by Matt Young
This recruit attends Mass on the first Sunday of basic training, because it is a thing that has been given.
At the front of the chapel a large retractable screen, on which the pastor/reverend/priest/chaplain—whatever he is—displays his sermon, takes up an entire wall. The chapel is air-conditioned and the pews are padded. And there are no drill instructors. This recruit loses control of his eyelids. He feels every single eyelash collide, the sound like so many cars crashing echoes through his inner ears.
Music wakes this recruit. When he wakes, everyone is standing. The pastor/reverend/priest/chaplain tells these recruits to join hands. There are blinking words on the large screen, which cease their blinking as an animated red ball begins to bounce across their jagged stark peaks, and the chapel—now more a revival tent—is filled with voices. This recruit scans the room and watches tears stream from eyeballs and snot bubbles pop from nostrils. Recruits begin to sway and the recruits on either side of this recruit tighten their grips, and this recruit can hear their voices grow taut like overtightened guitar strings. This recruit reciprocates their hand squeezing and begins to sing in tune and in time with the music and words on the screen. By the time the ball has bounced itself out and the pastor/reverend/priest/chaplain asks these recruits to please be seated this recruit is all in. His mother attends and works in a church, though he has never been interested. He thinks maybe this could be a way to heal that relationship, to have a piece of home, to experience love in this hard place.
This recruit has found religion.
But this recruit marches to the chapel and follows the bouncing ball’s directions and laughs at the pastor/reverend/priest/chaplain’s bad jokes only one more Sunday. That second Sunday night, when the recruit lay leader asks this recruit to lead the group in prayer this recruit stutters because he does not know any prayers. When the lay leader asks about his church’s denomination back home this recruit becomes flustered and cannot answer because he does not know what denomination his mother is. The recruit lay leader looks at this recruit like people look at ugly dogs in animal shelters. This recruit begins to speak, to explain himself, but another recruit speaks over him. This recruit feels like a tourist. He will cease to attend prayers and services on Sundays, and will instead stay behind to clean the head, read the newspaper, and write letters to his girlfriend, whom his drill instructors refer to as Susie Rottencrotch.
In his rack the night after his last Sunday service and lay leader meeting, he thinks of the hand-holding and the swaying and the red bouncing ball and how it told him when to sing, and how the lay leader looked at him with expectance and then pity. This recruit feels his face grow hot with disgust and shame at his longing for the comfort of his mother—of his past life. He resolves to be harder. To take the grief, sadness, and despair brought on by loss and perform alchemy on those emotions, to turn them into determination, anger, and strength. Like anything in the Marine Corps, if this recruit does it and thinks it and performs it enough, it will become automatic, ingrained in the muscle forever. It will become truth.
Prepare to Eat
At Camp Pendleton in May 2005, in between Crucible obstacle stations, an orange is placed in this recruit’s hand. No one has told this recruit what to do with the orange and so he does nothing. But he is anxious about the orange. How will he eat the orange correctly if no one tells him how?
Hasn’t he eaten countless different fruits in his lifetime? This recruit may have once peeled an apple in one long glossy strand, sliced it into sections, dipped it in honey or peanut butter. Afterward, he might have ground the peel and core in the garbage disposal and washed the small particulate matter down the city wastewater pipe.
Where did that apple come from? Did this recruit’s mother or father buy it from a grocery store? Does this recruit even have a mother? Did this recruit pick it off a tree in his backyard? Did he ever have a backyard? This recruit does not remember being issued any of these things.
This recruit must not have been in formation when he ate the fruit. This recruit must not have been in a desert when he ate the fruit. He must not have had a past-its-prime rucksack strapped to his shoulders, the framework wearing through the kidney pad, metal digging into the small of his back, breaking open freshly scabbed skin. This recruit’s face must not have been covered in camouflage grease paint and he could not have known words like portholes or inkstick or gofasters or quarterdeck. Was there a time like that?
