of their strategy has been to host monthly educators’ workshops: Recruiters invite school staff, usually high school teachers and counselors, to either of two recruit training depots (San Diego or Parris Island) for a four-day glimpse into the life of the Marine recruit. It’s meant to demystify the process by which civilians turn into Marines. Parris Island handles male recruits east of the Mississippi and all female recruits. It churns out 18,000 Marines a year. During the educators’ visit, they witness many stages of the training process. With 44 graduations a year, those stages are usually running concurrently.
Last month, Marine recruiters invited teachers from Virginia and Kentucky. Those included a ninth-grade English teacher from Charlottesville High School, Michele Rzewnicki, and Hannah Catherine Munro, who directs development for the Virginia High School League, which is based in Charlottesville.
To round out the numbers, the Marines invited me and a photographer, too. My mission: to talk to Charlottesville Marines-in-training. During the four days on Parris Island, I will see recruits fresh off the bus, recruits in the early stages of physical training, recruits working at the rifle range, recruits at the culminating 54-hour training test, and recruits as they graduate.
Retired Marines are on hand for the trip, too, and from them I get my first lesson in Marine culture thanks to a casual blunder.
“So ya’ll are ex-Marines?” I inquire of a group of men who have been “ooh rah”ing through the morning’s flight from Richmond.
“Former Marines,” comes the quick correction. “The only ex-Marines are guys like Lee Harvey Oswald.” Once a Marine, always a Marine.
“Loving every second”: Week 1
If Ryan Gormes has had any second thoughts, he’s doing a pretty good job at keeping them to himself. “I’m loving every second of it, I can’t lie,” says Gormes, who graduated from Fluvanna High School in May and moved in with his grandfather in Charlottesville. He’s speaking to me on his fourth day of training.
We’re in a clean, presentable cafeteria. The seats are so close together a third grader would feel cramped. We’re squeezing conversation into lunch while shoveling down mashed potatoes and green beans and chicken tortellini—one Corps value seems to be fast eating. The food might be heavy on the starch, but it isn’t bad. Gormes prefers it to the food in high school (the flavor is probably enhanced by all that marching and exercising).
Gormes’ enlistment was a confluence of accident and appeal. Originally, he counted on walking-on as a football player at a Division II college. But the offensive lineman decided he wanted a break from school. “I’m a pretty smart person, but the college classroom setting definitely wasn’t for me,” Gormes says. In high school, he had taken a few classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College. “I’m more of a hands-on person.” Before enlisting, he worked at Staples for about a year and a half. “Another reason I decided to join the Marine Corps.”
He considered the Air Force but when the recruiter didn’t show up for his appointment, the Marine recruiter across the hall circled in.
“When I checked out the different things he was telling me, it came out to be true. It wasn’t like a bunch of crap that he came up with, it was good stuff, definitely. I like the values,” Gormes says.
There’s dirt on his face—recruits don’t shower after physical training (PT)—and he was up between 2 and 3 that morning on watch. But he’s bright eyed talking about the extent of the training, which he says was key in his decision to join, as well as the squad’s camaraderie: “It’s actually the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.&r
dquo;
“Your slate is clean”: Week 4
Under the dull light of a cloud-covered morning, in the midst of a grassy field, a man in a red sweatshirt does push-ups on a podium. Stretching in all directions around him a sea of bald men in olive green sweats and bright reflecting belts do as he does to the cadence of his chant, as if acolytes in some peculiar form of worship.
Instructor: “Ah-one-two-three.”
Chorus: “One!”
“Ah-one-two-three.”
“Two!”
“Ah-stay-with-me.”
“Three!”
“Ah-one-two-three.”
“Four!”
For recruits, most mornings start with PT. It’s 7am, the wind chapping my face as it rolls in off the ocean. Black birds line the wires to watch the human spectacle, one as odd as any winged migration they will ever perform.
Some recruits fall off beat. Like wolves trailing the herd, drill instructors known as third hats gleefully howl at the offenders to return to order. Each platoon gets three drill instructors (DIs), and the third hats are the guys you think of when you think “boot camp”—the hardass sonsabitches who scream at you for trying to breathe. Their voices usually go froggy after the first day from all that yelling. Next up the DI ladder is the experienced drill instructor, who acts as both disciplinarian and trainer—the Marines’ Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. The father of the platoon is the senior drill instructor, who is distinguished by a black belt. A mentor, he generally leaves the discipline to the third hats and focuses on instruction and guidance, both mental and physical. The third hat tears the individual apart; the senior DI rebuilds the individual as a Marine.
