Driven to the Corps : 3 Valley Marine Recruits Hope to Forge a New Identity in Boot Camp

The day before Victor Rustandi’s life changed forever, he hung out with friends in a cluttered back room of his parents’ home in Reseda, a cigarette constantly burning in his fingers, his baseball cap turned around, his walls spray-painted with graffiti.

With a smirk on his lips and a rudeness that would have made his Chinese-Indonesian parents blanch, Rustandi called for a pizza delivery and made the clerk wait on the phone while he asked each buddy for his favorite toppings.

“I have had no discipline,” he would say later of his life growing up in Germany, Indonesia and the San Fernando Valley.

He has plenty of it now.

Rustandi is a U.S. Marine Corps recruit in Platoon 1017 at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego with two other Valley guys--Bill Norris of Van Nuys and Gilbert Escobedo of Canoga Park.

Ahead lie nine more weeks of their nearly 12-week boot camp, the promise of a transformation that means even more to them than to the Marine Corps.

Cocky and hesitant, athletic and clumsy, they have come by different roads, deliberately throwing themselves into a crucible they both hope and fear will hammer their old selves to dust and anneal for them a new identity: Marines. Men with a capital M.

What motivates them to forsake the comforts of home and the easy cynicisms of the culture? What will become of them? How will they change?

*

Norris enlisted after considerable introspection near the end of his senior year at Birmingham High School. His first contact with a recruiter who saw him wrestling with a pal last spring proved prophetic. “Sgt. [Kelly] Newman saw me pile-driving my friend into the mud during the floods and said, ‘It seems like you’re a Marine Corps type,’ ” Norris recalled.

“My friends said I was insane for joining up, but I told them, ‘I’ve just got more of what it takes than you.’ ”

Escobedo packed his three civilian rifles in boxes at home before leaving for boot camp. An avid participant in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Explorer program, he seemed the local recruit most likely to charge gung-ho into training.

Escobedo initially wanted to join the Navy to be around jets, then go to college and become a cop. But he rejected the pressure tactics of a naval recruiter on his Cleveland High School campus and hitched up with the Marines instead.

“If you’re going to join a service, you might as well join the best,” he said.

The elite mystique of “the best” has a practical payoff for the Marines. The image of “the few, the proud”--whipping sorry youths into shape as a byproduct of forging a steely war machine--helps the Marines pull in the 40,000 raw recruits they need each year to maintain a force of 175,000.

Since October, the San Fernando Valley has supplied 226 of those--just slightly above goals, local recruiters said.

It’s one of the most intense dragnets for bodies in the U.S. labor market, far outpacing hiring by an industrial giant such as General Motors.

As the rebounding national economy makes civilian jobs easier to find, military executives fret that the battle for a four-year commitment from high school grads ages 17 to 28 will grow more and more fierce--and they send recruiters to the same Xerox Corp. sales education programs that Fortune 500 companies use.

As a result, white buses roll up to the nation’s two Marine intake depots--San Diego and Parris Island, S.C.--three days a week and spill out the harvest of 1,300 recruiters’ efforts: Youngsters from good families and bad, each reflecting a facet of America and charged with ambition to emerge from boot camp as a warrior for America.

For Rustandi, Norris and Escobedo, that means 82 burning days and bone-weary nights at the recruit depot and Camp Pendleton.

*

While Rustandi kicked back with his friends two weeks ago, Bill Norris was helping his mother pack up their apartment a few miles east. The day he started training, she would move from Van Nuys to Las Vegas.

Norris’ life has been filled with loss. A blustery but gentle, natural-born leader whose dress code tended toward hoop earrings and baggy shorts, he has also been filled with self-awareness, self-doubt and an incandescent desire to impress through his experiences.

When he was 12, his parents broke up, and soon after his grandmother died--a one-two punch he says sent him skittering down a dark hole of depression.

“It hurt so much to see my folks separate,” he said, rolling up his camouflage fatigue sleeves to reveal welts on his biceps.

“See these? I branded myself with a lighter. I couldn’t stand it, man, that was so hard on me.”

He appears to be on an emotional roller coaster in boot camp. One moment, he bursts with pride at being named squad leader. The next, he complains that drill instructors are “playing mind games.”

“This sucks,” he said after failing his first inspection in an embarrassing fusillade of screaming from a drill instructor, or DI. “If they expect you to be Marines, they should show you more respect. It’s getting hard to take their attitude.”

