Putting Marines Through a ‘Crucible’

Christopher Blackman, 19, of Walla Walla, Wash., is cold, hungry, covered with mud, soaked by sweat and chilly rain, and exhausted both mentally and physically. He has never been happier.

He has just endured a 54-hour gut-busting ordeal called “the Crucible,” the capper to 12 arduous weeks of Marine Corps boot camp--a regimen that a national commission has suggested the other military branches, which have softened their own training, would do well to emulate.

Blackman’s reward for his perseverance is the right to be called a Marine and to possess a miniature of the eagle, globe and anchor that constitute the Marine Corps emblem.

“This means everything to me,” a tearful Blackman said as he held the small piece of metal as if it were a priceless gold nugget. “I earned this.”

To Blackman and other recruits in Company A, it is a matter of immense pride that basic training in the Marine Corps is tougher than that of the Army, Navy or Air Force.

“Everyone wonders at some point during the 12 weeks why they didn’t go into another service where training is easier,” said recruit Joel Francis, 18, of Los Angeles. “But you keep pushing and pushing, and in the end, it’s all worth it, believe me.”

For two centuries, the Marine Corps has prided itself on being different than other branches of the U.S. military--a difference that begins in boot camp. Even the other services concede that the Marine Corps is a breed apart.

“The Army and the Navy are run like traditional military services,” said a Navy admiral. “The Air Force is run like a corporation, but the Marine Corps is a religion.”

The Marine Corps is the smallest service, the most tightly knit, the most combat ready, “the first to fight,” and the most dependent on its enlisted ranks.

Never has the difference between the Marine Corps and other military branches been more apparent than in recent years as America enters the uncertainties of the post-Cold War era.

Other military branches have reduced the rigors of basic training, scaled back the physical and mental demands, and moved to include women in previously all-male training units--all in the name of accommodating trends in the civilian society. Defiantly, the Marine Corps has opposed those trends.

“By being out of step with civilian values, the Marine Corps has remained in step with military values,” said Charles Moskos, military sociologist at Northwestern University. “The Marine Corps hasn’t lost sight of the fact that a military force exists to fight and to change civilians into combatants.”

The Army, Navy and Air Force have sought to attract enlisted recruits with promises of college money, technical training, travel and tuition loans. Not the Marine Corps.

Although Marine enlistees can enjoy all those benefits, the Corps does not emphasize that in its recruiting. “The Marine Corps doesn’t offer enticements. We offer challenges,” said Col. Timothy Conway, commanding officer of the recruit training regiment at San Diego.

Or as Sgt. Maj. Lewis G. Lee, the Corps’ senior enlisted man, likes to put it: “We don’t promise anybody anything but a damn hard time.”

The hard-knuckle approach seems to be working. The Marine Corps continues to meet its monthly recruiting goals while the other services are struggling.

Recruiters are forthright with would-be recruits about the rigors that await them with the Crucible. If anything, adding the Crucible seems to have improved the appeal of the Marines.

And in December, a blue-ribbon committee appointed by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, and headed by retired Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, concluded that the other military services should adopt some of the Marine Corps’ methods. The committee’s report is being studied by the Pentagon and Congress.

Beyond the issue of maintaining high standards for physical fitness, the Kassebaum Baker committee also praised the Marine Corps for its emphasis on “values training” and for maintaining the authority and esteem of drill instructors.

The committee found Army drill sergeants demoralized and convinced that they are not valued or supported by the brass. In the Navy, recruit division commanders “felt undervalued, underappreciated and undersupported by the chain of command.”

But Marine drill instructors, the committee found, still maintain a “strong sense of cohesion among themselves” and believe firmly that they enjoy the backing of their senior officers.

No longer are drill instructors allowed to strike or threaten recruits. But a bellowing voice and a fearsome countenance still carry the power to frighten, shape and instruct recruits.

“I look in the eyes of these recruits and I see youngsters who want to become men but don’t know how to make that next step. That’s where I come in,” said drill instructor Staff Sgt. John Sportsman. “They’re empty vessels, and I pour everything into them that I know about being Marine.

“At graduation, one of the mothers came up to me and said, ‘You took my little boy away from me.’ I felt like telling her, ‘Yes madam, but I gave you back a man.’ ”

One reason the Marine Corps is so attentive--almost obsessive--about recruit training is that the Corps is more dependent on its enlisted personnel than any other military branch.

