A Taste Of Parris

[thedrifter]

05/25/2008
A TASTE OF PARRIS
BY DAVID SINGLETON
STAFF WRITER

Before they are one of the few, the proud, Marine recruits get a strong dose of reality

It is 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and 31 young men sit quietly on the lobby floor of the IBEW Building on Wyoming Avenue, just outside the Marine Corps recruiting office. Some are still blinking varying degrees of Friday night from their eyes.
It is 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and 31 young men sit quietly on the lobby floor of the IBEW Building on Wyoming Avenue, just outside the Marine Corps recruiting office. Some are still blinking varying degrees of Friday night from their eyes.

In a few hours, they’ll join 600 other potential Marine recruits at Fort Indiantown Gap in Lebanon County for a brief but intensive taste of what’s in store for them before they can count themselves among the few and the proud.

It’s officially known as the Summer Warrior Challenge. You could call it Boot Camp Lite.

Staff Sgt. Ronald Krumenacker, one of the Marines assigned to Recruiting Substation Scranton, is trying to prepare them physically and mentally.

Most at least pretend to listen as he covers everything from shedding unnecessary clothing — “You’ll thank me later” — to the wisdom of not looking directly at a drill instructor — “Stare straight ahead at the person in front of you, like you’re Superman friggin’ trying to look through the back of their skull.”

Before they board the bus for Fort Indiantown Gap, each would-be soldier is given a red water bottle. The words printed on the side hint at what’s to come: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

Meeting expectations

These are pretty good days to be a Marine Corps recruiter.

Despite the seemingly interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing casualty lists in each, the Marine Corps far more than any other active duty service is not just meeting but exceeding its recruiting goals.

In April, when the Army, Navy and Air Force each barely hit their national objectives for new enlistments, or accessions, the corps topped its goal by 42 percent. It was 37 percent ahead in both February and March.

Since fiscal 2008 began in October, the Marine Corps has enlisted 17,495 recruits nationwide, according to Department of Defense statistics. That’s 118 percent of its goal for the seven-month period.

“Recruiting in and of itself is challenging, but is it any tougher now than it has been before? I’d have to say unequivocally no,” said Cpl. Jesse R. Stence, public affairs officer at the recruiting station in Harrisburg, the command for the Scranton substation and 14 others across Eastern Pennsylvania.

In 2007, the region sent 998 young men and women to the Marines’ boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. About 100 of those came up through the Scranton substation, which includes recruiting offices in Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton.

“We have a long-standing tradition of making our goals,” Cpl. Stence said. “Like all other things in the Marine Corps, we accomplish the mission.”

Into the pool

Of the 31 potential Marines who step off the bus at Fort Indiantown Gap earlier this month, nine are guests just along for the experience — no strings attached.

The other 22 are “poolees.” Mostly 17- and 18-year-old high school seniors, they have made a commitment to the Marine Corps by joining the deferred enlistment program but still have the opportunity to back out before leaving for Parris Island in the coming months.

At 20, Damascus resident Anthony Heyn is one of the oldest poolees. Soft-spoken, with an easy smile, the 2006 Honesdale High School graduate bounced around in a “bunch of nowhere jobs” before deciding he needed to do something with his life.

A friend who joined the Marines suggested Mr. Heyn give it a try. After enlisting in January, he started working out, trying to get into shape for the anticipated rigors of boot camp.

His parents have been supportive, but are understandably concerned, as most are when a child joins the military.

“I’m not a recruiter, but I bet it’s tough,” Mr. Heyn says. “With all this war stuff going on, it’s probably hard to persuade people to go in there and do it. That’s the main thing parents worry about. They don’t want their kids shipped overseas and having to think about that every day.”

He thinks he has what it takes to be a Marine.

“I believe so — responsibility, commitment,” he says. He pauses and adds, “I hope I have the courage. I’m not sure yet. We’ll see.”

Mr. Heyn shipped out to Parris Island last Sunday.

‘They’re crazy’

The Harrisburg station organizes the Summer Warrior Challenge every spring with two purposes. The first, says Cpl. Stence, is to motivate the poolees and keep them engaged as they get closer to boot camp.

The other is simply to give the future recruits a taste of the training and lifestyle they’ll encounter at Parris Island “to sort of figure out who is serious about it and who is not.”

“The one thing we don’t want to do,” he explains, “is ship people to basic training who are not ready and have them quit.”

So the poolees are put through a series of rigorous physical trials, including crunches, pull-ups, a 1 1/2-mile run and an obstacle course that has them crawling on their bellies through a tunnel and splashing through — and often stumbling in — a muddy pit in the woods.

