One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer - Hardcover

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1

Fifteen of us climbed aboard the ancient
white school bus. Wire mesh
covered its windows and four black words
ran along its sides: UNITED
STATES MARINE CORPS.
Dressed casually in shorts and sandals,
we spread out and sat
alone with our bags. Some sipped coffee
from paper cups, and a few unfolded
newspapers they had brought. I found a
seat near the back as the bus
started with a roar and a cloud of smoke
blew through the open windows.
A second lieutenant, looking crisp in
his gabardine and khaki
uniform, sat in the front row. He had
just graduated from Officer Candidates
School, and would escort us on the
hour's drive to the Marine Corps base in
Quantico, Virginia. Shortly after we
pulled away from the recruiting office, he
stood in the aisle and turned to face
us. I expected a welcome, a joke, some
commiseration.
"Honor, courage, and commitment are the
Marines' core values,"
the lieutenant shouted over the engine.
He sounded scripted, but also
sincere. "If you can't be honest at OCS,
how can the Corps trust you to lead
men in combat?"
Combat. I glanced around the bus's
gunmetal interior, surprised to
see people reading or pretending to
sleep. No one answered the lieutenant's
question. He stood there in the aisle,
glaring at us, and I sat up a little
straighter. The lieutenant was my age,
but he looked different. Shorter hair, of
course, and broader shoulders. It was
more than that. He had an edge,
something in his jaw or his brow that
made me self-conscious.
I turned toward the window to avoid his
gaze. Families drove next
to us, on their way to the lake or the
beach. Kids wearing headphones
gawked, surely wondering what losers
were riding a school bus in the
summertime. A girl in an open Jeep stood
and started to raise her shirt
before being pulled back down by a
laughing friend. They waved and
accelerated past. I thought of my
friends, spending their summer vacations in
New York and San Francisco, working in
air-conditioned office towers and
partying at night. Staring through the
wire mesh at the bright day, I thought
this must be what it's like on the ride
to Sing Sing. I wondered why I was on
that bus.

I went to Dartmouth intending to go to
med school. Failing a chemistry class
had inspired my love of history, and I
ended up majoring in the classics. By
the summer of 1998, my classmates were
signing six-figure contracts as
consultants and investment bankers. I
didn't understand what we, at age
twenty-two, could possibly be consulted
about. Others headed off to law
school or medical school for a few more
years of reading instead of living.
None of it appealed to me. I wanted to
go on a great adventure, to prove
myself, to serve my country. I wanted to
do something so hard that no one
could ever talk shit to me. In Athens or
Sparta, my decision would have been
easy. I felt as if I had been born too
late. There was no longer a place in the
world for a young man who wanted to wear
armor and slay dragons.
Dartmouth encouraged deviation from the
trampled path, but only
to join organizations like the Peace
Corps or Teach for America. I wanted
something more transformative. Something
that might kill me — or leave me
better, stronger, more capable. I wanted
to be a warrior.
My family had only a short martial
tradition. My maternal
grandfather, like many in his
generation, had served in World War II.
He was
a Navy officer in the South Pacific, and
his ship, the escort carrier Natoma
Bay, fought at New Guinea, Leyte Gulf,
Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, often
supporting Marine invasion forces
ashore. At 0635 on June 7, 1945, so the
family story went, only two months
before the end of the war, a Japanese
kamikaze crashed into the Natoma Bay's
flight deck. The explosion tore a
hole in the steel twelve feet wide and
twenty feet long. Shrapnel peppered my
grandfather's body. My mother remembers
watching him pick pieces of metal
from his skin twenty years later. He had
some of that shrapnel melted into a
lucky horseshoe, which was shown to me
with great reverence when I was a
child.
My father enlisted in the Army in 1968.
When most of his basic
training class went to Vietnam, he
received orders to the Army Security
Agency. He spent a year in Bad Aibling,
Germany, eavesdropping on Eastern
bloc radio transmissions and waiting for
the Soviets to roll through the Fulda
Gap. He completed OCS just as President
Richard Nixon began drawing
down the military, and took advantage of
an early out to go to law school. But
my dad was proud to have been a soldier.
The Army sent me a letter during my
junior year at Dartmouth,
promising to pay for graduate school.
The Navy and Air Force did the same,
promising skills and special training.
The Marine Corps promised nothing.