Weren’t there times this recruit cut up bananas and put the pieces in pancake batter that sizzled and popped on a griddle covered in melted butter? Weren’t there times when he sliced an orange in half and juiced it? What would he have done with the rind?
This recruit stands in formation with the weight of the orange in his left palm. He thinks of how he could measure its roundness. A laser micrometer maybe. How does this recruit know that term? No drill instructor has ever said that term. What was before this?
Ears.
Open, sir.
Fuck no, ears.
Open, sir.
No trash, good to go?
This recruit hears the commands through his thoughts.
Don’t leave any doggone trash. Nothing. Not one doggone thing goes in your cargo pockets. Recruits don’t put anything in their cargo pockets. Cargo pockets do not exist. Recruits for all intents and purposes do not know the meaning of cargo pockets. Good to go?
Yes, sir.
Sit down, right now.
Aye, aye, sir.
Prepare to eat.
Aye, aye, sir.
Eat, right now.
Aye, aye, sir.
Now this recruit is left in the dirt, and all around him, recruits are biting into their fruit. He sees another recruit try to place a banana peel in his cargo pocket, which isn’t supposed to exist. A drill instructor pulls the banana-peel recruit out of formation and runs screaming behind him to a place this recruit cannot see and does not wish to.
This recruit is alone with his orange. It rests in the palm of his hand, a miniature desert sun. This recruit imagines the juice in his mouth, sliding down his throat, lighting up his insides. With the orange at his lips, this recruit unhinges his mandible like a snake swallowing an egg. The orange’s flesh is thick. Microvesicles full of citric acid pop as his jaw closes, his skin tingling. Everything burns, tongue, gums, throat, face, lips. The juice double-times down his chin, pools into his cupped hands, and he forgets that there might have been another way to eat a piece of fruit. This is, has been, and will be, the only way. Ever.
Targets Appear
Six weeks into basic training, in the prone shooting position, this recruit slips the butt stock of his rifle into the pocket of his shoulder and draws a bead on a dog target. This is what he sees:
Not a dog, but a human.
One day, when this recruit is no longer this recruit he will wonder if this was purposeful, if it was meant to dehumanize the target, if it was a cosmic joke, or just a coincidence of Marine Corps nomenclature.
But not right now.
Right now this recruit wonders what it will be like to load live 5.56mm ball rounds into his magazines, to slide the curvaceous thirty-round-capacity aluminum case into the magazine well until the catch pops like a pussy. He imagines the feeling of sight alignment, sight picture, breathing, exhaling, squeezing the trigger, watching the shot find its home.
During classroom instruction at Camp Pendleton, this recruit sits on aluminum bleachers for hours learning about the fundamentals of marksmanship from a primary marksmanship instructor who crams his trigger finger in his nostril to the second knuckle, inspects his find, and wipes the aftermath on his utilities.
After classroom instruction, this recruit takes his rifle and circles with other recruits in sandy crabgrass around white fifty-five-gallon drums covered in spray-painted stencils of the three target types—Able, Dog, B-Modified—while the PMI demonstrates how to make loop slings, which cinch high around nonfiring biceps and wrap nonfiring forearms, and
choke blood flow, but also increase firing stability.
The PMI walks the circles of recruits and expounds on the necessity of stock weld—what he calls chipmunk cheek. He sells proper eye relief like snake oil, joins rifle butts into shoulder pockets and preaches high firm pistol grips. He uses phrases like skeletal support and bone-to-meat contact. The rifle he holds seems to have sprouted from his hand: an extra appendage. The PMI takes this recruit’s glasses, affectionately called birth control goggles, and uses athletic tape to attach a foam earplug to the inside of the nosepiece while explaining that it will help this recruit achieve proper eye relief.
This recruit learns the prone position is the most stable firing platform, then sitting, then kneeling, then standing. The PMI rotates recruits through positions, an hour in the kneeling, in the standing, in the sitting. He focuses least on the prone.
