The Title
1801
“Everybody get the fuck up right now! Get the fuck out of those racks right now! Get on line!”
My voice sounded foreign to me, but somehow that didn’t matter. This role felt great.
The raw recruits in the barracks scrambled to get out of their racks and get on the chalk line drawn on their side of the room. Young men wearing nothing but their underwear tripped over one another or the edges of their beds to make it happen, most recovering quickly with just a stubbed toe or a hop and a skip. One sprawled face first on the floor.
“Don’t get up,” I told him. “Push.”
He knew immediately what I meant. This wasn’t his first day of training, after all. He got himself into a push-up position and started dipping his chest all the way down to the floor, then shoving himself up to full extension. Repeat. And again. After the twentieth one I told him he only had twenty more. Then I moved on.
“Count off!” Davidson, my fellow drill instructor, shouted.
One by one they shouted out their numbers until they got to thirty, our class size for that particular platoon, before waiting in nervous trepidation about what came next. Davidson and I let that fear linger in the air for a bit, never fully letting the smiles come to our faces, before we both shouted for them to get dressed and “hurry the fuck up about it.”
We left them to it at that point. Davidson was a sergeant and had already been running drill for a few cycles. This was his fifth, I believe, so he was pretty well-versed in the order that everything went in. I was fresh. This was my very first cycle, and the only thing I had to go off of was my memory of how recruit training went for me. Nowadays I’ve heard that the Marine Corps is a little more orderly with their training and drill instructors have to go through courses of instruction before they can instruct others, but back then we didn’t really have anything like that. We had to make due with hardening young men into warriors the best way we figured.
“What’s next?” I asked in the drill instructors’ hut when we were out of earshot.
“Simple week for now,” Davidson said. “Just drill and marching. Weapons handling in terms of ceremony type shit. Port arms, order arms, shoulder arms, you remember all that.”
“Right,” I said.
“Next week we’ll step it up. Still doing drill and shit but we’ll throw in some bayonet training on top of it.” He grinned. “Better get back out there.”
Davidson was a good guy, and I liked him, but he had a mean streak that made him absolutely perfect for this job. I suppose I have a mean streak myself, and the two of us would feed off one another when the recruits were around to see who could make those young men break first. It was a sort of game, and difficult to keep the laughter at bay half the time, but at the end of the day it did actually serve a purpose.
I’m not sure whether or not Davidson truly saw the purpose there. It might’ve been enough for him to run a recruit into the ground for the sheer entertainment of it. That was part of the job anyway. As drill instructors it’s not like we were expected to hold their hands and ensure everyone makes friends.
That’s the way I justified a lot of what I did, anyway.
We were meant to make Marines. And Marines were notorious after the War for Independence for being a fighting force that would stop at nothing to achieve its goals and complete its mission. Marines were tempered by fire. That takes breaking someone down before you build them back up.
People aren’t born warriors. They’re built. They’re constructed by a combination of their bloodline and the experiences of their lives. A soft life will form into a soft man, and a soft man with a soft belly makes a perfect target for the enemy. Hard life and hard times breed hard men, and if Davidson and I could reconstruct those types of moments and times in the eleven weeks we instructed these young men we might be able to toughen the soft and make the already-hard nearly impenetrable.
That first week we did exactly as Davidson described. From morning to night we drilled them in simple weapon movements and marching. They went from being utterly pathetic to being slightly less so. I resolved to hammer them a bit harder the following week.
Bayonet training began as a disaster, with several men nearly skewering themselves before Davidson and I decided to just take the bayonets off and have them practice with sticks we secured to the ends of their muskets. It was a ripe bit of humiliation for them, but the message was delivered loud and clear. They weren’t ready for men’s weapons because they weren’t really men… Yet.
The third week we spent mixing a bit of everything they had learned so far and peppering in an excess of physical training. I had lost several pounds myself, looking more like wiry muscle now instead of some of the bulk that I was proud of beforehand. I had to remind myself constantly to keep eating when I wasn’t around the recruits if I wanted to retain my muscular frame. For them it didn’t matter so much, and for many of them it was actually preferable that they didn’t eat enough because they came to us chubby and needing a complete physical transformation. And they got it.