But the highlight is an introduction to actual Marine Corps drill instructors, on loan for the day from Parris Island.

For Joe Dixon, 18, of Harveys Lake, it’s almost old hat. The Lake-Lehman High School senior, who has wanted to be a Marine since he was 10 and is due to leave June 16 for boot camp, participated in the event in both 2006 and 2007.

“I’ve seen drill sergeants before,” he shrugs. “They’re crazy.”

Some are reputedly crazier than others. Female drill instructors are “very hardcore,” the type you hope you can avoid, Mr. Dixon says.

Karma must have been listening. When the poolees split into three platoons, two get male drill instructors. But Mr. Dixon and the rest of the group from Northeastern Pennsylvania find themselves standing in front of Staff Sgt. Christian Halstead.

“It was freakin’ intense,” Mr. Dixon would say later.

‘Aye, ma’am!”

Staff Sgt. Halstead wastes no time on pleasantries.

Within moments, her 200 young charges are flat on their stomachs, then doing push-ups, then back on their feet, then down on their backs for crunches. To each shouted order, the poolees respond, “Aye, ma’am!”

“Get on your feet right now!”

“Aye, ma’am!”

“Scream! I said scream!”

“Aye, ma’am!”

“You will move fast, you got that!?”

“Aye, ma’am!”

It goes that way the rest of the day, sometimes with large groups, sometimes with just a handful of poolees: Staff Sgt. Halstead, hands alternately on hips or pointedly in motion, barking orders and demanding instant obedience.

One young man, apparently unfamiliar with Staff Sgt. Krumenacker’s admonition, makes the mistake of looking directly at the drill instructor.

“Get your eyeballs off me!” Staff Sgt. Halstead screams, no more than two inches from his face.

Nothing personal

Tunkhannock Area High School senior Kyle O’Neill, 19, of Washington Township, insists he couldn’t help himself.

The drill instructor he laughed at, Sgt. Pedro Montalvo, couldn’t either.

“It probably wasn’t the brightest idea,” Mr. O’Neill says later of the chuckle that attracted Sgt. Montalvo’s baleful gaze and had him and another poolee running sprints in the mud. “He got in my face pretty good.”

Sgt. Montalvo, a 25-year-old Bronx, N.Y., native with chiseled body and a voice like sandpaper, says while drill instructors can be famously hard on recruits, none of it is personal. If a recruit fails, the drill instructor has failed.

“Our main goal is to get them prepared for a combat situation,” he says. “The reason we’re hard is so when they graduate, we don’t send somebody out to be killed. It’s not to play with them. Everything has a purpose behind it — every single thing. If it’s making them do the littlest thing a hundred times, it’s because you didn’t get it right the first 99 times.”

Mr. O’Neill appreciated the intensity — Sgt. Montalvo’s wrath and all — especially as he readies for his departure to Parris Island on June 25.

“I think they were holding back a little,” he says of the drill instructors. “Down there, they’re going to be a lot meaner and a lot more intense. But it’s not going to stop me. I’m going.”

Born to be

It’s a quiet bus ride back to Scranton. Many of the poolees, muddy and exhausted, pull up the hoods of their sweatshirts, sink into their seats and nod off.

Others are too wired to be tired.

The experience sealed the deal for Derek Hunsinger, 16, a resident of Junedale in Carbon County and a student at Hazleton Area Career Center.

When he turns 17, he’ll go to the recruiting office in Hazleton and make his commitment. He’ll be following his 23-year-old brother, who graduated from Parris Island last month.

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was 11,” he says.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col Jonathan Withington believes the Marine Corps mystique is a key component of its recruiting success. But more than that, he says, the young men and women the Marine Corps appeals to are exactly the individuals the corps is looking for.

“There are people who are just innately Marines,” agrees Cpl Stence. “Our job, more than selling somebody a product, is to reach out to people who already have that deep inside of them and make them aware of what they need to do to get to that place. We just find a way of bringing that out and leading them on that journey into the Marine Corps.”

Contact the writer: dingleton@timesshamrock.com

Ellie

[gwcarpenterii]

Sgt, now Staff Sergeant Montalvo was my Sergeant Instructor at Officer Candidate School PLC class 201, 2009 Delta Company, 4th Platoon. He was one lean and mean Marine. I'll never forget him.

[CJT14022010]

"this (former) candidate" was in your platoon. Good times with the Staff Sergeant...

[gwcarpenterii]

Sup Trainor?

[chavestac]

I don't want to bump an old thread but myself and a few other Marines are trying to reach (SSgt at the time) Montalvo, we served together on a few occasions and we have been trying to reach him. If anybody has a line on him, please let me know chavestac@gmail.com