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Making The Corps. By Thomas E. Ricks. New York: Scribner, 1997. $24.00. Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, a frequent contributor to Parameters.
Tom Ricks, the Wall Street Journal's splendid defense reporter, has written the best non-fiction account of basic training you will ever read. Making The Corps is also an account of today's Marine Corps, with its routine triumphs and occasional problems. On yet another level, Ricks reports on America-and on our country's relationship with its military in an age when the values professed by those in uniform are sometimes at odds with the practices of American society. The book is informative, thoughtful, fun-a great, swift read-and an echo from the past for anyone who has gone through basic training in any of our services. When Sergeant Carey, USMC, barks, the young private sleeping inside the graying veteran snaps to attention.
Ricks followed recruit platoon 3086 through basic training at Parris Island, then tracked the survivors-those recruits who had the right stuff to become Marines-for their initial year of service. For military readers, there are no revelations here (although it's a great tour down memory lane). Marine Corps basic training is essentially the training we all got before Harry met Sally in the chow line.
The salient complaint on the part of the trainers is the need today to awaken the young men undergoing the first real test in most of their lives to values drill instructors and general officers wish they could take for granted in young American males. The program works, and values emerge for most new Marines. The rite of passage includes a post-training phase of disorientation and alienation from "nasty" civilian life; basic training and military service in general have always engendered separateness, and that is fundamental to their purpose and success. But the moral aspect works because the values were already there, latent, overlaid with a slacker crust. You don't learn values in a couple of months, you merely begin to realize them.
There are born winners and born losers, studs, steadies, jerks and weaklings. The Marines give them all a chance, and some fail. But anyone who thinks today's youth are difficult to condition to a military worldview needs to look back to the New York City draft...