The Marine Corps has nine enlisted personnel for every officer, the highest ratio of any service. Half of the Corps’ 174,000 active duty personnel are in its three lowest enlisted ranks.

Each year, the Marine Corps trains 20,000 recruits at the recruit depot in San Diego and 22,000 at Parris Island, S.C. The Parris Island number is higher because it includes training companies of women (who undergo the same training as men, including the Crucible); San Diego is strictly male.

Recruits frequently say that the toughest part of enlisting was breaking the news to their parents--particularly their mothers.

A popular marching cadence during training plays off this motherly recalcitrance:

Mama, mama, can’t you see/

What the Marine Corps has done to me/

Made me lean and made me strong/

Made me where I can do no wrong.

To counteract any lingering parental disapproval, the Marine Corps takes pains to invite parents and family members to graduation and to two days of preliminary ceremonies on base. It is not unusual for a graduation of 400 recruits to attract more than 1,000 family members--all at their own expense, many from long distances.

At a pre-graduation “D.I. Dinner” for Company G, parents expressed pride in their sons, surprise that the drill instructors were not as imposing as they thought, and residual wonderment at why their sons chose the Marines.

“When he said he was enlisting, I said, ‘Why not the Army or Navy where they give you a bed and sheets?’ ” Mike Cokley of New Melle, Mo., said as he waited to be reunited with his son, Nathan, 21. “He said, ‘No, I want to be a Marine!’ I guess he was trying to prove something to himself and to us.”

A Final Test to Mold the Corps

When Gen. Charles Krulak, a charismatic, twice-wounded combat veteran of the Vietnam War, became commandant in 1995, Marine Corps basic training was already the longest, most intense and physically demanding of any branch of the U.S. military.

Marine recruits did more marching, more running, more push-ups and more pull-ups than recruits in other services; they were held to higher standards of marksmanship and physical fitness; they received fewer privileges during training.

Still, Krulak wanted something more: a defining moment for boot camp, a final test of physical stamina and a final chance to bond the recruits to the Marine Corps, to one another and to what the Corps calls its core values of honor, courage and commitment.

From Krulak’s desire came the Crucible, which debuted in late 1996 at Parris Island and Camp Pendleton and added a week to the training schedule. “The Crucible is a final gutcheck, a challenge, to see how badly they want to become Marines,” Krulak said.

The Crucible is not a triathlon or fraternity initiation, although it has elements of both. It is not just an extreme sport in camouflage garb, but rather something most subtle and, the Marines believe, more lasting.

By the time they face the Crucible, about 10% to 12% of recruits have washed out, about the same as other services. (Unlike other service recruiters, Marine recruiters only get credit for recruits who succeed.)

About half of Marine washouts are due to “fraudulent enlistment,” that is, for having undisclosed criminal records or testing positive for drugs. The other half of washouts leave because of injuries or “failure to adapt.”

The first seven weeks of boot camp is at the San Diego Recruit Depot next to Lindbergh Field. Only after the recruits shift to Camp Pendleton for weapons and field training do the drill instructors ease off their role as authoritarians.

In the beginning of boot camp, drill instructors refer to their charges as recruits or other, more colorful names. Once at Camp Pendleton, the drill instructors call them privates and offer a modicum of respect. The shift provides motivation to keep striving when backs and legs begin to ache and spirits droop.

The Crucible course at Camp Pendleton is laid out on 3,100 acres of hills and deep gullies in the sprawling base that separates San Diego and Orange counties. The ordeal begins at 2 a.m. Thursday when recruits are ordered to gather a full pack, including their M-16 rifles, and fall out.

In 2 1/2 days, the recruits will march 40 miles, eat only prefabricated stuff called Meals Ready to Eat, and be allowed but four hours of sleep a night in cramped, two-man tents.

Company A had the misfortune to undergo the Crucible during an El Nino-generated storm of cold, driving rain. Rivers of mud swept beneath the tents. Wind whipping over standing pools of water created a bone-gnawing chill.

The Crucible course has 32 stations: obstacle courses, problem-solving areas, pugil-stick arenas and “warrior stations” where the recruits hear about Marine heroes of the past.

At one of the stations, recruits are told the story of Marine Sgt. John Basilone, awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery at Guadalcanal and then posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for bravery at Iwo Jima. A signpost bears a picture of Basilone.