Yet, when a sergeant checks on his health, he pridefully declines to reveal an agonizing ankle twist to avoid sick call.

Still, Norris acknowledges that something else has weighed him down. By the end of the second week of training, he has received only one letter from his mother after sending her four. He doesn’t expect to hear from his father.

“Without my mom I can’t accomplish anything,” he said, his face flushing red atop a sunburn, and tears welling in his eyes.

“We are totally, totally alike. She’s forward, fair, outgoing, she has a tremendous heart. She has stuck with me through all my problems. I need her to send me one of her poems. It’s so hard not to hear from her, man. I miss her.”

A few hours later his face brightens.

“I’m just going to be a Marine, and forget everything else. I’ll be mentally and physically strong. I’m going to make it.”

*

Two weeks after kissing his girlfriend goodby, the cocky smirk has disappeared from Rustandi’s face. Yet he says he likes the service, spouting Marine slogans and drilling with such intensity that a sergeant nicknamed him “Power Ranger.”

“I love boot camp,” he said in a private moment. “Courage, commitment, honor: That’s a pretty cool thing to live by. In the outside world, there’s nothing but ‘I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours, and I’ll take yours too.’ No one cares about anybody. Here, everyone cares about everyone else--you have to stick together as a platoon.”

Rustandi even professed admiration for drill instructors--called “hats” because of their Smokey Bear headgear--despite their constant yelling.

Why? Trim and hard as fire pokers, and bulging from their tan uniforms with muscles and bearing, the hats evince an honest constancy of purpose seldom seen by the recruits among other authority figures. Two of the Valley recruits lack fathers in their lives.

The platoon’s senior DI, Staff Sgt. Mitchell Ferrell, wears a black patent-leather belt as an emblem of office and acts as a father figure. He’s the good cop, rarely yelling and always available for consultation. Even a long scar zigzagging across one cheek --”a gift from some admirers,” the Philadelphia native deadpans--fails to detract from his look of compassion.

“We try to communicate our love for the Corps,” said Ferrell.

The three junior DIs who work for him 17 hours a day, wearing green belts, are the bad cops--barking commands and insults.

The dirty little secret of recruit training, however, is that even the most brutal-looking DIs care deeply about their men. Sgt. Bruce Knapp, whose blue eyes glow menacingly from his sunburned skin, has yelled himself hoarse to fulfill his personal mission.

“You take a bad part from society and put a good part back out there,” he said.

Rustandi, for one, sees through the facade: “They just want to get you used to the pace of war. . . . Move it, move it, move it! That’s cool.”

*

But things are not so cool with Escobedo, the police Explorer with his own guns who seemed so much closer to the Marine ideal before boot camp.

His first humiliation: Being red-tagged as an overweight “diet” recruit. Until he lost five pounds, a drill instructor would inspect his meal trays for contraband pats of butter, or ice cream.

Anxiety over being away from home plunged him into a stoic introspection. Already a loner who preferred reading about chivalry to hanging out with classmates he considered time-wasters, it took him two weeks to adjust.

“I’m always thinking about home, and it’s been hard to concentrate,” he said. Home is his mother, grandmother, sister and brother. His parents “never got along” and recently separated, he said.

Every single recruit failed Platoon 1017’s first full inspection, but Escobedo took some of the worst abuse.

“Dirty butt plate!” thundered Sgt. Kip Gibel, five inches from Escobedo’s face, after inspecting his rifle. “Dirty butt plate screws! What’s your rifle’s serial number? . . . You don’t know? You don’t know?!!”

Tossing back the rifle, Gibel ripped clothes and equipment from Escobedo’s body, tossing them to the ground.

“Cover not marked! Water bottle cap not secured! Dirty bowl! Pocket unbuttoned! Skivvies not marked! Trousers not buttoned! Belt not marked! . . . Nose hairs! Bad breath!

“You are an embarrassment, you are disgusting!”

Gibel chuckled privately to himself after Escobedo and the others gathered their gear and hustled back to the squad bay, admitting he hadn’t instructed the recruits about half of the things he dinged them on. His purpose: Strip them down, stress them out, use anger as motivation.

“It’s kind of exciting when you see a finished product at graduation,” he said. “That gives us a lot of pleasure.”

For the recruits, graduation means a dress-uniform parade before their families to the “Halls of Montezuma” poetry of the Marine Corps hymn. But it is still nine long weeks away.

And they’re not at all sure they can make it.

In September: Camp Pendleton.