COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Where civilians become Marines
GRAHAM RAYMAN, Newsday
March 21, 2006
PARRIS ISLAND, S.C. -- On a broad field, Gavin Dornemann, a former stock broker and sheet metal worker from East Islip, has his chest in the dirt. His face is drenched with sweat. His ears are filled with the raspy bark of a drill instructor delivered from a range of about six inches.In his 14th training day here, Dornemann, 25, has already lost his voice three times from repeatedly shouting "Aye, sir!" at the top of his lungs. He has dropped 12 pounds from physical exertion. Deadpan, he describes the training as "rigorous."
"It's pretty much about concentrating and pushing on," he says during a break. "It's preparing you for what's out there."
Welcome to Marine Corps boot camp, the place where the road to Iraq begins. "We try to make you question your decision," says 1st Lt. Todd Crumbo, who was overseeing the physical training. "Generally speaking, if you let people go to what they think is their limit, they will accomplish about half as much they probably should."
As the war enters its fourth year, about 155 recruits from Long Island and New York City -- each with different reasons for joining -- face not only the grueling days and nights of training, but also the specter that they might eventually be sent to Iraq.
"It hits in my heart because I realize that if you mess up here, you just get yelled at, but if you mess up over there, people get hurt," says recruit Ryan Mc.Laughlin, 19, of Ronkonkoma. "It's a reality check."
Meanwhile, back home, in East Islip, Lindenhurst, Bellmore and Woodside, the parents of some of these recruits struggle between the pride they feel for their children and their own discomfort with the war.
About 20,000 Marine recruits pass through Parris Island each year. The barracks here may now be air-conditioned, but the 95-year-old training center is still an essentially timeless place of sand fleas, austere rows of sit-up racks and pull-up bars, functional brick buildings and the hard call-and-response of drill instructors and their recruits.
There is but one road in or out, and the magazine stand at the commissary stocks sports and military magazines, but not current news magazines such as Time or U.S. News & World Report.
According to Lt. Col. Peter Delorier, the commanding officer of the support battalion at Parris Island, about one in five of the recruits who choose the infantry will end up in Iraq.
"Our practice is not to take a recruit who has graduation on Friday and on Monday they are heading to Iraq," says Delorier, of Katonah, N.Y. "It might be six months to a year beforehand."
Dornemann joined the Marines last Thanksgiving. "It's something that I always wanted to do, and if I waited much longer, I would've been too old," he says of his personal standard. A friend who could not join because of cancer also motivated him.
Parents' doubts
He had to weather a somewhat unhappy reaction from his parents. "My mother was a little more upset than my father," he says. "She's my mother. And she watches the news every night and she knows what's going on."
Dornemann's father, Robert, recalls the day that his son told him that he had joined. "He said 'I have a surprise,'" Robert says from his home in East Islip. "I said 'What's that? You're pregnant?' He says 'I signed up.' I told him, 'Your timing stinks.'"
Dad was only half-joking. While he is proud of his son's achievements, Dornemann senior also expressed misgivings about the war. "Here we send troops there and spend billions to help that country, and somehow it's not appreciated," he says. "That's what upsets me the most. So much infighting and anger that you wonder whether it's something we should continue with."
Jesse Phillips, 26, of Lindenhurst left the Navy to join the Marine Corps, hoping to gain entry into scout-sniper school and the Marines' special forces unit, Force Recon.
"I ultimately will volunteer for a battalion going over to Iraq," he says. "I want to go over there as soon as I can."
Though they are close, Phillips' father, Patrick, 47, differs with his son on the war. "I don't think we belong in the war, and I don't believe in killing people," he says from his Lindenhurst home, as he happens to watch "Jarhead," a recent movie about the Marine Corps. "My beliefs are that we're there for political reasons. But he's a special individual, and he believes what he's doing is right. I'll still be down there to support him when he graduates."
A 9/11 tribute
At the shooting range, where Marines learn to hit a target 500 yards away, recruit Louis Garcia Apa, 25, of Bellmore has weathered weeks of training, but it is a reporter's question about why he enlisted that struck a nerve.
"This recruit," Apa begins, following the Parris Island ban on the personal pronoun. He pauses. His voice cracks. "This recruit lost someone who was very close to him, a role model."
Apa is referring to Bruce Gary, a New York City firefighter from Bellmore who died on Sept. 11, 2001. Apa went to school with Gary's son and spent time at the firehouse where Gary was assigned. His reaction is a reminder not only that training at Parris Island rubs emotions raw, but that the terror attacks on the Twin Towers still carry enormous emotional power.
"It's something that stayed in my mind," he says. " It took this recruit a couple of years to get himself together before he could join."
