The Day the Marine Corps Drill Instructors Broke Me
I thought I had what it takes. Turns out, it wasn’t enough.
By mid-June of 1988, I’d technically made it through the hard part of Marine Corps boot camp.
I’d survived the first month where they broke us down into common lumps of human resource. I’d learned to drink coffee for the first time in my life during the two weeks of sleep-deprived chow hall duty. I’d even made it through the many frigid night-watches during the two weeks in the field learning infantry basics, and done pretty well on the rifle range.
By the end of the second month of bootcamp, thanks to the precise psychological and physical conditioning techniques of the USMC (including both sleep-dep and food scarcity) the drill instructors had successfully turned about 50 of us into ravening bloodthirsty killers.
That’s not an exaggeration. If they’d let us out after month two of bootcamp, we would have likely murdered the first person who bumped into us the wrong way.
That was their job — turn us into engines of violence.
But it needed to be violence they could control, so the third month was slapping a veneer of honor, duty, and pride over the whole thing. The real power of the military doesn’t lie in the performance of violent…
