Making the Corps

"Making the Corps," (http://www.amazon.com/Making-Corps-Thomas-Ricks/dp/0684848171/sr=8-1/qid=1166641893/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-7361455-7084848?ie=UTF8&s=books) is a story which follows platoon 3086 of the United States Marine Corps from their bus ride down to basic training on Paris Island, South Carolina to a year past their graduation. It was written by Thomas Ricks, currently the military reporter from the Washington Post.

Mr. Ricks did a very good job of giving a semblance of what life was like moving through boot camp, week-by-week. If you are considering joining the Marine Corps, this is probably as good an idea as you will get of what you are in for (the exception being that this book was written before the Crucible was instituted).

Towards the latter part of the book, you begin to get the feeling that Mr. Ricks has fallen in love with the Corps (a problem I see many writers falling into as they intensely cover one topic), but his tone changes as he begins to follow the platoon into Marine Combat Training and various post-boot camp schools (infantry, etc.). You get the feeling the boot camp was nearly a religious experience and then the Marines come face-to-face with the realities of their career. Many are still extremely enthusiastic, many others are complacent, and others are downright disenfranchised with the ideal as portrayed at boot camp, with the reality as played out around the country, and in fact the world.

In sum, I feel the book was a very fair representation of this fascinating branch of the U.S. Military and even some of Mr. Ricks concerns in the epilogue are ominously accurate. This book was written in 1997, but includes observations such as:

"...the American people simply won't tolerate casualties in situations where they dislike or don't understand it, as with Somalia."

"Not to understand the military is dangerous both for the military and the nation. Nowadays civilian policymakers tend to overestimate what the military can do...Overestimating the military is probably even more dangerous than believing the military is peopled by incompetent buffoons, as the Baby Boomer generation seemed to believe in the 1970's."

Finally, Mr. Ricks sees two major problems partially expressed above. The first is that fewer and fewer citizens (and consequently politicians) have any military experience. Therefore, the do not understand the military nor its capabilities. The second is that this above problem, along with the breakdown of morals in this nation lead to a hyper-moral military force defending a populace that in large part lacks morals. Taken to its extreme, this can have severely negative consequences.