Making the Corp.

• Author: Waldman, Amy

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...