Tears streaking his face, Apa explains that he worked in a law office and sold cell phones for Sprint before signing up. He pauses. "Sir," he asks an officer standing nearby. "Can I wipe my face?"
Reached at her office on Long Island, Apa's mom, Linda Favara, 48, says, "I wasn't really happy at the time because we are in a war right now. But my son is trying to make a better life for himself. In that respect I was happy for him. And I am behind him 100 percent."
Of Iraq, she says, "I try not to think about it. I go from day to day. No mother wants their son to go."
Another recruit, Brian Rivera, 22, of Forest Hills says he was attending LaGuardia Community College when he "fell into the wrong crowd." He wound up working at a CVS pharmacy. His girlfriend got pregnant.
When Rivera graduates from boot camp next month, he will also be a new father. "The Marines help you out, help you change as a person," he says. "It's a lot better than working at CVS."
Vietnam revisited
Rivera's father, Samuel, a former Marine who served in the mid-1970s, is also proud of his son, but he, too, questions the war. "It was a grown-up decision, and you have to feel proud and sad in a way because your baby is growing up," he says by phone from his Woodside home.
Of the war, he adds: "We really stepped into it this time. The more and more it lasts, the more and more it looks like Vietnam."
Recruit Yao Bo Mo, 19, of Woodside won a sought-after slot at the academically challenging Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan. But after two years there, he decided to drop out and obtain his GED. Mo, who was born in Guangzhou, China, says his decision had less to do with academics than the classroom setting.
"This recruit," he says, "just felt high school wasn't for him." The decision to join the Marines didn't sit well with his parents. "We still talk, but it just gets uncomfortable," he says.
Kevin Wright, 25, of Buffalo joined in frustration after the college graduate could not land a teaching job in the city's public school system. "The economy was bad," he says. "I became discouraged so I decided to enlist in the Marine Corps and hopefully go to officers school in the future.
"It's not that I want to go to Iraq, but if I have to go, I will," he adds. "It's my duty."
Whatever their reasons for joining, the recruits have to set all that aside during the 13- week training session, a grueling time in which recruits have even been known to die. A Marine Corps swim instructor, for instance, was found not guilty last month of negligent homicide in the drowning of a recruit last year during a pool training exercise.
At the very least, however, it's a period in which every minute is programmed and every activity calculated.
"In the morning time, I would say there are about 25 steps in getting ready, and they have to do all of those perfectly before they can even go outside," says Staff Sgt. Claudio Casanova, a drill instructor finishing a stint here.
When visitors are around, the drill instructors seem to clean up the language somewhat, if not the volume. "You know you only see the G-rated version," says one Marine sergeant, half-joking. "You don't want to see the R-rated version."
As one of the older recruits, Phillips, of Lindenhurst has become a kind of adviser to younger recruits in his squad. "A lot of the guys are homesick," the loquacious Phillips says between shoveled bites in the mess hall. "I find myself in my free time helping them. I tell guys to just try to live by the meals."
Having gone through Navy boot camp, Phillips has more of a perspective on training than most other recruits. "It's yelling and swearing and stuff," he says. "Nothing any of you guys wouldn't use on the outside. And they don't use it if they don't have to. The first thing is, you don't want to get yelled at, then do it right the first time."
But, with sand fleas crawling over his face, while standing at attention, even Phillips sometimes can't help but scratch. "When the drill instructor turns around, you get a little scratch in, and the next thing you know, there's another drill instructor in your ear, yelling, 'Stop scratching your face!'" he says. "You learn to not move when you're not supposed to move because someone is always watching."
Phillips has been bothered by tendinitis on his knee. Sprained ankles and other injuries are not uncommon here. "I'm running through it," he says. "I'm trying to work through the pain. If you get hurt, they take you out and you can be held for up to six months, and then they put you right back in."
Learning teamwork
When recruits make an error, the entire squad often has to repeat the lesson, or do exercises to make up for the gaffe. That fact initially creates tension among the recruits, but then often leads to cohesion.
"Everybody starts getting angry, but you realize that you have to work together as a group," Mo says. "In combat you have to work together as a group. Out in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one man can win the war. It will have to be everybody as a group."
Just about every Friday morning here, another recruit class graduates on the parade ground in front of collected relatives. Afterward, crowded by his family, one of the new graduates, Kyle Lampman, 19, of King's Ferry, N.Y., reflected on the 13-week course. "At first, everyone wanted to quit," he says. "Anytime anybody screwed up, the whole platoon paid for it. There were times when we wanted to go free for all, but we kept our cool. And we just kind of stuck together."
In response to one final question, Lampman answers, "Yep."
"What's this 'yep'?" says his mother. "You're in the Marines, now. It's 'Yes, sir."
Lampman smiled and nodded.
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