Graduation is special day for all

[thedrifter]

February 25, 2005
Graduation is special day for all

by Staff Sgt. Jason J. Bortz
MCRD Parris Island


MCRD/ERR PARRIS ISLAND, S.C. -- For over 12 weeks, recruits have been working toward the moment when they get to wear the Eagle, Globe and Anchor...the symbol of the Marine Corps.

The day isn't just exciting for the recruits, it's also the first time that families will get to see their "new" son or daughter.

"I sent him here thirty pounds heavier," said Robin Van Curen about her son. "He looks so good now."

The day begins at 9:30 a.m. with a motivational run by the recruits around the Depot. As they make their way down Boulevard De France, the recruits are greeted by a mob of family members, many of whom have been aboard the Depot since the sun came up, waving and trying to catch a glimpse of their soon-to-be Marine.

At 1 p.m., the bleachers on the Parade Deck fill up as the recruits march out. Each recruit is then handed an Eagle, Globe and Anchor, which they place on their covers.

Once the ceremony is over, the recruits are dismissed and are on liberty. Family members rush from the bleachers as hugs and kisses sweep over the parade deck.

"I'm the proudest mother in the whole world," said Van Curen after the ceremony.

The recruits spend the rest of the day with their friends and family until 7 p.m. The recruits spend their time giving tours and catching up on the pleasures of life they have missed, like eating cookies and pizza.

As the sun sets aboard the Depot, recruits report back to their squad bay and parents slowly drive off of the island. The next time they see their son or daughter will be after graduation, when the young Marines will get to leave the island as new warriors.

The Drifter's Wife


Ellie

[thedrifter]

The few, the proud...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of The Daily Oakland Press
Editor's note

Daily Oakland Press reporter Sven Gustafson and photographer Vaughn Gurganian spent four days following local recruits at the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. Held in conjunction with the Educator Workshop, a Corps-sponsored program involving high school educators and counselors, Marines aimed to show media representatives an array of training exercises and other aspects of the 12-week training program.

PARRIS ISLAND, S.C. - It takes mere seconds for the roughly 50 passengers to empty the bus.

On a cool, cloudless night, the bus chugs idle for a few moments, then the door closes and the bus drives off.

It's the last lifeline to the outside world for the young adults, many of them still teenagers, fresh off a plane and dropped off here in the South Carolina low country.

The group, meanwhile, rushes like a frenzied mob from the bus. Someone drops the papers they've been asked to collect from the others onto the pavement. A young woman slips on one of them, sending her sprawling and several others behind her tripping over one another like dominoes.

The man who ordered them off the bus immediately darts over.

"Hurry up!" he screams. "We ain't got all night!"

A receiving drill instructor, Staff Sgt. Stephen Roberts, is a 26-year-old with long arms, broad shoulders and an improbably tiny waistline typical of Marine drill instructors.

"Get up!" he bellows as the young men and women scramble to their feet. "Let's go!"

The recruits quickly file onto a series of yellow footprints painted on the pavement. There, they are ordered into the position of attention they will spend much of the next 12 weeks assuming: Heels together, feet at a 45-degree angle, thumbs pointed down along trouser seams, palms turned inward and curled into a loose fist and eyes straight ahead. "And your mouth is shut!" Roberts screams emphatically. "I'll say it again. Your mouth is shut!"

After a time, recruits are separated by gender from this point forward, and they line up for their turns to call parents to tell them they have arrived. The men get their heads shaved; women get to keep their hair, as long as it can be kept above the collar.

The check-in process inside the Marine Enlistment Processing Station at the Parris Island Recruit Depot lasted until the early morning hours. The recruits awoke at 5 a.m. and arrived at Parris Island around 11 p.m. They wouldn't retire for bed until almost 9 p.m. the following day, some 22 hours away.

The slogan "We Make Marines" is everywhere at the Parris Island Recruit Depot, an 8,000-acre peninsula surrounded by a network of tidal salt marshes, the Broad and Beaufort rivers and Port Royal Sound. The depot serves as one of two boot camps - the other is in San Diego - that together graduate about 40,000 new Marines each year.

Boot camp lasts 12 grueling weeks. Recruits never leave base and scarcely find a free moment to themselves.

