Winning the Battle : Graduation: One wrestled with his soul. The other embraced the gung-ho ethic of the Corps. But when training had ended, both had survived.

Without firing a shot in anger, Gilbert Escobedo found war in the Marine Corps.

The clash was in his soul, and it was tearing him apart.

“I don’t think I can last another night here,” he said at sunrise only a day before his long-awaited graduation from boot camp. “I don’t think I’ll see another dawn.”

Even he found it hard to understand how 11 grueling weeks of training had come to this--a condition that the military, in its adoration for acronyms, calls SIs. Suicidal ideations.

The Canoga Park teen-ager--one of three recruits from the San Fernando Valley this series has followed through boot camp for three months--had passed every test that drill instructors had set before them: He shot like Daniel Boone, earning an expert’s badge as a rifleman. He ran with the wind. He had done so many pull-ups over the past 88 days that his neatly ironed khaki uniform bulged with lats, delts and pride.

But still Escobedo felt he did not deserve to graduate, that he had not become the tough Marine he expected to be.

He felt desperately alone, hostile and edgy amid the rowdy cheerfulness of fellow recruits who were elated to get boot camp behind them. He found himself crying in the bathroom, depressed by health problems, homesickness and a gory image he could not shake from his mind: the body of a recruit from another platoon who committed suicide by diving from a third-floor balcony.

“I saw the pool of blood . . . and that depressed me,” the 18-year-old said, shivering in the chill just outside his squad bay. “He felt helpless, and I feel helpless. I thought, oh damn, that could have been me.”

Escobedo’s sadness was made more unbearable by the sense of triumph evident in every other recruit in Platoon 1017.

Victor Rustandi, another of the three Valley recruits, radiated excitement over graduation. He showed off the EGA--the Marine Corps eagle, globe and anchor emblem--that he had just earned the right to iron onto his uniform. And he spoke of his delight at belting out the red-meat poetry of the Marine Corps Hymn.

“It gives me a chill every time,” the 18-year-old said.

The third Valley-area recruit, Bill Norris, never made it to the “Halls of Montezuma” stage. Released from boot camp after two weeks on the grounds that he had failed to tell recruiters about a medical problem, he is sleeping on the couch at his grandfather’s place in Thousand Oaks.

Working nights at a Pizza Hut to save money for college, he wants to become an elementary school teacher. For now, his life is “work, work, work,” but he feels he’s better off than being a “brainwashed person with the title Marine,” he says.

While Norris and Escobedo may have resisted the Marine Corps’ social reprogramming, Rustandi revels in it. Still, Rustandi was moved by Escobedo’s eve-of-graduation pain, and felt ashamed that many in the rest of the platoon did not sympathize. With a convert’s fury, he scorned them as unworthy, in Marine terms.

“They ain’t got no discipline, they slack off, do their own thing,” he said. “That’ll get you killed in war, man.”

The intensity of both young men showed how deeply each had changed in the past three months.

While attending Cleveland High, Escobedo spent almost every penny earned as a theater usher on rifles and handguns. He spent his spare time working for the Los Angeles Police Department as an Explorer scout volunteer, practicing his aim at a local firing range, or playing war simulations on his home computer.

But the Marines’ grimly focused preparation for the real thing turned him off.

“Shooting at boot camp took the fun out of it,” he said. “I think of it more as a sport. I’m not the type of person who wants to kill people. I want to help them.”

His Marine superiors considered him entirely too cerebral--he could and did quote Machiavelli and Shakespeare while training--and teased him mercilessly. A drill instructor called him the “punk philosopher,” and fellow recruits took the cue and called him “Escumbedo” or ‘Escondido” or “Hollywood.” Only his bunkmate, an 18-year-old Mexican American from New Mexico, shared his passion for literature and classical music.

“They believe that if you think [in combat], you hesitate--and you’re going to die,” Escobedo said. “But you can’t change who I am. I’m always gonna be thinking.”

Indeed, Ohio State University military historian Allan R. Millett--a retired Marine colonel--observes that the most intelligent recruits are often the most wracked by anxiety, and a debate rages within the Pentagon over how to put them under stress in training without breaking them.

“You attract people who are tremendous romantics and idealists,” he said. “When they find they’re not being tested enough, that becomes a crushing disappointment.”

Rustandi went the other direction from Escobedo--gung-ho. Before enlisting, he scrawled graffiti on the walls of his room and could laze around watching TV all day. In boot camp, he applied his penmanship skills to a position as platoon scribe, or secretary, then leveraged that job to become leader of 100 recruits assigned to the mess hall. By the eve of graduation, he was tougher, livelier and more efficient, with little nostalgia for his former self.

“When I see our old squad bay, I think, ‘That’s my old house--that’s the old, slow me,’ ” he said.

Their experiences diverged with the recruit training schedule. In first phase, the young men learned to adapt to military life, with constant drilling and yelling from DIs. In second phase, they learned to be Marines--firing weapons, reading maps, bivouacking in the dirt and bonding as a family. In third phase, they learned to take responsibility for themselves, as drill instructors faded into the background and recruit squad leaders directed the platoon toward graduation.

That suited Rustandi, who became a leader. But Escobedo retreated inward, hating squad leaders he considered bullies, mocking what he called the “Marine cliches” of team-building, tuning out even the instruction of DIs he respected.

