By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, early, and it is still cool on my reconditioned deck. This morning I have my coffee, Starbucks’s Breakfast Blend, and “Crucibles” just published by James R. McNeal and J. Eric Smith.
James McNeal is a retired rear admiral. Eric Smith is a former Naval Supply Officer and, importantly, was born right here in Beaufort, the son of a Marine Corps Colonel.
“Crucibles” is nonfiction and tells us “How formidable rites of passage shape the world’s most elite organizations.” Among the organizations chosen for scrutiny are the Swiss Guard, The Knights Templar, the French Foreign Legion, the Gurkhas, the U.S. Naval Academy and the United States Marine Corps.
Some may know I went through a plebe system at The Citadel in 1963-64. Some may remember that I came out of that experience with mixed emotions. But when I learned this book had been published, I was eager to read it.
In its prologue, “Crucibles” starts off at the Naval Academy; but Chapter 1 takes us straight to the Marine Corps Recruit Deport at Parris Island.
This choice was interesting because I can hear reveille and taps on my reconditioned deck; and for years I’ve heard stories about “The Crucible” at Parris Island.
But I’ve never known detail.
The training that occurs on Parris Island consumes 12 weeks beginning with the basics of military drill and PT. Then comes a swimming “qualification” and the rifle range. Finally there is 54-hour event involving 48 miles of hiking while carrying 55 pounds of gear.
“While the specific details and schedule of the Crucible are closely guarded, the event includes a variety of test situations (often anchored around the stories of some significant moments in Marine Corps history to affirm those historical connections) and including casualty evacuations, limited food, sleep deprivation and utter physical exhaustion.”
It is important to put these young men under enormous stress, to make them feel that all is lost, experience the same desperate feeling the Marines felt at the Chosen Reservoir. Most of these teenagers, apparently, reach down and find courage they never knew they had.
When this exercise is done, they then march — dirty, exhausted and emotionally drained — to the Iwo Jima Memorial and get their “Eagle, Globe and Anchor Insignia.”
The authors, in preparing their manuscript, spent time with a Marcus Heydahl — a professor of Leadership, Ethics and Law at Annapolis who posed two questions.
“Why do we allow tests like the Crucible? And why societies would want to allow these groups themselves to regulate who gets to be a member?”
“It is hard for people who are not doctors and lawyers to tell the difference between someone who is qualified and someone who is not.”
Speaking of doctors, Heydahl continues, “So what is the difference between a good doctor and a bad doctor? I don’t know the answer to that. But others doctors know.
So as a society we let doctors and lawyers decide who gets to be a doctor or a lawyer because the rest of us are not qualified to do so.”
Heydahl believes that professional soldiers, like the Marines, understand better than anyone, the rigors of combat and what it takes to function in combat.
And so we as a society let the Marine Corps decide the methods of finding that teenager who is going to be focused, resilient when his world is coming apart.
“Crucibles” also looks at other organizations—the Gurkas, the French Foreign Legion and the Japanese Special Attack Units (“Kamikaze”)—and tells us how Nepal, France and the Japanese created their particular brands of ferocity.
Then the authors bring us back to the Naval Academy where they detail the impossible academic load (Naval Engineering, Calculus, Chemistry) together with the inspections, “chow calls,” “come arounds,” “square meals,” and “countless offenses, obvious and subtle that could result in getting ‘fried,’ and once convicted, assigned to area tours (marching in circles with a drill rifle outside of Bancroft Hall …”
“We would both be absolute lying If we said the four years in Annapolis between I Day and graduation were not absurdly hard, and we would be equally totally lying if we said that we enjoyed the experience much at all. …”
But the authors — both graduates of the Naval Academy — say that difficult experience changed them.
“Those lessons fundamentally shaped everything we have done throughout our personal and profession careers …
We were not grateful while being taught those lessons, but we are forever grateful that we learned them.”
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