Whereas the other services listed their
benefits, the Corps asked, "Do you
have what it takes?" If I was going to
serve in the military, I would be a Marine.
A few months before, I'd seen a poster
in the dining hall
advertising a talk by Tom Ricks. Then
the Wall Street Journal's Pentagon
correspondent, Ricks had recently
written a book about the Marines. I sat up
most of one night reading it. I arrived
early to get a good seat and listened as
Ricks explained the Corps's culture and
the state of civil-military relations in
the United States. His review of the
Marines, or at least my interpretation of
it, was glowing. The Marine Corps was a
last bastion of honor in society, a
place where young Americans learned to
work as a team, to trust one
another and themselves, and to sacrifice
for a principle. Hearing it from a
recruiter, I would have been skeptical.
But here was a journalist, an impartial
observer.
The crowd was the usual mix of
students, faculty, and retired
alumni. After the talk, a young
professor stood. "How can you support the
presence of ROTC at a place like
Dartmouth?" she asked. "It will militarize
the campus and threaten our culture of
tolerance."
"Wrong," replied Ricks. "It will
liberalize the military." He explained
that in a democracy, the military should
be representative of the people. It
should reflect the best of American
society, not stand apart from it.
Ricks used words such as "duty" and
"honor" without cynicism,
something I'd not often heard at Dartmouth.
His answer clinched my decision to
apply for a slot at Marine
OCS during the summer between my junior
and senior years of college. I
would have laughed at the idea of
joining the Corps on a bet or because of a
movie, but my own choice was almost
equally capricious. Although I had
reached the decision largely on my own,
Tom Ricks, in an hour-long talk on a
cold night at Dartmouth, finally
convinced me to be a Marine.
But even joining the Marines didn't
seem as crazy as it had to my
parents' generation. This was 1998, not
1968. The United States was
cashing in its post–cold war peace
dividend. Scholars talked about "the end
of history," free markets spreading
prosperity throughout the world, and the
death of ideology. I would be joining a
peacetime military. At least that's the
rationale I used when I broke the news
to my parents. They were surprised
but supportive. "The Marines," my dad
said, "will teach you everything I love
you too much to teach you."

The Marine Corps base in Quantico
straddles Interstate 95, sprawling across
thousands of acres of pine forest and
swamp thirty miles south of
Washington. Our bus rumbled through the
gate, and we drove past rows of
peeling warehouses and brick buildings
identified only by numbered signs.
They looked like the remnants of some
dead industry, like the boarded-up
mills on the riverbanks of a New
Hampshire town.
"Christ, man, where're the ovens? This
place looks like Dachau."
Only a few forced laughs met this quip
from someone near the back of the
bus.
We drove farther and farther onto the
base — along the edge of a
swamp, through miles of trees, far
enough to feel as if they could kill us
here
and no one would ever know. That, of
course, was the desired effect.
When the air brakes finally hissed and
the door swung open, we
sat in the middle of a blacktop parade
deck the size of three football fields.
Austere brick barracks surrounded it. A
sign at the blacktop's
edge read UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS
OFFICER CANDIDATES
SCHOOL — DUCTUS EXEMPLO. I recognized
the motto from Latin
class: "Leadership by Example."
I hoped a drill instructor in a Smokey
Bear hat would storm onto
the bus and order us off to stand on
yellow footprints. Pop culture has
immortalized the arrival of
enlistedMarine recruits at Parris
Island, South
Carolina. But this was OCS, and the lack
of theatrics disappointed me.
A fresh-faced Marine with a clipboard
took the roll by Social
Security number and then handed a pencil
to each of us, saying we had a lot
of paperwork to fill out.
For two days, we shuffled from line to
line for haircuts, gear issue,
and a battery of physical tests.
Candidates who had returned after being
dropped from previous OCS classes
explained this routine: the schedule was
designed to minimize the number of us
who flunked out for high blood
pressure. On day three, with physical
evaluations completed, the hammer
would fall.
We slept in squad bays with fifty bunks
per room. There, on the
evenings before OCS really started, I
got my first lesson in esprit de corps.
OCS is competitive. Since the peacetime
Marine Corps needs a fixed
number of officers, a certain number of
candidates are earmarked to graduate
while the rest are destined to fail. I
thought this put us in competition with
one another, but the candidates who had
been dropped before, or who had
served as enlisted Marines, shared their
knowledge with the rest of us.
