- Neven, Thomas E.
Sir, The Private Don't Know!
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2013.
ASIN B00D5EO5EU.
-
The author, a self-described “[l]onghaired surfer dude”
from Florida, wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life
after graduating from high school, but he was certain he didn't
want to go directly to college—he didn't have the money
for it and had no idea what he might study. He had
thought about a military career, but was unimpressed when
a Coast Guard recruiter never got back to him. He arrived
at the Army recruiter's office only to find the
recruiter a no-show. While standing outside the Army
recruiter's office, he was approached by a Marine recruiter,
whose own office was next door. He was receptive to the
highly polished pitch and signed enlistment papers on March
10, 1975.
This was just about the lowest ebb in 20th century
U.S. military history. On that very day, North Vietnam
launched the offensive which would, two months later,
result in the fall of Saigon and the humiliating images
of the U.S. embassy being evacuated by helicopter.
Opposition to the war had had reduced public support
for the military to all-time lows, and the image of
veterans as drug-addicted, violence-prone sociopaths
was increasingly reinforced by the media. In this
environment, military recruiters found it increasingly
difficult to meet their quotas (which failure could
torpedo their careers), and were motivated and sometimes
encouraged to bend the rules. Physical fitness,
intelligence, and even criminal records were often
ignored or covered up in order to make quota. This
meant that the recruits arriving for basic training,
even for a supposedly elite force as the Marines,
included misfits, some of whom were “dumb as a bag
of hammers”.
Turning this flawed raw material into Marines had become
a matter of tearing down the recruits' individuality
and personality to ground level and the rebuilding it
into a Marine. When the author arrived at Parris Island
a month after graduating from high school, he found
himself fed into the maw of this tree chipper of the
soul. Within minutes he, and his fellow recruits, all
shared the thought, “What have I gotten myself
into?”, as the mental and physical stress mounted
higher and higher. “The DIs [drill instructors]
were gods; they had absolute power and were capricious
and cruel in exercising it.” It was only in retrospect
that the author appreciated that this was not just
hazing or sadism (although there were plenty of those),
but a deliberate part of the process to condition the
recruits to instantly obey any order without questioning
it and submit entirely to authority.
This is a highly personal account of one individual's experience
in Marine basic training. The author served seven
years in the Marine Corps, retiring with the rank of staff
sergeant. He then went on to college and graduate school, and
later was associate editor of the
Marine Corps Gazette,
the professional journal of the Corps.
The author was one of the last Marines to graduate from the
“old basic training”. Shortly thereafter, a
series of scandals involving mistreatment of recruits at
the hands of drill instructors brought public and Congressional
scrutiny of Marine practices, and there was increasing
criticism among the Marine hierarchy that “Parris Island
was graduating recruits, not Marines.” A great overhaul
of training was begun toward the end of the 1970s and has
continued to the present day, swinging back and forth between
leniency and rigour. Marine basic has never been easy, but today
there is less overt humiliation and make-work and more instruction
and testing of actual war-fighting skills. An epilogue (curiously
set in a monospace typewriter font) describes the evolution of basic
training in the years after the author's own graduation from
Parris Island. For a broader-based perspective on Marine basic
training, see Thomas Ricks's
Making the Corps
(February 2002).
This book is available only in electronic form for the Kindle
as cited above, under the given ASIN. No ISBN has been assigned
to it.
June 2013 