Sure, Marine D.I.s are tough, but war is crueler

Marine drill instructors have been accused lately of kicking, hitting and generally humiliating recruits under their command at the boot camp in San Diego. The seriousness with which the charges were greeted surprised me. I thought that’s what D.I.s were supposed to do.

Having survived boot camp in the days before anyone cared much about what was going on, I can tell you that nothing any one of them did or said would have surprised me. If their objective was to turn a simple college boy into a misanthropic war machine, they accomplished it quite effectively.

That I made it through recruit training without having suffered either brain damage or internal injuries was a triumph of genetic composition over external force. Even today, should anyone slap me in the stomach with the back of his hand, as one D.I. delighted in doing, my stomach muscles would automatically tighten and the pain of the whack be diffused throughout my body. Once a Marine, by God, always a Marine.

I mention this today due to the four D.I.s who were hauled up on a variety of charges, all of which involved being mean to their recruits. One Meanie, as I understand it, facing a recruit with a bad ankle, failed more or less to kiss it and make it well, which caused the recruit to say it almost made him hate the Marine Corps.

Almost?

Hell, man, the whole purpose behind the regulated cruelty and degradation of boot training, as I saw it, was to have us emerge from the little camp of horrors not only hating the Corps, the D.I.s, the food, our shaved heads and our olive drab underwear but also the very necessity to awaken every morning. It was considered Esprit de Corps.

Hatred was supposed to toughen us to face whatever rigors combat held. I don’t know whether it did or didn’t, but I do know that I was conditioned enough to withstand the war in Korea and return home with all of my faculties intact. In some ways I had learned to fear drill instructors more than I feared the Chinese Army.

Our D.I.s were tough but relatively uncruel. A slap in the stomach by one of them was only a punctuation mark intended to emphasize a point he was trying to make. Others specialized in shin kicking and swagger-stick whacking, along with spraying expletives directly into our faces, nose to nose, as creative methods of explaining the rules of preparation.

I felt as though I was their special target because I was shorter than most of my fellow recruits and marched as though I had one leg shorter than the other. It destroyed the platoon’s precise order of movement to have one short guy skipping along like a dog with an injured foot while the remainder of the unit moved as one.

Marine boot camp training has been under fire since a D.I. marched six recruits to their deaths in the swamps of Parris Island, S.C., in 1956. That occurred a few years after I’d left the Corps and forced changes in recruit training. Among the more noteworthy mandates were that recruits should have eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and at least 20 minutes to eat their meals.

Before these rules of conduct were in place, we were required to eat with a speed that challenged the mastication rate of an animal, knowing instinctively that if we didn’t get it down fast, another animal -- I mean, recruit -- would grab it. Picture lions ripping apart an eland.

Food, or rather chow, was placed in the center of the table while we stood at attention, drooling and staring down at it. When the D.I. hollered “Eat!” we lunged, snapping and snarling, until the food was gone, and then held up the empty bowls for a refill. I felt like Oliver Twist pleading for seconds at the orphanage: “Please, sir, can I have some more?” If we did get more, the meat belonged to the quick, and the rest of us ate broccoli. Elapsed eating time for the average boot camp meal? I’d say 7 minutes, 21 seconds, including the gray stuff they called dessert.

As for eight hours of continued sleep, it amused our D.I.s to shock us awake in the middle of the night by snapping on the lights in the barracks and roaring their insistence that we get up, dress and assemble outside. They used more colorful terms to inform us of their desires, but my laundered interpretation will have to do.

Once up and about, we were required to double-time in sand until we dropped and, if we dropped, to do push-ups until we fainted, and once aroused, to run in place until we died. Survivors were among the few and the proud.

I do not believe that intentional cruelty trains anyone, but toughness is a requirement of existence in a warrior culture. Combat is considerably less kind than the roaring, slapping, mocking and even hurting of a D.I. No one should die during training. But no one should have to die in a war either. Until we understand that basic concept, nothing will ever change.

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Almtz13@aol.com