Training Marines for Vietnam on Parris Island

It’s March of 1968\. The Vietnam War is at its height. A seventeen-year-old high school dropout, fresh from his third arrest and a savage beating by two cops, enlists in the Marine Corps. With a mother on a locked ward in the state mental hospital and an abusive, alcoholic father who has given up on him, he literally has nowhere else to go. Beaten and defeated, on probation, he’s grateful that the Marine Corps even wants him.So, one week after his day in court, he gets off a Greyhound bus at Parris Island and, having watched the war movies and read the books, thinks he knows what’s in store for him. By the end of the next morning, however, he’s in shock, terrorized and trembling, having found himself in what the novelist William Styron—having experienced it, too—called “the closest thing in the free world to a concentration camp.” Unable to believe the sadistic hazing he and his newly formed platoon have just received from not one or two but twelve drill instructors, he says to himself, “This is America. They can’t treat people like this.” But they could. And it was just the beginning.Unlike most Marine memoirs, which devote only a chapter or two to boot camp before going on to recount the author’s experience in a war, this memoir focuses on boot camp itself. It’s a detailed week-by-week, and sometimes day-by-day, account of the rigors of recruit training on Parris Island in 1968\. Although every fifth or sixth chapter recounts the author’s rocky adolescent road to Parris Island, the main story is the intensity of a recruit training schedule that had been reduced during wartime from thirteen to nine weeks. And, of course, it’s an account of the drill instructors who, with only two months to turn boys into combat-ready Marines, had no choice but to be brutal, ruthless, and, at times, just plain cruel.This is a pull-no-punches memoir of boot camp; there are few smiles to be had in its pages. And although some readers might think it’s an exposé or a vengeful tell-all meant to even the score, it is not. It’s the tale of a troubled, confused, and unwanted seventeen-year-old, who boarded a Greyhound bus one afternoon and took a long and frightening journey to the proudest day of his young life, the day he graduated from recruit training at Parris Island and earned the right to call himself a Marine.