Escobedo’s superiors became aware of his gathering depression only two days before graduation. Heartsick and angry, he blurted out his wish to quit training or kill himself to his senior drill instructor, Sgt. Mitchell Ferrell, who could barely contain his dismay and anger. In six terms as drill instructor, Ferrell bellowed later, he had never had a recruit try to resign the day before graduation.

“It’s unprofessional, it’s un-Marine-like!” he growled through clenched teeth, striding darkly across the parade grounds after passing Escobedo along to the company commander. “He’s trying to quit on me, and it’s not going to happen! It’s the easiest thing in the world to quit. That takes no doggone talent at all.”

While Escobedo wrestled with his soul, Rustandi and the rest of the platoon learned to pray.

On the parade deck where they would graduate the next day, drill instructors showed the recruits that no matter was too personal or simple to escape Marine Corps regulations.

“When the chaplain says tomorrow, ‘Let us pray,’ you bend your head 45 degrees, good to go?” barked the DI before a sea of recruits. “When he says, ‘Amen,’ it goes back up. Now let’s practice. . . .

“Let us pray!”

Heads nod.

“Amen!”

They bob up.

“Let us pray!” Down. “Amen!” Back up.

Escobedo also missed a lighter moment, when recruits were handed back the clothes that they wore when they arrived at boot camp. Ferrell had warned the night before that they would “look at that nasty doggone civilian trash and laugh.” True enough, they did.

“Whoa, look at these!” cried Rustandi with a big grin, holding up a pair of cream-colored trousers to his waist. They looked about three sizes too big. “I can’t believe these things. Nasty!”

While the others celebrated, Escobedo was heading back to civilian life. Talks with company officers and the chaplain failed to cure his depression; neither did a conference call with his mother, brother and recruiter back home in Van Nuys.

But pop psychiatry hauled him back from the brink. At his last stop before discharge, he visited the base shrink, a Navy psychiatrist who diagnosed him as suffering from an “adjustment disorder.”

“He said I had to give myself permission to feel as if I deserved to graduate, then go home and take it from there,” said Escobedo outside the doctor’s office. “That’s good to go. I feel relieved.”

And with that he returned to the ranks.

The senior drill instructor was ecstatic.

“Ha ha! We got the quitter out of him, didn’t we? We exorcised that doggone monster!” Ferrell said, gloating over his final success as a DI. “He tried to apologize later, but I told him he didn’t have to--that’s unmilitary.”

*

The morning of graduation dawned sunny with huge, fluffy clouds. Civilians crowded the parade grounds, adding incongruous dashes of color to a base where green and khaki rule. At the far end of the parade ground, Platoon 1017 marched purposefully toward its banner-waving destiny as Ferrell called out a bluesy cadence, the savage ego assaults of early boot weeks converted to a brotherly joshing.

“Good morning idiots!”

“Good morning, sir! Hoorah!”

“Good morning, knuckleheads!”

“Good morning, sir! Hoorah!”

Then he joked with them like equals for virtually the first time, saying they could invite themselves over to watch a football game with him or “have a few brews.” The new Marines looked stunned at the notion of kicking back with this khaki-colored God who had so ruled their lives, and their smiles beamed brighter than the sun.

Many of Escobedo’s extended family of uncles and cousins had driven down from the San Fernando Valley in a motor home to see the graduation, and they craned their necks and cameras to see him in formation 200 yards away.

His girlfriend, Katie Blackwell, laughed about personality changes she had noticed already. “He used a fork when he ate!” she giggled, agreeing with his mother that he had become more of a gentleman.

The youths’ black boots rose and fell, their spit-shines flashing in the sunlight, as they marched to receive final exhortations from the training battalion commander. He called them “Marines” for the first time and told them that America depended on their readiness.

They were now officially the few, the proud.

And then they were dismissed.

Rustandi’s parents and sister swelled with amazement and pride as they swarmed their Marine, the first person in their family of merchants ever to join the military. At first, the Chinese-Indonesian immigrants admitted, they had balked at his decision.

“We feared that if the United States and Indonesia were to go to war, which side would he be on?” said his mother, Amelia, smiling. Added his father, Indra: “We are so proud of him. He went in as a boy. But I told him I was sure he’d come home as a man.”

Rustandi and Escobedo would spend the next 10 days on liberty before reporting for training in their military specialties.

Encountered at home a week later, Escobedo was meticulously ironing his camouflage fatigues in anticipation of his return to Camp Pendleton for the School of Infantry. He had gained a small measure of satisfaction over not quitting when he visited the Port Hueneme naval base for treatment of his chronic cough and discovered that he was treated with real dignity by naval officers.

Still, he dreaded the prospect of leaving home again. Characteristically eschewing bravado, he said he would try for a career as a mortar man to keep his “butt away from the FEBA,” or forward edge of the battle area.

His worry was unnecessary. The Marine Corps had second thoughts. Two weeks after he reported for duty, Escobedo was recommended for discharge--and he didn’t object. He now plans to apply to Cal State Northridge, and hopes one day to become a police officer.

Rustandi, meanwhile, was also encountered carefully ironing his cammies. Looking around his room at home--graffiti and knife marks still on the walls--he said he looked forward to training as a rifleman and cook, and felt fortunate to have escaped his friends’ “boring cycle of routine” in Reseda.

The only one of the three Valley recruits totally content with his choice after three months of mind and muscle molding, he hummed as he saw a visitor to the door:

First to fight for right and freedom

And to keep our honor clean.

We are proud to claim the title

Of United States Marines.