“Did Sgt. Basilone show honor, courage and commitment?” asks a drill instructor.

“Yes, staff sergeant,” comes the spirited reply.

“Will you show the same honor, courage and commitment as Sgt. Basilone?”

“Yes, staff sergeant.”

“What?”

“YES, STAFF SERGEANT!”

The problem-solving areas test the recruits’ ability to devise ways to ford streams or overcome barriers or navigate a (simulated) minefield without injury and without losing any equipment. Teamwork is essential--drill instructors watch but do not intervene.

Late on Friday, as the wind and rain became the most debilitating, one squad of recruits struggles for ways to retain body heat between obstacles. As the rain pours relentlessly, the recruits march in a tight circle and rub one another’s backs.

On one of the obstacle courses, recruit Shane Gavin, 18, of Louisville, Colo., is in trouble.

This is Gavin’s second attempt at boot camp. In his first attempt he was injured early in training and had to wait to join a new class. Since coming to boot camp, he has dropped 41 pounds.

On a course meant to simulate the hazards and chaos of combat, the 6-foot-5 Gavin gets snagged on low-strung barbed wire as he crawls on his belly in the cold soupy mud.

Unbidden, fellow recruit Charles Dittman, 21, of San Antonio crawls over to provide help and encourage.

“Come on Gavin, you can make it. Show us what you’ve got!” yells the 5-foot-3 Dittman. Seemingly energized, Gavin wiggles his ammunition canister free of the barbed wire and dashes for the make-believe helicopter.

“Move! Move!” Dittman shouts.

Standing in a downpour, Dittman later explains: “Marines help each other. Marines never leave a Marine behind.”

Dittman had been a good recruit but had not been selected as a squad leader. It is commonplace during the Crucible for the unlikeliest of recruits to display leadership.

“We’re looking for them to come together as a team,” said Maj. Kenneth Wynn, commanding officer of the field weapons training company at Camp Pendleton. “We’re looking for character.”

A Dramatic Finale and Token of Brotherhood

The moment-by-comment ordeal of the Crucible is devoid of glamour, but the pinnacle is pure theater.

No other military service knows the value of ritual and ceremony, of patriotic pomp amid muscle-straining circumstances, like the Marine Corps. “The Marines are definitely High Church,” Moskos said.

At Camp Pendleton, the final stage of the Crucible is a nine-mile march through mazes of valleys and finally up a steep, slippery hill called the “Grim Reaper.”

Rousted from their tents at 4 a.m. on Saturday, recruits in Company A began their march in the dark, rain and wind.

Up an eastward slope, the recruits marched to the highest point of the Reaper, affording an unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean from San Onofre to La Jolla. As if part of a Hollywood script, the rain stopped, the sky brightened, and a rainbow arched over Camp Pendleton.

Recruits marched through a phalanx of the flags of the states. The American flag and the Marine Corps flag were in a position of honor. Patriotic music blared from loudspeakers, including Lee Greenwood’s country-Western favorite “I’m Proud to Be an American.”

Snapping to attention in neat rows, the recruits heard rousing words from the company chaplain (“Dear Lord, thank you for giving us the honor, courage and commitment to make it up the Grim Reaper”) and the first sergeant (“You have just completed the toughest, most demanding recruit training in the world!”).

And then came the moment the recruits had only dared dream of for 12 weeks. Drill instructors walked down the rows, handed each recruit an emblem bearing an eagle, globe and anchor, called him a Marine, and greeted him, for the first time, as a brother.

“Make us proud,” said Staff Sgt. Heriberto Morales.

“Yes, staff sergeant,” said Roberto Gomez, 18, of San Angelo, Texas, his eyes glistening.

Tough, disciplined young men who were newly proficient in the arts of war and who had just been initiated into one of the world’s most storied fighting forces wept openly.

“When we came up the Reaper and I saw that American flag, all the pain in my legs went away,” said N.B. Swanson, 19, of Las Vegas. “Suddenly I felt great.”

“When I saw those flags, I just lost it,” said Stacy J. Johnson, 19, of Columbia, Pa. “It was overwhelming.”

Swanson, Johnson and the others had just completed what the Kassebaum Baker committee referred to as the Marine Corps’ unique blend of physicality and patriotism. The Marines call it something different.

“We call it our way of making new Marines,” said Col. Conway. “It’s a secret family recipe.”