One Bullet Away Page 3

  The candidate chow hall was in a low-slung building on the banks of the Potomac River, across a set of railroad tracks from our squad bay and the parade deck. We crossed the tracks on a footbridge, winding up and down the ramps twice for each meal, three times a day. Three hundred seventy-eight crossings during the course of the summer. OCS didn’t allow candidates to wear wristwatches, and wall clocks were intentionally few. We measured time from meal to meal.

  I shuffled through the food line holding my tray in front of me and parallel to the ground, elbows bent ninety degrees, thumbs and forefingers touching in small circles. Sergeant Olds demanded this posture because it mimicked the way we held our rifles at shoulder arms while marching. Those with the best muscle memory, he said, will graduate. Those without can join the Army. A gauntlet of screaming instructors lined the path from the chow line to the tables. After my ass-chewing on the parade deck, I was desperate to avoid being singled out. I ducked my head and plunged through, not wanting to waste my precious meal time at the position of attention listening to a spittle-laced lecture on the virtues of endurance or loyalty. The harassment, I suspected, wasn’t random. The staff pulled candidates they thought needed punishment or a challenge. Apparently, I’d had my dose for the morning because I slipped among the tables untouched.

  I sat at a Formica table with my back straight and my heels together at a perfect forty-five-degree angle. The genteel posture was a façade. There were no manners here, no conversations with tablemates. I shoveled food into my mouth, dripping flecks of syrup and gravy down my camouflage blouse. My mission for the next three or four minutes was to consume enough calories for my body to recover from the log run and make it through the morning.

  Classes filled most of each day between morning PT and evening drill practice on the parade deck. We marched to the classrooms, usually Quonset huts or converted aircraft hangars, and filed silently down the rows of tables. We couldn’t sit until Olds gave the command. When the whole platoon stood at attention by its chairs, Olds would roar, “Ready. Seats!”

  “Kill!” we shouted in response. It was an early step toward acclimating us to violence. We had one second to drop into our chairs, or else we’d stand and do it again. Each candidate carried a binder filled with loose-leaf paper and outlines of the classes. The instructors were mostly officers, captains and first lieutenants, and they stuck to the Marine Corps’s formulaic teaching method. We memorized the names and dates of famous battles and the exploits of renowned Marines. We learned the fourteen leadership traits, the eight principles of camouflage, and the six battlefield disciplines.

  The curriculum seemed ridiculous at first. My liberal arts education had valued discussion, debate, and nuanced interpretations of complex ideas. But in combat, we were told, there’s rarely time for discussion and debate. Complex ideas must be made simple, or they’ll remain ideas and never be put into action. The leadership traits were bearing, courage, decisiveness, dependability, endurance, enthusiasm, initiative, integrity, judgment, justice, knowledge, loyalty, tact, and unselfishness. We drilled them, and every other list, over and over again. I memorized them in the classroom, in line at the chow hall, and in my rack at night. The purpose, we were promised, was to make them instinctive. They would become innate to our decision-making process and infuse everything we did without even a conscious thought.

  One of the captains stood at the front of the classroom and read a quote from T. E. Lawrence, leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks in World War I. “Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practicing the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex.” He said we would be taught one tenth at OCS and another five or six tenths at The Basic School (TBS). If we were lucky, we’d pick up an additional one or two tenths in our first platoons. The final tenth could be learned only in combat. That tenth, for us, seemed impossibly remote.

  During the first three weeks, I slept in five different racks, since we continually shifted to fill the gaps left by dropped candidates. Their transgressions varied. Two fell out of three runs in a row. “Not physically qualified.” Another couldn’t grasp the concepts in our written work. “Academic failure.” They were kicked out, taunted by the staff as they emptied their footlockers, and then ridiculed after they had gone. The fourth, though, was treated more solemnly.

  Candidate Dunkin had been struggling since the first week when Olds had singled him out as an individual. The accusation proved true. I was learning that the staff valued enthusiasm and loyalty above all else. They wanted candidates with heart who could work as a team. A struggling candidate could redeem himself by trying harder, wringing performance from effort. Dunkin chose a different course.

  Dietary supplements were strictly forbidden. We drank water, not Gatorade, and ate chow hall food, not laboratory-engineered performance bars. Every candidate was warned that being caught with a supplement of any kind would be an honor violation, meaning instant dismissal from the course.

  As we toed the line one evening, ready for taps, the staff announced a footlocker inspection. Hidden in Dunkin’s shoeshine kit was a bottle of ephedrine. He stood there, blubbering, as Staff Sergeant Carpenter calmly told him to pack his bag and go stand in the hallway. No screaming or theatrics, just a stern dismissal, a clear statement that he was not Marine officer material. The platoon stood at attention, watching in silence as he packed. No one said a word as he shouldered his seabag and walked between the rows of racks.