This recruit hears the racking of other recruits’ M16A2 lightweight, magazine-fed, gas-operated, air-cooled, shoulder-fired rifle charging handles, the click of ejection port covers, and crisp snaps of hammers slamming into the head ends of firing pins. In his rack that night the sounds echo in his ears like church bells.
This recruit has never shot a gun. He wants to know what it will feel like when the round casing ejects from the side of his rifle and the bullet explodes from the muzzle. He learns about parabolic flight, how gravity acts on a bullet from the very moment it is fired, dragging it to the earth. He learns about elevation and windage and how to adjust his front sight post when achieving a battlesight zero.
He wants to know what it will feel like when the targets are people. He wants to know what it is like to be shot at and return fire. He wants to believe it is all as easy as WMD and jihad and democracy-in-danger. He wants to kill some raghead terrorist motherfuckers. He wants to tell his family at home that war is hell and he wants to give the thousand-yard stare when he says it. He wants people to ask him what it’s like to kill and he wants to be able to tell them. He wants to be feared. He wants to deploy to war this very second. He wants to go home. He wants to be a hero. He wants to go back in time and go to college, to a time before nomenclatures and acronyms and Susie Rottencrotch this and faggot that and drill here and quarterdeck there. He wants to rip the tape and earplug from his goddamn glasses. He wants. Every time he holds the rifle he wants and wants and wants and in his mind he sights in on each and every single want and gives a slow, steady squeeze with his death-dealing trigger finger as he reaches the valley of his breathing rhythm. He blows them away.
The Drill Instructor at Rest
It is June 2005, the last days of third phase. The recruit company is back in San Diego from Camp Pendleton. The drill instructor stands at the entrance of the barracks shower room and shouts commands at the recruits.
Soap! Place that doggone bar of soap in your right hand and lather your left arm. Now take that doggone bar of soap and place it in your left hand and lather your right arm.
He names various parts of the recruits’ bodies and has them fill in the blank canvas with soap bubbles like a paint-by-numbers. This used to amuse him. At one time he thought the cheap broken shower shoes flopping around the recruits’ ankles were a poignant metaphor for something, but he no longer remembers what. His time at the Depot is drawing near an end. He’s a heavy hat, a second in command, has never been a senior drill instructor, thinks maybe he won’t ever be.
Make sure you get your nasty damn heads. Every recruit, right now, rub that doggone soap on your grape.
He’s tired. So goddamned tired.
It’s the last night of the cycle and still these nasty fucks have to be showered by the numbers.
He knows full well if he doesn’t walk them through it Barney-style they’ll curl their grimy asses up on the floor, use the towels as pillows, and take a nap.
In his mind he rambles off the creed he’s recited more times than he’s said I love you to his mother: These recruits are entrusted to my care. I will train them to the best of my ability. I will develop them into smartly disciplined, physically fit, basically-trained Marines, thoroughly indoctrinated in love of Corps and Country. I will demand of them, and demonstrate by my own example, the highest standards of personal conduct, morality, and professional skill.
Then he thinks, Fuck these recruits. If I don’t kill one of them, it’ll be a good day. If I can get just one of them to know their ass from their elbow, I will die happy. However, I will confuse the hell out of them until they don’t know up from down. Also, I vow to never let them catch me napping in the DI lounge.
The soapy mess of bodies in front of him whimpering from stinging eyes graduates tomorrow. Today he had to hand them their Eagle, Globe, and Anchor emblems and call them Marines. The drill instructor grimaces and holds down his gorge. Gonzalez (whom he calls Gorditas) blubbered all over himself. Young wasn’t wearing his goddamn BCGs. He knows he told that motherfucker he wasn’t to wear the contacts his family sent until graduation. Then again, Young couldn’t even get the handshake and acceptance of the pin right—maybe the motherfucker just hadn’t worn anything and couldn’t see. And goddamn Duffy (whom he calls Doofus)—somehow Doofus’s fat fucking belly has gotten fatter.
