Book Review - Making the Corps

• Author: Major Jeff Brady
• Pages: 07

1999] BOOK REVIEWS 218

MAKING THE CORPS1

REVIEWED BY MAJOR JEFF BRADY2

"Marines, the Nation's 911 force."3 Selective service registration begins today as the Marines take over Congress and the White House!

Thomas Ricks' book, Making the Corps, explains the Marine "culture" like few others. Ricks, however, takes an otherwise excellent review of the recruit training process and leaps to the radical conclusion that the Corps may eventually rebel against the public it serves. Set against the backdrop of recruit training, Ricks follows sixty-three prospective new Marines through recruit training and the first year after the rigors of Parris Island.

Making the Corps, however, is more than a flowery version of the life and times of sixty-three young men aspiring to become Marines. Ricks artfully details the philosophical, psychological, and mechanical processes Parris Island and the Marine Corps use to transform civilians into United States Marines. Unfortunately, although he spent considerable time and effort studying the forging process Parris Island employs to transform civilians into Marines, Ricks never understands fully what makes Marines. Ricks abandons everything he has learned about Marines and the transformation process in his radical conclusion. Perhaps one must be transformed himself to truly understand Marines.

Thomas Ricks is a Wall Street Journal Pentagon correspondent. He conceived the idea for this book while observing young Marines in Somalia and other operations. On his first deployment as a Pentagon reporter, Ricks went on a night patrol in Mogadishu, Somalia, with a squad of young Marines. That experience piqued an interest in the Marine Corps and especially its unique "culture." Ricks' interest deepened when he observed and interacted with Marines around the globe over the next four years.

Ricks used his observations to describe the Marine Corps as a subculture within the culture of the Armed Forces, separate and distinct from the other services. His book is a study of how the Marines "stand out as a successful and healthy institution that unabashedly teaches values to the Beavises and Buttheads of America."4

The author traces the recruit training cycle of Platoon 3086, from initial arrival through graduation and service school training. The author insightfully describes the platoon members' backgrounds, which allows the reader to understand how each person adapted to the Marine Corps. The first six chapters focus on recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD), Parris Island, South Carolina. These chapters also contain short biographical sketches of individual recruits. Ricks thoroughly explains the various phases of recruit training. He allows the reader to empathize with the recruits' experience of MCRD Parris Island. Chapter titles in the first six chapters are well suited to the various training stages the recruits face during their stay at Parris Island.5

Ricks artfully describes the first major transformation tool recruits experience-the "disorientation" phase. This phase begins almost immediately when new recruits reach Parris Island. Ricks' writing style vividly captures the sensory assault on the new recruits, which allows the reader to be the metaphorical "fly on the wall" at Parris Island. He correctly summarizes the effect of the techniques used. The Marines designed these techniques to strip away an individual's civilian identity, leaving room to begin building the group culture of Marines. He discusses many examples of this process in the four-day stage marked by lack of sleep and civilian culture breakdown. For instance, when recruits initially step off the bus the drill instructors force them to stand on yellow footprints. These footprints are so close that recruits lose their individual identity and become one mass. Then, the drill instructors strip everything away to include clothing, hair, jewelry, food, friends, and even the recruit's name. This short four-day period begins the transformation from civilian to Marine.

The reader is unaware while reading Making the Corps that Ricks will...