What was written as current affairs is now popular history and military sociology.
In
March 1995, at what we now know to be the midpoint between the Cold
War and the so-called Global War on Terror, military journalist Tom
Ricks embedded himself in a platoon of recruits going through Marine
Corps boot camp at the famed Parris Island. Making the Corps,
Ricks' account of that experience, was published in the late summer
of 1997, just as I enrolled – as a Foreign Service Officer – in
the Marine Corps' Command and Staff College in Quantico. Like Ricks,
in my ten years in the State Department (to that point), I had had
frequent contact with Marines – the detachments that secured our
embassies, and my Ambassador in Jamaica, who had been the first
African-American to lead a Marine infantry unit in combat (in
Vietnam), and was at that time a Reserve USMC Major General
(two-star).
The bulk of the book is, properly enough, taken
up with the literal trials and tribulations of the 63 men who seek to
gain the title and dignity of being called “U.S. Marine,” which
will only come after they complete the eleven week course. Ricks,
much like the drill sergeants, focuses his attention on the
stand-outs and wash-outs among the recruits. For the D.I.s, those in
the middle will do ok without their attention. For Ricks, the ends of
the bell curve provide better stories: “reformed” white
supremacists and nominally criminal gang members from SE Washington
DC are more interesting than fast food employees or even a washed up
accountant. And it is interesting – but is it an authentic picture
of the Marine recruit in the mid-1990s? Probably not.
Where
the book really disappoints though is the penultimate chapter, Ricks'
attempt to predict the coming role of the Marines and the US
military. Having belabored the idea that there exists a deep and
widening gap between the military generally and the Marines
specifically and civilian culture at large, Ricks doubles down.
Earlier, he noted that the skinhead and the gangbanger agreed that a
“race war” was coming to America (and that Jews were at fault).
In this latter chapter, he turns to experts with better credentials
but the same bigotry to argue that as the military experiences the
then-expected downsizing, and American culture is ravaged by the
supposed acolytes of cultural Marxism, the Marines will be called on
to maintain peace and order at home. Ricks is blind to oncoming rush
of terrorism, even though al Qaeda had already bombed the World Trade
Center in 1993 and the USAF barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia in 1996
(initially atributed to Hezbollah and its backer Iran), neither of
which he mentions, and the Marines suffered 220 deaths in the 1983
Beirut terror bombing (which Ricks does mention).
In that
chapter, Ricks worries about the increasing politicization of
individual Marine and military officers, taking as his benchmark a
mythical past in which US military officers were strictly apolitical,
not even voting. The benchmark, the myth, studiously ignores the real
history, which saw the former Commanding General of the U.S. Army
George McClellan candidacy against his former Commander-in-Chief
Lincoln in 1864, General Douglas MacArthur flirt with a run for
President in 1952; the cigar-chomping, fire-bombing, warmongering
General Curtis Lemay's run for Vice-President in 1968; and the
similar role of Admiral James Stockdale in 1992.
Making
the Corps is well-written, and
Ricks had almost astonishing access to the boot camp experience. A
very good effort for his first book-length essay. But in the end,
this is descriptive, not analytical or incisive, and it remains a
curio for the curious, easily laid aside and forgotten.
