We jogged down a trail through the woods. After a night of hiking without sleep, we stumbled along at half speed. The temperature was already ninety degrees, and sweat soaked my uniform. Canteens thudded against my hips with each step and the pack straps cut into my shoulders. Candidates strung out along the trail, urging one another on. I panted into a clearing and saw the trail disappear into a bog. A wooden pier extended across it, clearly not intended for me. My path lay in the mud beneath strands of barbed wire next to the pier.
I dove under the first strand into the stinking beige water, eager to impress the instructors with my gung ho. It was deeper than I expected, and I sank beneath the water. I recovered and began to crawl, scratching my way forward beneath the banks of mud.
Another candidate struggled along in front of me, and I made it my goal to close the gap between my hands and his boots. Suddenly, he stood straight up, shouting and waving. Something long and black hung from his upper arm: a snake.
Christ, I thought, there are snakes in here. I started to stand.
A boot heel between my shoulder blades drove me, face-first, back beneath the water.
“What do you think you’re doin’, boy? Crawl.”
“Aye-aye, Sergeant Instructor.” It came out garbled because mud stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. I continued pulling myself forward, past the candidate with the snake on his arm. The instructor who had kicked me was waiting as I climbed out of the Quigley.
“You can’t compromise a mission and get men killed for a harmless little snake. Not even for a poisonous big snake. Discipline always. Now get out of my sight.”
His message was clear: you need discipline most when it’s hardest to muster — when you’re tired, hungry, outside your comfort zone. I struggled for the next two days to stay alert, stay disciplined, and keep my focus on the candidates around me. We worked in squads of twelve, rotating as squad leader and attacking through acres of humid woods. Our tactics were unsophisticated: walk as quietly as possible to the objective and then charge it, wildly firing blanks from our M-16s. The mission of OCS was more to gauge spirit than to teach us skills.
It rained through both nights, and we slept in Korean War-era pup tents seemingly designed to collect water and channel it onto us. The rain and the gnawing hunger (we received only one meal per day) conspired to keep us awake. By the third afternoon, the dirt-encrusted faces of the candidates around me reflected the countless attacks and long runs with all our gear that we had endured. Just a few hours before the Crucible’s end, I was digging a hole to stay awake.
“What the hell are you doing, Candidate?” Olds’s voice suggested that whatever I was doing was not what I ought to be doing.
“Digging a foxhole, Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds.”
“Digging a what?”
“A foxhole.” I paused, trying to stand at parade rest while holding a shovel and pushing my helmet up so I could see him more clearly.
“Foxes dig holes to hide in. Marines dig fighting holes to kill the enemy from. Are you planning to hide in your hole or to use it as a weapon to kill the enemy?”
In the Marines, anything can be a weapon; it’s a whole new way of thinking. My plastic MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) spoon was a weapon if I used it as an insulator on a radio antenna so that I could talk to jets and call in air strikes.
“Weapon, Sergeant Instructor.”
“Right. Now who’s providing security for you while you dig this weapon?”
I looked into the brush, searching for the other three candidates in my fire team. They were snoring.
“Candidate, Marines do everything in pairs. We fight in pairs. We patrol in pairs. We dig in pairs. Go to Thailand on deployment, and you’ll see that we even fuck in pairs. A Marine alone is easy to kill. A Marine with a buddy is hard as hell to kill. Don’t let me catch you alone again.”
Train your men as a team. I cursed myself for letting fatigue get to me.
Later in the morning, we packed our gear and hiked down to the parade deck. Hulking gray CH-53 Super Stallions, bigger than school buses, waited to ferry us over to TBS. It was my first helicopter ride. We sat on nylon benches along the sides of the cargo bay, and I looked past the tail ramp as the parade deck and our barracks fell away beneath us. Crossing I-95, I looked down at the cars filled with commuters. Clean people, well-fed, rested, in control of their days. I realized I wouldn’t trade places with any of them.
Candidates were grouped in fours as we gathered at the edge of the TBS landing zone. A second lieutenant met each group. These men had been on the Crucible not long before and knew to take us straight to the chow hall. We filled our plates with macaroni and pizza and ate slowly. No sergeant instructors lined the paths to our seats. No one threatened us for looking around the room or failing to keep our boot heels together. It felt rebellious. We went back for seconds.
Outside the chow hall, the platoon assembled in a formation. We were filthy but stood straight. Our rows and columns were perfectly aligned. Sergeant Olds made his way down each row, stopping before every candidate to shake his right hand and press a cold piece of metal into his left. I hoped Olds would say something encouraging to me, maybe note my improvement or say he had enjoyed having me in the class. Instead, he locked me with unblinking eyes and said, “You ain’t done yet.”
But we were done. I held the coveted Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. I snuck a look when Olds moved on to the next candidate in the formation. One inch across and anodized in black, it was a pin, eventually for wearing on a dress uniform. It was the symbol of the Marine Corps, immortalized on bumper stickers and baseball caps across America. With it in hand, I could go back to college for my senior year. When I returned to Quantico, it would be as a second lieutenant.
4
ON JUNE 12, 1999, in Dartmouth’s Baker Library, I raised my right hand to take the oath of office as a Marine Corps second lieutenant. “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
My mother pinned the gold bars on my epaulets, and my father presented me with the Mameluke sword. I knew from my summer at Quantico that the sword was a reminder of Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon’s expedition against the Barbary pirates in 1805. But I had no idea what it meant to be a Marine. Wearing my dress blues for the first time, I felt like an impostor in a Halloween costume.
After OCS graduation, I could have walked away from the Marines with no obligation. The Marine Corps liked the program because it attracted people who might not sign up for four years otherwise. Candidates liked it because we could return to school for a year and debate whether we wanted to go back to the Marines for a longer stay. For me, it was no decision at all. OCS had planted the hook. I hadn’t suffered through ten weeks at Quantico for nothing.
My classmates would soon be marching off to their graduate schools and consulting jobs, but our paths had not yet diverged. We still lived in the same world. Walking together out into the sunlight on the Hanover green, I felt the first twinge of impending separation. I had already noticed a subtle change in my worldview. My tolerance for abstract theories and academic posturing had evaporated. Instead of classes in philosophy and classical languages, I gravitated toward national security and current events. When the Marines went into Kosovo, Macedonia, and Liberia, I followed their progress every day. The world’s problems felt closer and more personal.