All right fuck stains, turn on those doggone shower trees and rinse your nasty fucking bodies so you get all clean and pretty for Susie-fucking-Rottencrotch tomorrow. Then towel the fuck off and get changed over for hygiene inspection—and send me five recruits to come clean the Whiskey Locker by twenty-one hundred. That’s fifteen mikes, ladies.
Recruit Kelley requests permission to speak with the drill instructor, sir.
What, numbnuts?
This recruit and other recruits are wondering if these recruits who are PFCs should place their rank on their cammies for tomorrow morning’s chow, sir.
The drill instructor squinches his face together and parrots Kelley. Though Kelley looks so ridiculous at the position of attention, small olive drab shower towel over his dick, that to keep from laughing the drill instructor lowers his Smokey Bear over his face and gives a quick yes.
The drill instructor performs a perfect about-face, steps, right faces into a walk down the hall past the head, left faces into the squad bay, continues for a few steps, and left faces once more through the hatch to the drill instructor’s office, slapping the pine as he does so and saying to himself as he enters, Bad motherfucker on deck, sir.
In the office the drill instructor breathes asbestos insulation and recruit body odor. He has the squad bay solo tonight. He knows those goddamn Marys are chattering in the shower room, talking about the pussy they’re going to get and beer they’re going to drink. He hates them. Every last goddamned one. He knows there must’ve been a time when he felt proud to graduate a platoon. When did that change? This job is killing him. His back aches and his feet hurt. He is on the go damn near twenty-four-seven for thirteen weeks at a stretch.
Maybe it is just time to go, he thinks. But when he leaves, what will the fleet have for him? In the fleet he’ll return to accounting. He doesn’t think he can hack disbursing checks in a tiny shitcan office on Pendleton or Lejeune—or worse, the Stumps.
He’d loved this once—making Marines. He wants badly to love it again.
Recruits file past his open door, not turning their backs, looking through the hatch and smiling. One of them waves and before he can stop himself the drill instructor waves back.
And then a funny thing happens.
The drill instructor’s insides expand, and implode. He supernovas, and collapses into a black hole. He is out the hatch and into the squad bay, a dervish of screaming and cursing and drill instructor speak only recruits understand. He rotates them in shifts of ten to the quarterdeck—side straddle hops, mountain climbers, star jumps, high knees, hello Dollys, flutter kicks, push-ups, steam engines—while the rest of the platoon waits in the push-up position grunting and breathing heavily. He flips racks and dumps footlockers and spits in the new Marines’ faces as their bodies sweat and collapse on t
he quarterdeck.
The drill instructor’s love rises like a phoenix. Except instead of ashes it births itself slimy and gruesome from hate and pain and fanatical devotion to the Corps, and as the recruits huff and grow red-faced and lose their guts over the quarterdeck he feels their hate, their love, and he becomes Death, the destroyer of worlds.
The next day as he poses for photos with the new Marines and their parents, and then watches them walk to rental cars and taxis, the drill instructor’s face contorts into a smile he doesn’t tip his hat to hide.
Self-Diagnosis: Ouch
Legend
In the summer of 2005 at the School of Infantry on Camp Pendleton we are separated by specialty: machine gunners, mortarmen, assaultmen, TOW gunners, infantrymen.
Some of us take a qualification indoctrination to become reconnaissance men. Most of us fail.
We cannot hold a rifle above our heads and tread water and we are afraid to take the water into our lungs to accomplish our given task, and so we fail because we will not try.
Those who pass the indoc must become basic infantrymen in order to go on to basic reconnaissance school.
The rest of us have a choice.
Chris Smith and Randy Lawson are hulks. They choose to be machine gunners. Chris is half-Filipino and smiles big white Chiclets when he talks about his father, an M60 gunner in Vietnam.
Randy is ethnically ambiguous. Growing up, his hero was Jean-Claude Van Damme. Randy can do the splits in a doorway; he demonstrates this and we are amazed.
Fernando Vargas, whose family comes from Rosarito, Mexico, chooses TOW gunner. He wants to fire tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided missiles. TOW gunners and assaultmen blend together and cross-train because there aren’t enough volunteers.
