Today’s Marine Corps Looking for a Few Good Values

For decades Marine boot camp has been the ultimate individualistic macho ritual, testing a recruit’s ability to withstand taxing physical punishment and humiliating verbal assault.

Now the Marines have given the experience a less traditional dimension, introducing exercises designed to promote group bonding, personal values and self-awareness. In one such test aimed at encouraging joint effort, individuals fall backward from a raised platform into the arms of other recruits.

“I had to believe they would catch me,” said James Neumeister, visibly relieved that they did during a recent drill. “It was a matter of trust.”

The Corps also has extended boot camp by a week and made it even more physically demanding by adding a 54-hour endurance course called “the Crucible.” But other changes, part of a series of revisions in Marine recruitment and training, are aimed at making entry in the Corps not just a physical initiation, but an exercise in personal examination.

Even the role of the Marine drill sergeant, whose stern visage and no-nonsense attitude under a Smokey Bear hat has epitomized the military disciplinarian, is evolving.

Although there’s still no shortage of loud tongue lashings and other whip-them-into-shape tactics--particularly in the early weeks of boot camp--the sergeants now lead recruits in frequent discussions of personal values, exploring attitudes toward alcohol, drugs, sex and other issues. In the final Crucible phase of training, the instructors switch from browbeating to mentoring their units.

“At first I was skeptical of the new approach,” said Staff Sgt. Garritt Duncan, in his third year as an instructor. “I believed the drill instructor was hard-core, nose to the grindstone, always screaming and shouting. But now I like having more time in the schedule to talk with Marines.”

“The best instructor used to be the one who could yell loudest,” said Sgt. Eborah Lawson, another trainer. “Now, it’s who can teach the best.”

Marine Corps officials cite several reasons for the changes. By urging fledgling Marines to draw greater support from each other, service leaders hope to prepare them better to respond to the increasingly chaotic, complex nature of military operations.

The new focus on teamwork and values also comes in response to what Corps officials see as a growing gap between Marine standards and societal behavior.

Nowadays, recruits often enter the military from communities where rates of violence, drug use, sexual promiscuity and single parenting are higher than a generation ago. Institutions traditionally central to responsibility and civility--church, school, nuclear family--are in decline.

“Marines today come from a different generation of young people,” said Brig. Gen. Jerry Humble, commander of the Parris Island training facility. “Many have selfish attitudes when they enter. We decided we needed to do something to bond them.

“You used to get through boot camp on an individual basis,” the general added. “We felt the teamwork notion needed to be reinforced.”

Since December, training at camps here in the swampy lowlands of South Carolina and in the hills of southern California has been extended from 11 to 12 weeks to provide for the rigorous Crucible course, which cannot be completed unless recruits help each other through it.

Corps officials envision the Crucible as the “defining moment” in a young Marine’s life. It is a slog of more than two full days of forced night marches, mock infiltration events, casualty evacuation drills and assorted maneuvers, all done on little sleep and 2 1/2 cold meals.

“This recruit will be glad when it’s over,” said James Sturtevant, 19, taking a rare break at the 42-hour mark the other day, shivering in the zero-degree cold. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.”

At one point, squads of 14 recruits confronted a 10-foot-high wall, pondering how to lift each other over it, including the last recruit. At another station, they struggled to swing across a series of tires suspended on ropes placed frustrating distances apart.

At still other events, they clamored up rappelling towers, wriggled through barbed wire and balanced on rope bridges, lending hands and shouting encouragement to teammates all the way.

Cohesion here is supposed to be fostered not just by facing physical challenges together, but by talking about common values. In the weeks preceding the Crucible, recruits attend classes on “core values,” discussing dozens of behavioral scenarios and sharing attitudes on such topics as alcohol abuse, illegal drug consumption, adultery, fraternization and professional conduct.

During one such recent “locker-box talk”--so nicknamed because recruits sit on or near footlockers in their barracks--Sgt. Molly Ricks led a platoon of women in a discussion of what to do when a fellow Marine appears to have a drinking problem.

One recruit told of being treated belligerently by a friend after suggesting the friend seek help to break a pattern of repeated weekend binges. Another related a story about a friend who got pregnant unintentionally while drunk and only then was compelled to stop drinking. A third recruit spoke movingly about her brother, who consumed a case of beer every night and frequently got into trouble with neighbors.

As much as boot camp may be adjusting to the ‘90s, Marines have drawn a line against one change well underway in the basic-training programs of other military services: sex-integrated instruction.

Corps officials say initiation into their ranks is difficult enough without mixing men and women in boot camp. They also say female recruits benefit from looking to female drill instructors as role models.

“We believe the first step should be socialization into our ethos,” said Gen. Charles Krulak, the Marine Corps commandant, who surveyed the Crucible here in January. “That’s tough enough without throwing all the rest on top.”

For Krulak, the notion that boot camp was lacking something took hold soon after he assumed command of the Corps in mid-1995, when he absorbed the shocking news that two young Marines in Okinawa had participated with a Navy sailor in the rape of a Japanese teenager.

“That incident was a defining moment for me, it was a red alert,” Krulak said in an interview.