  Dunkin had broken the cardinal rule — the bond of trust between leaders and led. The leadership traits were more than a list to memorize for a test. Dependability. Integrity. Judgment. That evening, I understood for the first time the relationship between the sergeant instructors and the officer candidates: learn to obey before you command. For ten weeks, the staff owned us. They could yell and scream, make us put on and take off our socks fifteen times each morning, and harass us from reveille to taps. But after commissioning, the authority would shift. The candidates would become lieutenants, then captains and colonels. They would be the commanders leading enlisted Marines in battle. The staff had a very real, vested interest in killing bad candidates before bad officers killed Marines.

  3

  HALFWAY THROUGH OCS, I was in the spotlight. I couldn’t march, failed to appreciate the importance of aligning the right edge of my belt buckle with the right edge of the top button of my trousers, and had a masochistic reaction to being screamed at: I stared into my assailant’s eyes, prompting a whole new round of abuse. Olds had singled me out so many times that he stopped using my name. He’d say, “Well, well, well, look who it is,” or “What a surprise.” I was in danger of dismissal for “failure to adapt.”

  On a Friday afternoon, we lined up our folding campstools in the back of the squad bay and sat at attention, backs straight and hands on our knees, waiting for a speech by our platoon commander, Captain Fanning. I later learned that OCS platoon command is just a holding tank for young captains returning to Quantico for advanced training. It’s a cushy job to decompress after a Fleet tour — easy hours, little supervision, and no real responsibility. OCS is run by sergeants, staff sergeants, and gunnery sergeants — the notorious “gunnies.” But the truth was still hidden from me in the summer of 1998, and the captain was power personified. He walked down the aisle, and we jumped to our feet.

  Captain Fanning was a soft-spoken helicopter pilot. I stared at the silver bars on his collar and the gold aviator wings pinned above his left breast. He held a single piece of paper and told us to sit down. Fanning looked at us with a mixture of empathy and disdain.

  “Five weeks down. The mission of OCS is to train, evaluate, and screen. Mainly screen. We want to see who has Marine officer potential. It’s a game. You have to play by the rules. Our rules, the Marine Corps’s rules. Most of you are probably college a
thletes.” Candidates nodded, grateful for the human connection. Fanning went on, “This is no different from football: learn the rules and play the game. Trust me, this isn’t the real Corps. Just do what you have to do here, and then you can get on with your career and your life. Four more weeks till the Crucible starts.”

  The Crucible was our final exercise. We’d all heard rumors about three or four days of running through the woods with no food and no sleep. I was distracted thinking about it when Fanning looked down at his paper and changed the subject. “I want to talk with you today about leadership — five of the Marine Corps’s leadership principles that helped me in the Fleet.”

  I uncapped my pen, thinking it futile to reduce such complex ideas to a list. But Fanning didn’t only run through the five principles. He told us what they meant and how he, as an officer, had used them. “First,” he counseled, “you must be technically and tactically proficient.” There was no excuse for not knowing everything about the weapon, radio, aircraft, or whatever else it was you were trying to use. “Being a nice guy is great, but plenty of nice guys have gotten half their Marines killed because they didn’t know their jobs.

  “Second, make sound and timely decisions.” According to Captain Fanning, one of the gravest errors was waiting to have all the information before making a decision. In the fog of combat, you’ll never have all the information. A good plan violently executed now, he urged, was better than a great plan later. Be decisive, act, and be ready to adapt.

  Fanning’s third piece of advice was simple: “Set the example.” As officers, all eyes would be on us. We would set the tone, and the unit would take its cues from our attitudes — good and bad. “Why do we care here about how your uniform looks?” Fanning asked us. “Because your Marines will care.” Sloppiness begets sloppiness, and small inattentions would set us on the slippery slope to large ones. That, according to the Marine Corps, was the causal link between the alignment of my belt buckle and the survival of my future platoon.

  “Fourth, know your men and look out for their welfare.” Fanning smiled as he remembered Marines he’d served with. They will, he said, follow you through the gates of hell if they trust you truly care about them. “This is not about you.” Fanning spoke the sentence slowly, emphasizing each word. He explained that the Corps existed for the enlisted infantryman. “Everyone else — you aspiring infantry officers included — is only support.

  “Finally,” Fanning exhorted us, “train your men as a team.” A unit’s good morale and esprit de corps depend on each man’s feeling part of it. Marines need to know one another’s jobs. “That includes you and your platoon sergeant,” he added. A new lieutenant and his enlisted second-in-command had to share their responsibilities. Too often, Fanning said, platoon commanders focused on the mission while platoon sergeants focused on troop welfare. “Each of you has to do both.” Fanning drove the point home with a question: “What’s the difference between you and your platoon sergeant?” He paused and then answered it himself. “One bullet.”

  Captain Fanning wasn’t General George S. Patton in front of an American flag. He didn’t rant and rave and wave a pistol in the air. Because of that, his words resonated with me. He gave us a glimpse beyond the fantasy world of OCS. We began to see the connection between practicing and playing, between fake pressure and real pressure. Captain Fanning had explained the purpose of the game.

  From that afternoon on, I accepted the rules and lived by them. When getting dressed by the numbers, I tried to move faster and yell louder than anyone else. When Olds made me call cadence, I did it with heart and never backed down. He stopped caring that my calls confused the platoon. Marching didn’t matter. It was about cool under pressure. It was about detachment. We had to retain our ability to think when the world was crumbling around us. Not for ourselves, but for our Marines.