The Corps is a naval service, with
nautical vocabulary. Doors are
hatches, walls are bulkheads, and floors
are decks. Signs at Quantico, miles
from the sea, read WELCOME ABOARD. They
also taught us the more
arcane language of the Marines. Running
shoes were called go-fasters. Our
flashlights, worn on the hip at OCS,
were moonbeams. When we looked
confused, one of the prior-service
Marines laughed. Just wait till you get to
the Fleet, he told us. Three different
pieces of equipment were known as
a "donkey dick" — a radio antenna, a
brush for cleaning mortar tubes, and a
funnel for fueling Humvees.
In the beginning, my strongest
impression of Quantico, apart from
its isolation, was its timelessness.
Looking around the squad bay, I could
imagine Franklin Roosevelt in the White
House. No plastic, no advertising, no
bright colors. Just two-high metal
racks, as our bunks were called, a green
linoleum floor, brick walls, and bare
bulbs overhead. The only decoration was
a sign of two-foot-high letters
stenciled along an entire wall: HONOR,
COURAGE, COMMITMENT. I already had the
feeling that the Marines were a
world apart, that what we did at OCS
would be separate from the rest of my
life.
When another candidate dragged a wooden
footlocker next to
mine and sat down, I was glad of the
company.
"I'm Dave Adams." He stuck out his hand.
Dave was a football player at William
and Mary. His brother had
gone to Dartmouth. His easy smile made
me like him right away.
"So what do you think?" I tried to ask
the question with less
trepidation than I felt.
Dave smiled and said, "I think we're in
for a shitty summer. But
I've wanted to be a Marine since I was a
kid. What's that saying? 'Pain is
temporary. Pride is forever.'"
"I saw a bumper sticker in the parking
lot that said 'Nobody ever
drowned in sweat.'" I was nervous. Not
scared or intimidated — that would
come later — but apprehensive. The
Marine transformation is one of
American life's storied tests. I knew
its reputation was earned.
We had the barest taste of it at the
supply warehouse on the
morning of the ominous third day. All
the candidates lined up and moved from
bin to bin, selecting green camouflage
blouses and trousers, nylon belts with
two olive-drab canteens attached, and
odd items such as bug spray
labeled "Repellent, Arthropod." Two
young Marines in the warehouse took
advantage of the chance to hassle a
group of future officers.
"Get at parade rest!"
It was an alien command. I clasped my
hands in front of me and
tried to look respectful.
"You gonna gaff us off? Get at the
position of attention."
The candidates around me stood a little
straighter, with their
hands at their sides. The two Marines
told us there were only two ways to
stand at OCS: parade rest — feet
shoulder-width apart, hands clasped in the
small of the back, eyes straight ahead;
and at attention — heels together,
back straight, hands at your sides with
thumbs along the trouser seams.
Later, we assembled for lunch in a Word
War II–era Quonset hut.
Baking in this sun-beaten aluminum oven,
we munched processed meat
sandwiches and apples — a prepared lunch
the Marines called a "boxed
nasty" — as the school's commanding
officer (CO) outlined his expectations
of us. The colonel's lantern jaw, craggy
nose, and graying hair were straight
from a recruiting commercial. He looked
as if he could wrestle any of us to
the floor, and authority ran deep in his
voice.
"We seek to identify in each candidate
those qualities of intellect,
human understanding, and moral character
that enable a person to inspire
and to control a group of people
successfully: leaders," he said. "A
candidate's presence under pressure is a
key indicator of leadership
potential. In trying to identify Marine
leaders who may someday face combat,
we want to see who can think and
function under stress. Stress at OCS is
created in many ways, as you will see."
When the colonel concluded, he called
forward the school's staff,
introducing each Marine. All had served
as drill instructors. At OCS, though,
they were called "sergeant instructors,"
and we would address them by that
title, their rank, and their name. The
staff marched smartly down the aisle
and stood at attention before us. Khaki
uniforms with splashes of colored
ribbons, eyes focused over our heads on
the back wall of the room, no
smiles. They were sergeants, staff
sergeants, and gunnery sergeants, mostly
men with ten to twenty years in the
Corps. I saw scars and biceps and
tattoos. With introductions complete,
the colonel turned to the staff and
uttered ten words that ended our
civilian lives: "Take charge and carry
out the
plan of the day."
