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Review by Steve Lickteig
"Making the Corps" is less a blow-by-blow account of United States Marine Corps boot camp than a cultural study of the "Marine Corps Way." Though there are plenty of screaming drill instructors and shaking-in-their-boots recruits to give you the "thank goodness it's not me" feeling, Thomas Ricks' tale of platoon 3086 and its 11 weeks of basic training goes beyond reporting. He analyzes how 65 young men are transformed not into soldiers but Marines, examining that important distinction, which is pounded into the recruits' brains from the moment they step off the bus at Parris Island, South Carolina.
It's at that moment Ricks begins his story, when dozens of frightened civilians realize that, for the next three months, they won't move fast enough, quietly enough, and especially "Marine" enough for the drill instructors. Ricks, a veteran "Wall Street Journal" reporter, shows with fine detail the often dehumanizing, sometimes disturbing process that the Marine Corps believes is necessary to take a person from "undisciplined civilian" to crackerjack Marine. Boot camp is a world, Ricks declares, where the individual is dead, and use of the pronoun "I" is strictly forbidden. But Ricks puts each drill instructor tirade into context with a weave of thoughts from recruits and drill instructors. It's this combination of sociological study and reportage that makes Ricks' book richer than other boot camp accounts.
Oddly, Ricks compares the Marine Corps culture to that of Japan, arguing, "The Marines are almost a Japanese version of America -- frugal, relatively harmonious, extremely hierarchical, and almost always placing the group over the individual." It's a notion that not only separates Marines from civilian culture, but other military branches as well. Ricks' comparisons of Army boot camp to that of Marines show a disparate training philosophy that drives home the culture gap between the two branches. It's a gap Ricks believes the Marine Corps would like to widen.
When all is said and done, and Platoon 3086 graduates from basic training, Ricks becomes his most critical. Instead of leaving us with the glory of their graduation parade, he follows some of the new Marines beyond the gates of Parris Island, where many become disgusted with civilian life, and even with the Marine Corps itself, as they re-discover that the outside world is not the pristine cultural bubble of Parris Island. While Ricks' book is ostensibly about the experience of the Marine recruit, his solid research of Corps' history leaves the reader with full understanding of his statement that the Marine Corps "unabashedly teaches values to the Beavises and Butt-heads of America."
Steve Lickteig is a public radio producer living in Athens, Georgia.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.