Countywide : Marine Drill Team, Band Strut Stuff

About 80 men in red jackets, white pants and black boots marched in unison before a crowd of both children and adults in Tustin on Monday morning.

It was not a high school marching band or a pre-St. Patrick’s Day parade but the United States Marine Drum and Bugle Corps. The nationally known, Washington-based marching band was making its annual stop at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station to perform for Marines as well as children from area day-care centers and schools.

Somber-faced band members, with drum sets attached to their chests, cymbals strapped to their hands and tubas flung over their shoulders, displayed intricate combinations of precise steps and crisp turns as they played half a dozen well-rehearsed tunes.

Young children sat mesmerized as the performers, who sported crew cuts, walked backward and sideways, changing their formations from straight lines to columns to semicircles without ever falling out of line, hitting a flat note or jostling their neighbors.

When the musical part of the show concluded, the Silent Drill Platoon lined up. Members of the 24-man group, dressed in black jackets and white pants, slung 10-pound, fully operational M-1 rifles over their shoulders and executed a series of drills for about 20 minutes without any verbal cues.

The crowd watched in awe as two men on the team performed a pantomime, tapping their guns against the ground, tossing them into the air and back and forth through several synchronized rotations.

The drill team and musicians are touring Southern California and parts of Texas and Arizona through Monday, with stops at schools and military facilities. They travel in military planes and stay on bases at every stop. Most performances are open to the public, though the two at Tustin on Monday were not. The next show is at Sorensen Field in Barstow at 10:30 this morning.

One of the tour’s goals is to raise public awareness about the Marines, said spokeswoman Sgt. Cynthia Atwood. The intent is to get people interested in enlisting and to raise the morale of those already in the service, she said.

The band was formed in 1934 as a touring group. Before that, music helped in battlefield communications and to rally troops.

“The different bugle calls could be heard over a wide area and let Marines know if they should attack or retire for the evening. It just continued as an evolution,” with the musicians becoming performers during times of peace, Atwood said.

Now both the musical and drill teams make about 400 appearances a year, covering 50,000 miles annually, she said.

They are not the only ones to travel, though.

Recruiters also scour the country to find performers who want to be Marines. But during their coast-to-coast travels, Atwood said, few women musicians have auditioned, and so the current band is all men.

Those selected are initially treated like ordinary Marines: “They go through basic training before they can start. They have to be fully qualified,” said Atwood.

And even with their talents, the performers do not get special compensation. “They earn standard military pay,” Atwood said, and for someone straight out of boot camp, that equals $933 a month, plus room and board.

When this tour is complete, the performers will return to Washington and prepare for a series of annual parades there, which begin April 29.