Alex’s drill sergeants were vets. Many had just come back from Iraq, where Zarqawi’s singularly brutal branch of al-Qaeda was doing all it could to spark a civil war between Sunni and Shia. Terrorists and insurgents were gunning down patrols, suicide-bombing markets, and firing mortars at coalition Humvees and fortifications by the day. May 2005 was the bloodiest month since the invasion, with 80 U.S. soldiers and over 700 Iraqi civilians dead. Now it was July, and the action showed no sign of slowing. New privates would be launching into a firestorm. The army wanted them hard enough to survive it. The walls of the bay where Alex slept were decorated with large glossy photographs of IEDs disguised as Coke cans, rocks, and teddy bears. In the stairwell was a wanted poster for a recruit who’d gone AWOL.
As recently as the Vietnam War, soldiers would spend the week doing push-ups and bayonet drills and then go into town on weekends to catch movies and blow off steam. Nowadays no steam is blown off. The lid comes down at the beginning of “Red Phase,” in which drill sergeants exercise total control over every aspect of recruits’ lives in order to initiate the “soldierization process,” and does not come up again for three weeks. As far as the family is concerned, the recruit simply vanishes off the face of the earth. Though drill sergeants are forbidden to strike recruits without provocation, Alex’s account made it clear that they had plenty of techniques for inflicting pain at their disposal. They seemed to take particular pleasure in forcing recruits into Catch-22s whose inevitable outcome was “getting smoked,” the army phrase for punitive physical exercise.
On Friday we were eating lunch chow and our Drill Sergeant was entertaining himself by placing contraband ice cream sandwiches on recruit’s plates and telling them to eat it. When they finished the Drill Sergeant would yell “You fucking shit head! You’re not allowed to eat sweets, you fucking cunt! Go run until I get tired!” The Private would sprint out to the track and run under the supervision of another Drill Sergeant. The Private was told to run until he began vomiting. Our Drill Sergeant gave an ice cream sandwich to one Private who said “I’m not allowed to eat that Drill Sergeant.” “Sure you are fucker, I said you could.” “I don’t want to get in trouble Drill Sergeant.” “You won’t get in trouble shit bird!” The Drill Sergeant said playfully. “Go ahead, eat it.” “I’m not allowed to Drill Sergeant.” The Drill Sergeant’s face grew hard and he screamed “everybody out of the god damn chow hall right fucking now!” We scrambled to put our trays away and tore out of the chow hall to our common area where we waited in formation at parade rest. “Jumping Jacks you stupid fucking pricks! No, you stay out in front. Come here fucker!” The Private who refused to eat the ice cream sandwich was pulled out of formation and made to watch as we paid for his “mistake”. “See fuckers, when you don’t listen everybody suffers! All of you are undisciplined little shits. God damnit! I hate this fucking Platoon!” He turned to the Private who was watching us and handed him a box of ice cream sandwiches. “As soon as you finish this box I’ll stop smoking these mother fuckers!” he said. The Private crammed ice cream sandwiches into his mouth and finished them as soon as he could. Our Drill Sergeant yelled at him “You little fucking pig! You’re not allowed to eat sweets, and your fucking fat ass eats a whole god damn box of ice cream!? Holy fuck Shit head! That’s all right, we’ll pay for that!” The Drill Sergeant sent the Private to the track and continued to smoke us. When the Private came back he was covered in puke and gasping for air. “Push with the rest of the fucking Platoon! You fuckers are gonna get fat from all these sweets. So I’m gonna have to help you burn those calories!” He quickly added the calories in his head and told us that each bar contained 20,000 calories. After smoking us for what felt like four hours, he said we had only burned 1000 calories and that we would pay for the rest later.
For more than 13,000 words, basic training went on and on and on. Belongings dumped in a field, bayonets jammed into straw dummies, teargas pumped into a sealed chamber of trembling recruits, profound and accumulating sleep deprivation, getting smoked, getting tricked, getting insulted, getting threatened, weeping, puking, getting smoked for weeping and puking. What makes the grass grow? Blood, Drill Sergeant! As I continued reading, I kept glancing around at my lab mates with that self-conscious lack of expression you see on the faces of people reading pornographic novels on public transportation.
This non-stop, continuous negative reinforcement erases any and all self confidence you once had. You firmly believe that you can’t do anything right. At the time, you can’t see that they are intentionally and methodically breaking you down, removing all of your self esteem. You just believe that you are incompetent and unworthy of anything. You operate under complete and total fear and try to do anything to avoid more pain, embarrassment and humiliation.
Was all this a surprise? Not exactly. I’d seen Saving Private Ryan. I’d seen Full Metal Jacket. I was familiar, on a basic cultural-memory level, with the archetypes at play. There was the fat Private Pyle type, so chronically out of shape that he didn’t understand that the most he had ever exerted himself in his life was about one third of the baseline he needed to sustain here. There was the Joker type, who could not bring himself to accept the authority of the drill sergeants as legitimate and had to swallow his laughter down to a bitter, festering place whenever they bellowed in his face on the theme of his mother’s genitalia. And of course there were the screaming, stomping, cursing, toiletry-scattering drill sergeants themselves, who appeared to have watched all the same movies I had and strip-mined them for material. What I hadn’t seen before was a portrait of the interior life of the guys who only ever appeared as extras in these movies, for the obvious reason that they were of zero narrative interest: the ones who bought it. Who respected the drill sergeants as heroes whom they desperately wanted to please and live up to. Who overloaded their rucksacks by thirty pounds on marches and met secretly in stairwells on “rest days” for extracurricular physical-training sessions to prepare them for the Ranger Indoctrination Program, which they knew was going to be a whole lot worse. Who viewed the breakdown of their own bodies under all this strain as a shameful mark of weakness. Who wanted to be ready for Iraq.
In the seventh week of basic, after sleeping outdoors through a pounding storm that ended with cottonmouth snakes flopping in puddles in the recruits’ tents—weeks later they would learn that this had been Hurricane Katrina—Alex’s right leg started to hurt.
The following morning we had a five mile run for PT. Afterwards we marched to breakfast chow and I was in so much pain with my leg that I fell out of formation and was on the verge of blacking out. A Drill Sergeant came up to me and screamed “Get up you fucking pussy!” “Roger, Drill Sergeant,” I said and painfully tried to catch up with my Platoon. When I couldn’t keep up the Drill Sergeant dropped my buddies to do push-ups and made me stand in front of them and watch. “This little pussy thought the run was too hard and thinks he’s better than all of you! He thinks he’s allowed to rest while the platoon continues to march!” I was overwhelmed with guilt and when I tried to join them I was told to stand and watch. My leg progressively got worse as the week went on and by the weekend I was fighting back tears every time I