After about 20 minutes, the sea of recruits breaks up into smaller squads. They rotate stations to do pull-ups or sit-ups or climb ropes or whatever other exercise is necessary to tax all those muscles and tone those young bodies. At this point, I’m able to steal away a recruit from Charlottesville, Brendan Saul, a 23-year-old in his fourth week at boot camp. A public affairs officer addresses him briefly in order to grant him permission to speak in the first person.
Saul worked at various Charlottesville restaurants before returning to an idea he had had years before, in high school. “I was working a lot, just experienced life, doing things on my own, trying to make my own way,” Saul says. “I was relatively successful at that, but I wasn’t fulfilled. So I took account of everything that I had, everything that I wanted, and I decided that I better do it now if I wanted to do it.
“You definitely feel a little shaken to your core when you get off that bus. But once you get through it, and once you look back on it, it makes more sense, it’s a clear picture. So it’s kind of hard to explain—it just, it shakes you. It’s meant to shake you and give you a clear transition point from military to civilian, I believe.”
Saul’s age certainly makes him an elder in his platoon, but that’s in terms of a number only, he says. “Aside from life experience, and finding yourself a little bit more, that’s all those years have done. You’re all equal, your slate is clean, so to speak, and you just have to focus on getting through training and getting through it together, and there’s no room for outside experience, really.”
A few good women: Week 7
At the women’s PT, it is a collage of strange behaviors. One group of women navigate an obstacle course, climbing to a peak of logs that they then must descend, keeping their balance. Tears roll from the face of one girl at the top, unable to step onto the logs stretching down, even though the fall is but a few feet. It takes the berating bark of a drill instructor to propel her down, where then she must make a leap onto a horizontal log, roll over it, and jump down.
At a different station, women are climbing ropes 25′ in the air. Occasionally the landscape is broken by the shouts of one who has reached the pinnacle—she must shout some unintelligible speech about motivation and the Marine Corps that culminates with a Marine Corps “Ooh rah!” And which must be repeated until the senior drill instructor hears her and shouts an affirming “Ooh rah!”
About 6 percent of Marines are women. The staff that trains these women, from the drill instructors up to the company commander, are all women as well (the only exceptions are some specialized trainers in swimming or riflery). Recruits are gender segregated even when they go to chapel.
The purpose of the segregation, says public affairs officer Lt. Scott Miller, is that many of the female recruits were abused by their male “so-called role models.”
“Basically, you have someone who’s just screaming at them nonstop—a dad, a boyfriend, a stepfather—screaming, screaming, screaming,” Miller says. “And then, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s a positive role model who’s a drill instructor who—guess what—screams a lot.’ You could have a total counter-reaction because of that. So we let the females scream.”
Behind me, wraith-like figures walk in squares drinking water from canteens, greeting me and the other civilians with, “Good morning ladies, good morning gentlemen,” every time they come within 10′. At first I nod in recognition, but they can’t do anything else to respond. I let those sounds become another bizarre part of the backdrop. A squad practices martial arts moves, shouting, “Marine Corps! Marine Corps!” with each thrust of the fist and mechanized step forward.
Later in the day, the educators sit for lunch with a female platoon. I chat with Shayanee Bado, an 18-year-old from Miami, while we eat boxed lunches (ham sandwich, a hardboiled egg, an apple, raisins and Powerade). Bado enlisted just after marrying, her husband encouraging her to join. “He didn’t want this recruit to just sit around and depend on him for the rest of her life, but he wanted this recruit to have an education, to have a career,” she tells this reporter.
So far, Bado’s taken two extra months to pass the running requirement, but she thinks she’s on track now. “She’s awesome,” Bado says of her senior drill instructor. “She’s helped this recruit a lot. This recruit’s not trying to say that she needs more attention, but she does get kind of depressed sometimes because she’s been here longer than all the other recruits.”
