Early last year, my cousin, a Marine captain based in Okinawa, sent me a Wall Street Journal story about changes in Army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The article had been e-mailed back and forth around the world, from North Carolina to Iraq to Japan, until a dozen little forwarding arrows nudged every line into the right margin. There was no mistaking the scorn among the marines who were spreading the news.
The Army, it seemed, was seeking to lure more recruits by initiating a kinder and gentler boot camp regimen. At the fort, new soldiers were no longer welcomed by sergeants’ “shark attacks”—the roaring, spit-in-your-face initiation that had terrified previous generations of incoming GIs (“Some rattled recruits would make mistakes,” the Journal reported. “A few”—God forbid—“would cry”). Instead, a colonel made a speech thanking them for signing up. In the mess hall, sergeants no longer policed the meal trays of tubby recruits. On the contrary, the privates were surveyed on whether they had been allowed to eat everything on the menu, including dessert, and whether there was enough for seconds. When some fake roadside bombs hit a training convoy, the recruits didn’t bail out of their trucks, hit the dirt rolling, and secure a perimeter. Rather, they waited for someone to prop a ladder against the rear bumper. Then they clambered down one by one. Fewer sprained ankles that way.
Whether all that will boost enlistment is a matter for the brass to determine. But it made me, for one, glad that the Marine Corps has retained its distinct and Spartan basic training, twelve weeks (compared to the Army’s nine) of relentless pressure designed to break down Taco Bell shift managers and pool hall drifters and rebuild them into an elite fighting unit, a process Thomas...
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