  Starting the next afternoon, we got twenty-four hours off. My dad picked me up at Quantico’s gate and took me to Annapolis for the day. I tried to describe OCS, but the stress and the chaos were laughable, a million miles away. It embarrassed me to seem too affected by them. After all, this was training, really nothing more than a summer job. But it was more. The bullets were blanks, and the screaming was an act, but the test was real. By the Marine Corps’s own admission, I was being screened to see if I had what it takes to be a combat leader. It was a rite of passage, my generation’s chariot race or duel. I wanted to pass that test more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.

  Growing up, I’d tested myself on the athletic field. A bad football play or a lost lacrosse game could be shaken off — commiserate with teammates and look forward to next week. In college, I was never truly challenged. I worked hard to do well but never doubted the outcome. I knew from the first day of freshman year that I would graduate. At OCS, my commission was mine to lose. And I could lose it at any moment.

  The future disappeared, and my selfish motives went with it. I existed only in the present. The one thing keeping me going was being part of a group, knowing each mistake made my comrades a little weaker. Group punishment, shunned in most of American society, was a staple at OCS. Platoons fight as groups. They live or die as groups. So we were disciplined as a group. The epiphany struck one morning the next week as I locked my body in the leaning rest — the “up” pushup position. Sergeant Olds put the whole platoon in that posture while he berated a candidate at the far end of the squad bay for having scuffs on his boots. The message wasn’t in Olds’s words; it was in recognizing that this wasn’t about how much we could take, but about how much we could give.

  As we moved into the last month of the summer, the days seemed to accelerate. Riding the bus through Quantico’s gates felt like a long time ago. I thought of my early mistakes and laughed. At least they’d kept me around long enough to learn from them. The Crucible was only a week away. We would put together all the classes and PT in one final test. There were rumors of a ceremony after the Crucible. We would receive an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, the traditional symbol of the Marine Corps: a token of our survival.

  During the final week, each day ended as it began, with our platoon toeing the line along the length of the squad bay. We stood at attention in brown T-shirts, green shorts, and shower shoes. The sergeant instructors strutted past, berating us mostly, but then including a few nuggets of praise.

  “You candidates are the worst we’ve seen yet. The slowest. The dumbest. The most selfish.” Olds pointed at a different candidate with each pejorative tag. I exhaled when he moved on without pointing at me. “We may still send most of you back to college. Back to playing tennis and mixing martinis and thinking you’re better than the men who defend your freedom.” He wasn’t bluffing. We had lost another platoon-mate earlier that week — this time to a stress fracture. “But a few of you have heart. And we’ll make those candidates into Marines. They’ll go out and kill communists for Suzy Rottencrotch.” Suzy was a Marine Corps metaphor for every cheating wife and girlfriend we’d left behind. Nothing in our lives was sacred to Olds except our ability to lead Marines. He finished with one of his most often repeated pieces of advice: “A little heart will get you a long way in the Marine Corps.”

  We took it as praise.

  At the end of each night’s monologue, we hydrated. “Hydrate” is another entry in the Marine lexicon. Marines don’t drink; they hydrate. Many of our platoon’s casualties spent their last hour as Marine officer candidates sprawled in a tub of ice, getting jabbed with a rectal thermometer called “the silver bullet.” Heat stroke in July in Virginia does not discriminate between tall and short, black and white, or good candidate and bad candidate. It knows only hydrated and dehydrated. So there was no resistance to the nightly command to hydrate. We tilted our heads back and poured a whole canteen of water down our throats, holding the empty canteen upside down over our heads to prove it was empty. Some candidates had a hard time keeping so much liquid down, heaving streams of regurgitated water across the aisle to pool around the feet o
f the men on the other side, who kept their eyes stoically to the front to avoid the wrath of the stalking instructors.

  Olds pointed to the puddles, deeply offended. “This is my house. That water better be cleaned up by reveille. And none of you maggots better get out of your racks tonight either. The Marine Corps Order says sleep, so sleep.”

  At the command “mount the racks,” we clambered into our bunks. But even then the day wasn’t over. We lay at the position of attention, arms at our sides with fists clenched and thumbs on our imaginary trouser seams, heels together with feet at a forty-five-degree angle, eyes on the ceiling.

  Olds stood in the center of the squad bay with his hands on his hips.

  “Reeeaaaaddddy!” The word came not from his mouth, or even from his lungs, but from someplace deep inside known only to drill instructors and Italian tenors.

  “Sing!”

  “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.” Forty-five voices in the first week, then forty-one, then thirty-eight as the summer progressed, bellowed “The Marines’ Hymn.” Not “The Marine Corps Hymn” but “The Marines’ Hymn,” the song that belonged to the Marines.

  “First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean.” All the pride, all the striving, all the heart was there in those lyrics being shouted at the ceiling.

  “If the Army and the Navy ever look on Heaven’s scenes, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.”

  That moment at the end of the hymn, when silence roared in our ears and I could hear my fellow candidates catching their breath, was my favorite time of the whole day.