The Crucible: Week 11
Machine guns crackle, shells burst, cries go up to “Get down!” Agonizing screams of pain echo. I am almost deafened by these sounds. I’m handed earplugs. I’m out in a deserted portion of the island, just off an abandoned airstrip, listening to a loop of the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan blasting from a loudspeaker high in the air.
 Fluvanna High grad Ryan Gormes has to keep a straight face, but don’t read that as displeasure: “I’m loving every second of it, I can’t lie." |
Spielberg’s movie is also the soundtrack to “The Crucible.” It’s not exactly Arthur Miller, but this test is intended to be dramatic, the culmination of the recruits’ training. This is where they become Marines. Instituted in 1996, The Crucible is a 54-hour series of problem-solving exercises in the field, involving 42 miles of walking, 29 missions, seven hours of sleep outdoors, and three meals ready-to-eat (MREs). At the end, they get a breakfast “fit for only true warriors”: all you can eat steak, eggs and potatoes.
Marines in groups of twos and threes crawl slowly through sand, dragging heavy boxes of ammo and supplies—in addition to their guns and other gear. At several points, they must maneuver underneath barbed wire, lifting the strands with their rifles and wriggling underneath.
In about 20 minutes, most recruits have gotten only about halfway across. Drill instructors come by and fuss at them periodically if they aren’t moving correctly or if they put themselves in conspicuous spots. A lad or two is tapped to go back—either to get a comrade left behind or to start over again, presumably punishment for not doing something right.
It’s intense, yes, but there’s no getting past the fact that it’s a training ground simulation. There are no live rounds, no one explodes into bloody carnage. Another instructor looks on in boredom.
 A drill instructor makes sure that the recruits in his charge know they can’t give up during physical training (PT) at 7am. |
It seems more like a live action version of a videogame—which makes sense as Marines these days are part of a videogame generation. “Just in the time that I’ve been here,” says Lt. Miller, “I’m starting to see a difference in mentality of recruits because I think it’s a generational thing. They’re a lot less athletic, but a lot smarter. And I think that’s true when you just look at the younger generation, in general. They’re not going out as much, because they’re playing videogames.” Videogames make recruits smarter on the one hand, he says, and paunchier on the other. They’re having a harder time meeting the benchmark physical fitness to join the Marines. One joke I hear on base over the course of my visit is that the U.S. has the strongest thumbs in the world.
The Iraq War, however, is certainly no videogame. According to Pentagon numbers, of the roughly 3,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, 868 have been Marines. While active duty Marines account for 13 percent of the military, they account for 28 percent of the deaths over there. Charlottesville has lost one Marine: Bradley Thomas Arms, a 20-year-old corporal who died in Fallujah on November 19, 2004. Yes, more troops died in single days of fighting during World War II. But imagine that Charlottesville and Albemarle, which, with a combined population of 130,000 approximate the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, had 3,000 violent deaths over the past four years.
 Charlottesville native Brendan Saul, at 23, is older than most recruits. While he wanted to enlist fresh out of high school, in the wake of 9/11, he spent six years working in restaurants before joining the Marines. “I took account of everything that I had, everything that I wanted, and I decided that I better [join the Marines] now. |
Most recruits I speak with seem reconciled with the idea of going to Iraq—and with the possibility of death waiting there.
“I really feel like I’ll be fine, and if I’m not, then it’s O.K. because I accept that,” says Saul—whose family has a history of military service but whose mother, Christine Saul, attended the anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. last month. “And I think that most people in the military accept that. It’s not so much a job as a calling, something that you feel like you need to do, and that makes it a little easier for you to face the fact that you may die doing it.”
In the middle of his Crucible, I speak with Mathias Varga, a recruit whose family recently relocated to Charlottesville from Florida. Varga is covered in camouflage face paint and has been up since 2am. He thinks it’s three hours earlier than it actually is.
“This recruit’s thought about it,” says Varga. “This recruit knew from the beginning. This recruit’s been watching Iraq and everything else going on and pretty much this recruit’s just getting through boot camp right now. Iraq’s six months down the road, sir.”
Part of the reason that the recruit thought about it all was that the recruit’s mother certainly has it on her mind. Miranda Varga and her husband, Rudolph, who both served in the Navy, moved to Charlottesville when he got a job at the National Ground Intelligence Center. They weren’t thrilled when Mathias’ twin brother, János, first announced he wanted to join the Marines.
