What it is Like to Go to War Read Free Page B

leave. By the time a half hour had gone by, it hurt. After around forty-five minutes I was covered with red welts. I could feel blood trickling down my body. I could feel the mosquitoes inside my shorts biting my testicles. But I had decided this was a test I wasn’t going to fail.
    I remember the drill instructor standing in front of me on his fourth trip back, eyeball to eyeball, looking right inside me. This time he didn’t ask me if I wanted to quit. After a while there was an almost imperceptible change in his eyes. His head nodded just a fraction. Then he ordered me back into my clothes, shouting at me for being so stupid as to stand naked in a swamp filled with mosquitoes.
    From that moment on I knew that this frightening black man had accepted me into his group, which he often referred to as “my Marine Corps.” From that moment on I started thinking of myself differently. I felt proud. I was a Marine. I still feel proud to be a Marine. But there was one very critical issue that was missing from this particular passage of mine—the spiritual. I did connect with something larger than myself, the Marine Corps, but that is a long way from connecting with something larger than myself such as humanity or God. 1 My loyalty was to the U.S. Marines, and to Marine ancestors, not the ancestors of my people, who in the modern world are all people.
    The uninitiated often think that Marine boot camp is stupid or even sadistic. Clearly, getting bitten on the testicles by mosquitoes wasn’t training me to shoot straighter or attack smarter. But before society sends high school kids to do our killing in battle, those kids have to transform the way they think of themselves, or they are not going to be very effective killers. Worse, they will be more likely to endanger others. Lacking discipline on an ambush or losing concentration on a listening post by slapping a mosquito,or even scratching a mosquito bite, can get you and everyone else killed. At the very least, lack of discipline under extremity will make the whole organization less effective at killing. And killing is what we are asking these kids to do. This isn’t done without a major psychological transformation, unless we’re already dealing with a criminal mind, and it has to be done quickly. Our society invented boot camp to do this. Boot camp doesn’t turn young men into killers. It removes the societal restraints on the savage part of us that has made us the top animal in the food chain.
    Part of my own spiritual initiation was that awareness of death on Axel’s fishing boat, but spiritual initiation got a major booster shot the last weekend before graduation from boot camp. This was the first time we were allowed liberty; we got twelve hours to go off base. Most of us were headed for Washington, D.C., the nearest big city.
    Come Saturday morning we weren’t just feeling cocky; we felt invincible. We were fifteen pounds heavier and lean as snakes. We were Marines. My particular invincible band left Quantico for Washington on the noon bus: four of us, including Perkins. Perkins was a wiry kid, cocksure and quick and with a short fuse. We’d been in town a couple of hours, bathing ourselves in the air-conditioning in Benny’s Rebel Room and drinking cold beer, the result of very poetic interpretations of the birth dates on our driver’s licenses, when Perkins said, “Let’s go over to the Cap ’n’ Guys.” I looked at my two other friends. They looked at their beers. The Cap ’n’ Guys was reputed to be the toughest bar in D.C. No one, however, wanted to tell Perkins no. So we all went out into the blinding afternoon and walked the several blocks to the Cap ’n’ Guys.
    Three very sour-looking guys wheeled on their bar stools when we pushed in through the glass door, rattling the dirty venetian blinds. Two other guys were talking at a back table. They were all in their late twenties or early thirties, a little overweight, old men to our