Making the Corps, by Thomas E. Ricks
published 1997 - read 2005

Some journalist with vague ambitions of being a sociologist and/or political commentator decided to write a book on the US Marine Corps, circa 1995. The general strategy is sound: he follows one platoon of recruits through Marine bootcamp on Parris Island, and intercuts scenes of their lives with more general commentary on the nature of the Marines, the values of Marine culture, and the general situation of the military in American life these days.

It sort of works. While the book is rich with material and is basically worth reading, Ricks is never quite sophisticated enough to weave everything together the way he wants to. It turns out that the day-to-day experiences of recruits and drill instructors on Parris Island are really interesting, but don't always make for smooth segues into broader discussions. The latter end up feeling kind of repetitive and tend to meander on, while you just wish he would get back to the story arcs of Recruit Lee and Sergeant Carey.

Ricks also falls flat as far as criticism goes. He essentially accepts at face value the Marines' distate for slovenly, degenerate civilian life and the positive impact that the Marines has on the recruits. Sure, we see some recruits that don't turn out so good, but by this point the perspective is so skewed by the forward motion of boot camp that we see them as failures, rather than asking whether becoming successful Marines is necessarily the best thing for everybody. Ricks alludes to the Marines having problem with racial and sexual integration but never really addresses this (shockingly, he spends no time at all on female Marines) and the biggest concern he has with military culture is the increasing sense that the military is something very much set apart from civilian life and possibly even opposed to it, a worrisome concept in a free society.  This worry isn't convincing, though, since so much of the time he seems wafted along on the Marines' own rhetoric of how that difference from society lets them present good old-fashioned values to today's snot-nosed, sniveling kids. It's not that the prose is Marine propaganda, it's just that Ricks keeps his own opinions to himself, while pretty much relying on Marines to tell the story. Not surprisingly, they think the Marines are awesome.

All that said, I'm glad I read this. One of Ricks's genuinely legitimate points is that with the end of the draft, the majority of Americans acquire most of their knowledge about life in the military from the movies and the occasional war on television. My father was a Marine at some point, for some length of time, and I do feel like reading this book gives me some little sense of what that might have involved.

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