“We both did the military—I didn’t want it for my kids,” says Miranda Varga. “I would rather they go to college. They were [interested] at first, and then János popped up out of the blue that he was going to go in. And both of them started looking at going in, doing ROTC to go in as officers, and all the sudden János was going to go in active duty because he didn’t want to go to college. I still don’t want them in, but once they’re in, you support what they’re doing.”
 Mathias Varga, whose family recently moved to Charlottesville, can’t tell you the time—he’s in the midst of the 54-hour sleep-depriving, physically exhausting, and calorie-depleting final test, “The Crucible.” When he graduates, he might be in line to join the president’s surge, but it’s not time to reflect on the war: “Pretty much, this recruit’s just getting through boot camp right now. Iraq’s six months down the road, sir." |
Varga drew some lines. She didn’t want her sons on the front line, which meant she didn’t want them to be grunts. And she didn’t want them to join the Army. Mathias is specializing in intelligence and will serve in the reserves, not active duty. “We’ve told both of them to be very careful about what jobs they selected in the military to ensure that they could use it on the outside. Because there’s a lot of people that go into the military and they have jobs that do not correlate with civilian life.”
Another Marine is made: Week 13
A quote hangs on the wall in the Marine museum on Parris Island, circa World War I:
“Somehow, as the end of the three months of boot training came closer, the miracle of the Marine broke through. Lost was the searing hatred for the D.I., there quickened in the march that first hint of resolution, that swagger in the swing into line marking the Marine. …There was magic in the transformation. The temper in the shining blade. Another Marine had made it.”—The Old Corps, by Mgr. General Melvin Krulewitch, U.S.M.C.
I am watching the emblem ceremony that truly marks the Marine, when the men and women receive their eagle, globe and anchor pin and at last can return to the world of the first person. There is beauty in the crispness of their turns and in the way the salutes all simultaneously shoot up in the same way. The sweetness turns somewhat saccharine when Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” takes over for a marching band that had sounded sharp and full. Still, the ceremony remains moving. The senior drill instructors move down the lines of recruits to personally hand them their emblems, and smiles creep across faces that have borne few during the past three months.
After the Marines bark their hymn in the same barbarian tones one grows accustomed to hearing on Parris Island, the new Marines are free to rush out into the audience to find their loved ones—moms, pops, significant others. I’m asked to take a picture, and for recompense interview the young lad, Andres Osorio, whose family has come up from Fort Lauderdale for his graduation. He’s now a Private First Class, thanks to a few semesters of community college that qualified him for the promotion.
How was boot camp?
“Annoying,” responds Osorio. “I had a piece of paper on my footlocker to keep track of the days—sometimes you forget the days.” But he’s still proud. Why did he join the Marines? “They’re the best.”
Visiting families want to see where little Johnny has been living, and so the living quarters, called squad bays, have been temporarily turned into museums. Civilians check out the Spartan rows of bunk beds, and a Marine stands at attention on a black strip in front of the beds, explaining to his family in Spanish the routine of waiting there for inspections. I overhear a parent tell a senior drill instructor, “You made him into a man.” William Bennett’s book Why We Fight is laid out on a table along with other reading material and an American flag inscribed with the names of emergency personnel who died on September 11.
In the airport, after four days with the Marines, I look around and see how a leatherneck could resent civilians and the world we live in. We are overweight and underweight. We slouch in our chairs, we stumble through conversations without articulating. We grow impatient at trivialities. We are indecisive in our central beliefs, swapping values when opportunity makes it expedient. We do all this and think that to do otherwise—to stand up straight and to say, “Yes sir” and to fire a weapon and to believe one’s life can be justifiably lost at another’s orders—is to live like a machine, to lose humanity. Shall our society, in this time of war, with 138,000 troops in Iraq and 21,500 more on the way, become bifurcated between the scholars and the soldiers, the effete, intellectual and reluctant and the tough, rough and ready? As a society, do these dueling parts make us Hamlet-like, tragically bound by hand-tying inner conflict?
Pondering all this, I run into Private First Class Osorio on the way to his flight. Now he has a Playstation magazine safely tucked under his arm. There’s a smile on his face. And I think, just maybe, I caught a slight bit of curve in that spine.