"Get up early; shave every morning and night; eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at a set time. Then you go to bed early, 8 o'clock, get eight hours of sleep," said recruit Jason Fisher, a 2004 graduate of Bloomfield Hills Lahser High School.

"Then you serve fire watch at night. ... You have patrol of squad bay, where we stay, to make sure no one's doing something they're not supposed to be doing for an hour every night.

"You're constantly doing something all day long. There's no breaks."

The sign over the doors to the processing station reads, "Through These Portals Pass Prospects For America's Finest Fighting Force."

Boot camp training aims to remove each recruit's affiliation with the civilian world. While individual initiative is rewarded here, individualism is not.

"There's physical challenges that have to be met, but they prepare you for it. It's teamwork and getting your platoon to work as a team," said Chris Milliron, a 19-year-old graduate of Troy Athens High School who graduated from boot camp Feb. 25. "It's the mental challenge is more of the aspect that we have here that's been the hardest."

His face colored with a mixture of camouflage paint, grime and sweat, Milliron spoke during the tail end of the Crucible event, a 54-hour endurance challenge in which recruits, clad in full combat gear, including M-16 rifles, travel 42 miles on foot in a simulated combat environment. The event occurs during Week 10, and recruits sleep outdoors and eat just three ready-to-eat meals.

"Obviously, I'm sure you can imagine, the sand fleas are kind of atrocious here, getting bit up by bugs all day," said Richard Alan Cable, a 25-year-old Garden City resident. "You've got to have the discipline not to scratch. Marines are really key on discipline, which is one of the main reasons why I came here."

Cable said drill instructors can "push your buttons" and test limits.

On the confidence - obstacle - course, a female recruit stood sobbing high atop a platform, unable to lean out, grab a rope and descend about 40 feet onto a cushioned mat. After repeatedly chastising her from the ground, the female drill instructor climbed up the rope to the platform, shouted at the recruit to follow orders, then demonstrated how to properly descend the rope.

After several tense moments, the recruit let out a piercing shriek as, clutching the rope at last, she swung out into space and descended. Safely on the ground, she was ordered to step aside and perform push-ups as punishment.

By its very nature, boot camp is a hazardous place. On Feb. 8, the day media guests arrived, Jason Robert Tharp, a 19-year-old recruit from Sutton, W.Va., died after unsuccessful resuscitation attempts during his fifth and final day of water survival training in the indoor pool. Marine spokesmen have declined to label the death a drowning, and military officials have yet to complete the investigation. The Beaufort County Coroner's office labeled the death an accidental drowning. But the story took a new turn after a Columbia, S.C., television news crew, filming on base for an unrelated story, realized it had videotaped Tharp at the pool a day before his death.

The tape showed a drill instructor striking Tharp in the chest with a forearm - a clear violation of permissible contact rules. A different drill instructor told the reporter that Tharp had climbed out of the pool, scared and unable to perform the swimming qualification.

Tharp's parents have said their son, who joined the Marines hoping to earn money to study art in college, repeatedly wrote home saying he had made a mistake in joining and wanted out.

Five Marines have been suspended in the incident, and another has been placed on administrative duty.

It was the second death on the base in less than three months. In November, an 18-year-old male recruit from the Bronx, N.Y., was found dead during the Crucible event. The county coroner performed his autopsy but referred questions to the Marine Corps. Parris Island spokesman Maj. Ken White said the investigation into the death is continuing.

White said swimming training has "changed drastically" since 1991, the last time a recruit died in the pool after repeatedly struggling to stay above water while instructors watched (a drill instructor was later convicted in the case of negligent homicide). Since 1970, 55 recruits have died at Parris Island, from training accidents, from physiological causes related or unrelated to training or from other causes, such as suicide.

Public affairs officials said colleagues in Tharp's platoon would mark his death with a memorial event but conceded the incident would likely receive no mention in The Boot, Parris Island's official weekly newspaper. Most recruits, they said, would not be notified of the incident.

Despite the relatively heavy rotation the story received in media outlets, officials said the incident is not likely to have much of an effect on recruiting efforts.

But recruiters do acknowledge that the steady stream of gruesome news from Iraq is making recruiting, in the words of some, more difficult than ever. As of March 1, the U.S. Defense Department listed 1,486 U.S. military casualties there, the bulk of them Marines.

The Marine Corps missed its monthly quota in January for the first time in almost a decade.

