Why marines are crazy

But Sgt. She drinks hot tea followed by a cold drink, she said. But she has also tried pickle juice or lime juice mixed with salt. Laughing on the inside. The screaming that recruits must endure might actually be masking a different reaction: laughter. Drill instructors think recruits do and say some pretty funny things.

Lanier said he was tempted to laugh nonstop while on DI duty. Instead he'd scream at them for doing or saying the wrong thing.

The recruits execute the rappel tower as part of second phase recruit training aboard the depot. Rodion Zabolotniy. Photo Credit: Lance Cpl. Sandoval agreed and said she had to stop herself from laughing all the time.

You have to just breathe and think of something else. Juan Rocha, a drill instructor with 1st Recruit Training Battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, said he's too busy to even think about laughing in the moment, but he and other DIs will swap funny stories about recruits later. They channel their own DIs. Putting on the belt and campaign cover transforms a regular Marine into someone he or she probably feared as a new recruit. Once they're in that role, however, they realize how much time and dedication their own drill instructors devoted to the job.

Jennifer Thiroux with 4th Recruit Training Battalion here, said she recalls the way her DIs' hair was always perfect and the way they walked and talked. She does the same things now to set a similar lofty example. Drill instructors also rely on each other to see what works and what doesn't, Rocha said.

He'll pick up some of the language and phrases that other DIs on his team use if they're effective. They miss their families. Getting home at and heading back out to start the next day, sometimes as early as , doesn't provide a lot of time to be with loved ones. There is a family readiness program here to help Marines and their dependents get through those three years. Dependents can tour the DI schoolhouse here and see what their Marines will be called on to do over the course of their duties.

They always want you there. The schedule is demanding, he acknowledged. After running and screaming all day, he'll go home to his kids playfully smacking him in the face while he falls asleep at the dinner table. The key, he said, is to approach the situation as a team. It's imperative to talk to your spouse about what you're going through, he said. Sometimes he dreams about boot camp and yells in his sleep for his wife to "get on-line," the same thing he's been telling recruits all day.

It is important for her to understand what his life is all about. What they wish they had known. Marines considering drill instructor duty should know it's physically and mentally demanding. Most said they lose weight during the tour; they're constantly on their feet and running with recruits.

You hear it, but you can tell someone all day long you're going to be tired, you're going to be this, but you never know until you get there. It's also important to recognize that you're leaving your own MOS, a skill in which you are proficient, and picking up something entirely new, Sandoval said.

You can't expect so much from yourself. As a senior drill instructor, Brennan said it's his job to look out for other drill instructors. Just like recruits, drill instructors might not know their limits, he said, so he makes sure they don't overdo it.

They're turning you into a Marine. Some Marines who hear about the addition of core values discussions and foot-locker mentoring say that boot camp should be more physically demanding. But drill instructors say their main job is not to prepare Marines for combat. Their job is turning civilians into Marines, and there's a specific process that has to occur in order for that to happen in a week period.

The core values discussions help to establish a baseline from which all new recruits can adopt the Marine Corps way, Brennan said. Kadeem Walker, drill instructor for recruit receiving, glares at Rct. The recruits must quickly adapt to their new environment upon arrival on Parris Island. Recruits receive some of their first orders when they first arrive at the recruit depot during the receiving process.

Finally, a Marine Corps optimized for island campaigns could lack the logistics to sustain itself in a long fight. The war in Korea lasted three years, Vietnam seven, and Iraq eight. All required extensive fortifications and bases and long lines of supply.

The risk is twofold. Overspecialization will waste lives until the Corps can adapt and risks mission failure if adaptation is too slow. Army of was designed to fight Soviet tank armies in Europe did not stop President Johnson from sending it to Vietnam to fight insurgents and a regional power North Vietnam.

Second, the Marine Corps does not want to be in a position where it cannot go to war without Army support for tanks, heavy firepower, logistics, and mobility.

Though this may be a slight exaggeration — the Army provides niche capabilities like psychological operations units and theater-wide logistics to all U. The regular Army is at the smallest size , since the post-Cold War drawdown of the s. It will need all of its scarce rapidly deployable capabilities just to support itself. These capabilities are scarce because the Army has 52 percent of its total force in its reserve components. Creighton Abrams, then Army chief of staff, built three additional active-duty divisions by putting most support into the reserve components.

As a result, the Army cannot deploy more than about a division without calling up large numbers of reservists. That was a helpful reinforcement but resulted from a unique circumstance. The brigade deactivated after the war. Today the regular Army remains at that low personnel level and there are no independent combat brigades. All such brigades are an integral parts of Army divisions. Indeed, although the Army programs forces for theater-wide logistics — port operations units, fuel distribution, long-haul trucking — that it provides to all services, it does not program forces for other kinds of support that the Marine Corps might need.

Any such support would have to be taken from Army units that rely on it. Relying on jointness to force the Army to provide units is a thin reed upon which to rest war plans.

Absent specific direction by the secretary, one service does not need to build capabilities desired by other services. Of course, a secretary of defense or combatant commander could override Army force planning and direct that Army units support the Marine Corps rather than the Army, but that is a lot for the Marine Corps to ask, especiallyseems unlikely in the early stages of a war. These units will require 90 days or more to activate, muster, train, and deploy; their equipment is often incompatible with that of the Marine Corps; and unit quality is uneven.

The resulting delay and coordination challenges are the antithesis of a rapidly deployable Marine Corps.

There is support in the National Defense Strategy for hedging. No matter what the crisis, our civilian leaders should always have one shared thought — Send in the Marines.

It is unclear whether this intentional. Many of the changes the commandant is talking about are sensible regardless of the conflict: Facilitating sea denial by adapting rocket artillery leverages existing systems and builds on a historical Marine Corps capability for defense of forward naval bases.

That was not my life. As a kid I was quiet — I read books and drew pencil sketches of cartoon characters. I hated my Midwest town.

I burned myself with the heated tips of Bic lighters to try and vent my anger out. I drank and snorted myself into blackouts and eventually drunkenly crashed my car into a fire hydrant. My fellow recruits and I suffered together.

We were given a common language that sought to bond us, ensconce us in groupthink and separate us from the outside. We were never alone. I had more fathers than I knew what to do with. They called our girlfriends Susie Rottencrotch, and told us fictional bull studs back home were having their way with them — women were not to be trusted.

It felt like a home, a place to rally together and stand for something — and against something. The Corps called it brotherhood. Our senior Marines joked about raping Iraqi women, so we did too. They called Iraqi children terrorists in training, and meant it. So we did too. I developed ethnocentric thoughts that I shared without shame.

But by then I was no longer a quiet, lost, empathetic kid who partied a little too hard and struggled with self-harm but still liked to read Stephen King and Star Wars novels and draw.

I was bloodthirsty. I wanted to kill. We knew the outside world would never be able to see that truth. When we raided homes in the middle of the night during our first deployment to Iraq and shoved our rifle stocks into the soft guts of men, doubling them over, we knew in our hearts they were not farmers caught in the crosshairs of a geopolitical struggle, but Al-Qaeda operatives.

When we watched American interrogators backhand the faces of restrained detainees over and over, we felt nothing but validation.