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.