Each recruiter, who works up to 16 hours per day, is responsible for plugging roughly two recruits per month into boot camp. Recruits don't count against this total until they graduate from boot camp, meaning discharges must be tacked onto the following month's quota.

For males, roughly 10 percent of recruits do not complete training. The rate among female recruits hovers closer to 18 percent.

On average, each recruiter makes about 200 contacts for every individual funneled into boot camp.

"It's just getting hard out there," said Master Sgt. Mike Giannetti, a recruiter from the Recruiting Station Detroit office in Troy, who accompanied media representatives to Parris Island. "A lot of kids are having second thoughts, which is completely understandable. But, overall, we're still meeting our yearly goals.

"This is the first time any branch of the military has had an all-volunteer service during a sustained conflict."

Established in 1798 under the umbrella of the U.S. Navy, the Marine Corps today graduates about 40,000 new Marines each year. Most serve three- or four-year terms and then move on.

After the 12-week boot camp, enlisted Marines attend three-week combat training, then it's on to Military Occupational Specialty school, where they pursue training for fields such as infantry (combat), engineering, aviation or journalism.

Sgt. Maj. Stephen Balczo, who also works from the Troy office and joined the tour, said that of those recruits who choose infantry as their specialty, roughly 90 percent will be deployed overseas. That means they could be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, he said, but not necessarily to fight. Marines also are called on for administrative duties or to assist humanitarian efforts in countries such as Haiti or any of the Asian nations recovering from the Dec. 26 tsunami.

continued

[thedrifter]

Balczo said that, while training methods typically don't change much, senior Marines have noticed a change in the younger generation of recruits.

"Many of them now bring out a lot of pride in country and family right now versus some of the late end of the baby boomers that were the individualists," he said. "So there's a lot of pride in self and in unit and in teamwork right now."

Local recruiters, who have offices in Pontiac and in Troy, said they do best in areas such as Lake Orion, Holly, Clarkston and Pontiac. "The whole M-59 corridor is good for us," Giannetti said.

For every story about recruits who don't make it, there are numerous stories of the success and perseverance of recruits who hung on through adversity. Many recruits described enlisting out of a desire to better themselves, to give their lives some direction.

"It saved my life because a lot of the kids I hung out with, one of the kids I knew was killed in Detroit. I would have ended up killed or in jail," said Giannetti, who now lives in Springfield Township. After graduating from Michigan State University, Giannetti said he returned home to Detroit, got involved "with the wrong crowd" and was kicked out of his home by his father.

"The day I graduated from boot camp, he flew out to San Diego," Giannetti said of his father. "My mom said it was the proudest day of his life. Even during my days in the Marine Corps, we didn't get along so well. It took a lot of patching up."

Giannetti said his father died of cancer while he drove home on a humanitarian transfer. He said the toughest thing about being a career Marine is being away from family members for years at a time.

Now 40 and nearing retirement from the Corps, Giannetti said he's thinking of becoming a teacher or starting a business.

Staff Sgt. Roberts said it's the drill instructors' duty to encourage recruits, especially those they suspect are less likely to succeed. He said many end up thanking him for it after they graduate.

Occasionally, the admiration is reversed.

On the way off the base for the final time, Sgt. Scott Braden, a lithe, 27-year-old drill instructor from Pittsburgh who accompanied media and educators, asked the bus driver to pull over. He then stuck his head out the driver's window, called out to a new graduate and shook his hand.

Braden explained that the Marine was pulled from his platoon after his 26th day of training because he still couldn't complete a single pull-up. He was placed in a special physical conditioning program.

Nine months later, the young man had made it - a newly minted Marine, dressed in his green service alpha uniform, escorting his girlfriend on their way home.

The Drifter's Wife

Ellie

[The_4th_Stooge]

i was wondering, who can attend graduation? Parents only or your whole family?

[LivinSoFree]

Anyone can show up... the bigger the crowd, the more they like it. Though if I were you, I'd keep it small... otherwise you end up unwittingly having to manage a lot of people... Just tell the ones that do come to take lots of pictures for everyone else.

[The_4th_Stooge]

lol, i think it will just be my mom and dad but i was wondering just in case my siblings and grandparents asked. thanks.

[drillinstructor]

STAY OFF THE PARADE DECKKKKKKKKKKKKKK HEHE