One Bullet Away

The result is a slight inferiority complex manifested in brutally hard training. Recon selection begins with candidates whose paper qualifications are sterling — expert shots, perfect physical fitness tests, glowing recommendations from previous commanders. These performers are put through the two-week Recon Indoctrination Program, a nonstop battery of swims and runs led by a cadre of current recon Marines. The aptly abbreviated RIP pares the field by half. Survivors continue to the ten-week Basic Reconnaissance Course in Coronado, California. BRC trains the reconnaissance fundamentals of patrolling, observation, and communications. Its rigor cuts the class in half again. I knew a captain who’d been dropped from BRC after breaking his back during the course.

RIP and BRC taught me almost nothing. I had learned most of the tactics and technical information during my earlier training and in Afghanistan. But they imparted something even more valuable: legitimacy. BRC, for enlisted Marines, is the gatekeeper to recon. Graduation changes their MOS to 0321, “Reconnaissance Man.” It’s a rite of passage. By suffering through the same three months they did, I’d be a known commodity to them. I had been there, too. Earning rank was easy compared to earning spurs.

In June 2002, my BRC class returned to First Recon Battalion on the Friday afternoon of our graduation. As new recon Marines, we would go on to advanced parachute and scuba training, survival school, and specialized courses in foreign weapons, demolition, mountaineering, and others. We had ranked our preferences a few weeks earlier. I put “practical” training at the top of my list: special operations mission planning and a certification course to rig helicopters for inserting and extracting recon teams with ropes and ladders. Running my finger down a scheduling board in the battalion’s admin office, I stopped at the school written next to my name: advanced water survival. It had been my last choice. My one irrational fear was being trapped, powerless, underwater. Drowning. Someone had noticed, and starting at 0400 on Monday morning, that weakness would be beaten out of me.

With the Marines fighting alongside the Army in most recent wars, people tend to forget that the Corps falls within the Department of the Navy. It is fundamentally an amphibious force. The Combat Water Safety Swimmer Course, our instructors told us during the predawn brief, was designed to nurture comfort in the water through exposure to extreme discomfort. “We’ll find your soft spot and make it hard.” They promised to push our limits so far that exceeding them would probably kill us. “You will be, for all intents and purposes, drown-proofed.” Listening to them, I felt sick. This was the course I had hoped to avoid, which was precisely why I was there.

“Hardness,” I was learning, was the supreme virtue among recon Marines. The greatest compliment one could pay to another was to say he was hard. Hardness wasn’t toughness, nor was it courage, although both were part of it. Hardness was the ability to face an overwhelming situation with aplomb, smile calmly at it, and then triumph through sheer professional pride.

A high white fence surrounds the pool at Pendleton’s Camp Las Pulgas, isolating it from the rest of the world. Recon unit insignia cover the boards — skulls, scuba divers, and parachute wings with slogans such as “Celer, Silens, Mortalis” — the Latin version of First Recon’s “Swift, Silent, Deadly.” A rickety wooden tower looms over the deep end of the pool. It narrows successively to three platforms — one at ten feet, one at twenty feet, and one at a dizzying thirty feet above the pool. Across the tower’s face in black block letters is the course’s motto: IF YOU ARE STILL CONSCIOUS, THEN YOU HAVE QUIT.

We began each morning by swimming a few thousand meters. This was normally a daily workout for me, but here it was only a warm-up. Retrievals came next — sinking into fifteen feet of water to drag rifles, rubber bricks, artillery shell casings, and weights from the poolside gym back to the surface. The stated purpose was to make us “see Elvis on the bottom of the pool.” As in every other part of the course, the real purpose was to create calm where once there had been terror.