Tables turned over, chairs clattered to
the floor, and I forgot all
about the half-eaten apple in my hand.
The staff charged us. We ran out the
back door of the Quonset hut. I wanted
to keep running, to disappear into the
woods, make my way out to the highway,
and hitchhike home. But pride
trumps most other impulses in young men,
and I fell into a ragged formation
with my new platoon-mates.
"Stop eyeballing the freakin' area,
maggot." My eyes were locked
to the front. I didn't think he was
talking to me. Warm, wet breath on my
cheeks. If not me, then someone right
next to me.
"Lock your body!"
Spittle across my eyes and lips. The
Marine strutted up and down
our crooked ranks. He spoke to the
group, but in a way that made it personal
for each of us.
"If you so much as breathe, I'll hear
it and rip your freakin'
windpipe out. Now grab your freakin'
trash and move with purpose. Pretend
for me that you want to be here."
We shouldered our bags. Candidates with
foresight had brought
hiking packs. They stood comfortably,
looking ready to strike out down the
Appalachian Trail. The truly lost
labored with their leather brief bags and
suitcases. I fell somewhere in between,
striving mightily to be inconspicuous
with an oversize duffel bag.
I snuck a look at the instructor's
nametag. Olds. Three stripes on
his shoulder. Sergeant Olds. He was
yelling, veins popping, eyes bulging.
His arms waved from broad shoulders that
tapered to his waist with all the
menacing grace of a wasp. I looked at
Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds,
sensing he had just become a fixture in
my life.
"Don't eyeball me, candidate. Do you
want to ask me out on a
date? You look like you want to ask me out."
"No, Sergeant Instructor Sergeant Olds."
"Go ahead, candidate. Keep whispering.
And keep looking deep
into my eyes." His voice dropped to a
whisper, and he moved in close. I
watched a vein throbbing in his temple
and struggled not to make eye
contact. "I dare you to ask me out. Your
chucklehead classmates here might
get a laugh out of it, but I swear it'll
be the last thing you ever do."
This is theater, right? I had seen Full
Metal Jacket. It's all a joke.
But it didn't feel like a joke. When
Olds spoke to me, icy adrenaline washed
through my chest. My legs shook. The
worst part was that Olds knew he'd
gotten to me. He would, I feared,
increase the pressure.
For now, Olds pivoted on a spit-shined
heel and struck out across
the parade deck. Lacking better options,
we followed him. Large raindrops
splotched the dark asphalt. The
splotches grew bigger and closer together
until they finally merged into a single,
dark stain. I dragged my duffel bag
along the pavement, struggling to keep
its strap from biting into my shoulder.
The bag had felt lighter when I'd hefted
it the night before. I had packed only
the required list: three sets of
civilian clothes, running shoes, a
toiletry kit,
and the combat boots mailed weeks before
so I could break them in. I folded
the clothes crisply, careful to crease
each trouser leg and keep the shirt
fronts smooth.
Sergeant Olds had opened a gap of fifty
yards between himself
and the straggling platoon. He stood
facing us with his hands on his
hips. "Dump your trash. I want to see
who's trying to sneak naked pictures of
his boyfriend into my squad bay."
I hesitated, unsure whether he actually
meant for us to dump our
belongings onto the puddled pavement.
Steam rose as the rain hit the ground.
"What are we, deaf? I said dump your
trash. Do it now. Move!"
I unzipped my bag and placed the boots
on the blacktop. Then I
stacked my clothes on them and put the
toiletry bag on top to deflect the
rain. Olds's attention landed on my
carefully constructed pile. He kicked it
over and put a boot print on the chest
of my neatly ironed shirt.
"What's in here?" He grabbed my
toiletry bag. "Drugs? Booze?
Maybe a tube of K-Y jelly and a big
cucumber?"
One by one, my toothbrush, toothpaste,
razor, and shaving cream
fell to the ground.
"You must have hidden it pretty well,
candidate," Olds
growled. "But I'll find it. Oh, yeah,
I'll find it. And when I do, I'll run
your ass
out of my Marine Corps before you can
even call your congressman."
Olds moved on to his next victim, and I
hesitantly began to piece
my life back together, wondering again
why I was at OCS. Next to me, Dave
caught my eye with a smile and mouthed,
"Semper fi."


Copyright © 2005 by Nathaniel Fick.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.