The fourth week we kept the drill, marching, bayonet training, and physical training in the rotation but each one got a little less time because we incorporated something new.
Swimming.
Swimming is essential to being a Marine, but somehow many of the recruits didn’t get that piece of news until they were already with us. I thought the title of the organization would give it away, but I guess people’s stupidity can still find ways to surprise me. Regardless, about twenty out of the thirty knew how to swim and passed the swim courses with ease. They went off with Davidson to work on drill, marching, and whatever else they needed to strengthen. The final ten stayed with me at the pier and learned how to figure it out in a literal sink or swim format.
The fifth and sixth weeks incorporated some more physical fitness components, but they were split in their focuses. Week five focused more on the team aspects. We had them carrying logs together and building ramps with dirt and logs to move from one obstacle to the next. Davidson and I got them absolutely filthy each day from dawn to dusk and loved every minute of it.
Week six broke away from the team-building and instead had them working on themselves as individuals. I taught half of them basic instruction in boxing, while Davidson instructed the other half in grappling. After a couple hours we would swap. At the end of each day we would pair up several students and have them run a boxing match then take another couple and have them grapple. It went like that all week until we had run through everyone with actual application of the skills they had learned. And we learned who needed to do more…
Weeks seven, eight, and nine were all focused on target practice. They were broken into different categories because only so much target practice can be done with Brown Bess muskets. They are only accurate out to about fifty yards before the ball starts going every which way, and the recruits that struggled below fifty yards were given swift instruction at the tip of a boot until they got it right. Musket practice, therefore, only lasted throughout week seven.
Rifle practice lasted both weeks eight and nine.
Pennsylvania rifles were used for target practice during these weeks. While the caliber of the bullet was smaller than the Brown Bess, the accuracy was undeniable. The first round of shooting began at one hundred yards, with two hundred being the target at the end of the week. By the completion of week nine, several of the more skilled students were hitting center mass on targets three hundred yards away. Davidson and I jotted their names down as potential sharpshooters for whatever platoons and companies they would be shipped off to when training was done.
Week ten involved a training course in how to set up different techniques for when one might be holding a defensive position. We taught them how to dig trenches and put up earthworks to protect themselves from enemy fire. We went over basic formations that they would need to know when they left to go to various platoons or serve on ships across the Atlantic. Things their commanders would expect of them when they arrived. We hoped we did right by them in the end, as week ten ended with a culmination of everything they had learned in the form of a final test.
That final test was nothing written, but all hands-on. It took everything these recruits had learned and saw if they could put them together to come out the other side as Marines. Lasting over two days with minimal food and minimal sleep, they had to use teamwork and everything they knew about being a warrior to complete a series of tasks laid out before them. Davidson and I were with them every step of the way. It was difficult to keep from smiling at the progress and sense of pride they held for themselves as they progressed through this crucible.
Week eleven wasn’t really a full week, but rather a return from their trials followed by a graduation ceremony. Families could attend to see their children or siblings receiving the highest honor bestowed by instructors in that line of work. The title. The whole thing concludes with the recruits having individually earned the title of “Marine” and collectively having worked together to form bonds that some would even keep lifelong.
Our first cycle concluded with a mixture of emotions. On one hand, it had felt like such a long time since the first day of the training began. Yet, at the same time, it somehow also felt like just yesterday. These young men were no longer recruits, but actually Marines in full, and we had orders for each and every one of them regarding where they would be heading off to. What a frightening thought.
When I looked with pride over the young men talking with their families, my gaze came to a stop on a pretty brunette girl with familiar blue eyes. Thyra, my sister, stood just outside the crowd with her hands on her hips and a mischievous grin playing on her lips. I smiled, but like a grape without water that smile died on the vine as I realized that if Thyra was here… my father was too.
If you want to read more of Calder's story, leading up to those shores of Tripoli, check out Leatherneck.
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