Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas E. Ricks's MAKING THE CORPS has sat in my bookcase for more than three years but I finally got around to reading it, and now I wonder what took me so long. Because this snail's eye view of a Marine platoon going through boot camp on Parris Island in the mid-1990s is a starkly revealing and absolutely absorbing read from cover to cover, as it follows these young men from being confused and aimless civilians to confident and proud Marines.

Ricks's look at the process is a balanced and show more fair one. He doesn't ignore the fact that many of the initial group will not make it through, and he makes the reader privy to the reasons for falling by the wayside and washing out. I was particularly surprised to learn that the DI's of Parris Island are now prohibited from using profanity or intimidating the recruits entrusted to them. Nevertheless, the DI's have their ways of getting the complete and undivided attention of their charges and, in the end, gaining their respect. More than once, however, I flashed back to my own Army BCT days, more than thirty years before Marine Platoon 3086, and how all my waking hours were lived in a near-constant state of mortal terror of my Drill Sergeants, who had no such prohibitions, so I learned a whole new vocabulary during those eight intimidating and terror-filled weeks. I also thought of an obscure and now nearly forgotten film I saw back in the seventies called BABY BLUE MARINE (starring Jan-Michael Vincent), about a recruit who washed out of a particularly brutal boot camp, in the days before it became a bit 'gentler,' and more 'civilized.'

My own BCT, back in 1962, was a lot more like the Marine boot camp documented here in MAKING THE CORPS, but with lots of profanity, intimidation and beau coups terror.

But perhaps what is most impressive in the Marine Corps Ricks shows us here is the way the Corps is actually a 'family,' and how boot camp instills 'family values' that many recruits had never learned. Wastrels and purposeless 'corner boys drinking their forties' are remade into upstanding young men who learn to respect themselves. In fact, when they return home on their first post-training leave, they find they have little in common with their old companions.

What is most disturbing in Ricks's account of the Marine culture and brotherhood is how Marines - and our professional, all-volunteer military in general - have become alienated from the civilian populace it is tasked with defending, particularly with the political and elite. He wonders how long this can go on, and even poses a remote possibility of an eventual military coup, and he makes a valid argument. This book was originally published in 1997, and I read the ten-year anniversary edition, and this separation of the military and civilian has only become more exacerbated in the intervening eighteen years.

This is simply a damn good book - well-written, thought provoking and fascinating. Made me appreciate the Marines a hell of a lot more. If you want to know more about our all-volunteer military, especially the 'few and the proud,' read this book. Highly recommended. show less

I'm a Tom Ricks fan -- I very much enjoyed Making the Corps, The Generals and First Principles. He's said on Twitter that he considers this book, Waging a Good War, to be his best. I'm not sure -- I loved Making the Corps -- but Waging a Good War is excellent.

It's an excellent history of a decade and a half of the Civil Rights Movement, but from a fresh and compelling perspective. Ricks is a military correspondent, and he examines the Movement in the light of a series of military-style show more campaigns. He argues that Movement leadership used a variety of tried and tested techniques also used by militaries preparing campaigns: rigorous training, careful strategic planning, assigning tactical initiative to leaders in the field and on the ground, post-conflict reconciliation and more.

It's a persuasive presentation. It's certainly helped me to understand the Movement in a new way.

He covers desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the South. Rosa Parks, the bus boycotts, the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer and much more are all here. He writes about Selma and the march across the Edmund Pettis bridge. Montgomery, Nashville, Oxford, and Memphis, including Martin Luther King's assassination, all get the attention they deserve.

He writes about other leaders of the SNCC, SCLC, NAACP, CORE and the Black Panther Party as well. The interplay and interactions of those leaders when their organizations collaborated and competed are interesting.

This would have been a first-rate history of the Movement, just on the detail with which Ricks reports the facts. His analysis of the Movement in terms of military discipline is, as far as I know, brand new. This is a piece of scholarship that advances our understanding of that time, and that effort -- still ongoing!

I loved it. show less

Journalism is history's first draft , and Thomas Ricks explores in exacting detail the errors in planning, judgement, and strategy that lead to America's misadventure in Iraq. From the beginning, the war was hampered by poor analogies, cherry-picked intelligence, and an division at the highest levels of the Pentagon. There is more than enough blame to go around; Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Franks, Powell, etc, but if any person is truly to blame, it's Rumsfeld, who sabotaged effective planning show more for the occupation, failed the military, and failed the American people. L Paul Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, deserves another large helping of blame, but an effective plan would have never put him and the CPA's unending stream of short-term contractors in charge to begin with.

The most killing indictment of the Bush administration's plan for war is that there was a very real chance that the war could have been won in 2004 or 2005. Saddam was crushed, the insurgency weak, the Iraqi people desperate for real change. But because the Bush administration was focused on non-existent WMDs, and didn't provide a real strategy for reconstruction, they gave the insurgency time to organize and to fight. The bloody peak of the conflict in 2005-2007 is entirely due to failures in the opening days of the war. Military boldness is often to be commended, but with the Bush team, lead instead to a quagmire, and an expanded civil war which has cost millions of lives, incited hatred for Americans, and trained our enemies in the hard school of insurgency.

If there's any weakness to this book, it's that it was published in 2006, and so doesn't cover the surge and General Petraeus's successful counter-insurgency strategy. But you can't fairly blame a book for not being prescient. "The Gamble" is Ricks' sequel, and has been added to the pile. show less

Boot camp is iconic, maybe infamous. Boot camp is the 11 weeks where hardassed drill instructors turn snotnosed civilians into Marines.

R. Lee Ermey, in his most famous role as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket

In Making the Corps, Ricks uses the journey of Platoon 3086 through Parris Island in 1996 as a lens to understand the Marine Corps as a whole, and their place in the American defense posture in the 21st century, and American society. The Marines are self-consciously about a show more warrior culture, the living legacy of Semper Fi, and boot camp is where that foundations of that culture are laid. Ricks is both caught up in the myth-making, he genuinely likes the Marines, but he has enough to distance to see warning flags where appropriate.

First, boot camp. The point of boot camp is to mold individualist and lazy teenagers into decisive, calm, and collectivist professionals. Every Marine is a rifleman, and every Marine should be prepared to kill, and if necessary, die, for his brother Marines. The yelling, the PT, the discipline, is all designed around this simple goal. In 1996, Parris Island had a 24% attrition rate, including injuries, psychological breakdowns, and 'Failure to Adapt'. While it's tough, it's not sadistic or particularly dangerous. We're a long ways away from the bad days of Ribbon Creek incident, where six recruits died while marching across tidal flats on the orders of a drunk DI, or the post-Vietnam funk. Ricks manages to make enough of the 55-odd recruits of Platoon 3086 individuals to give character to this transformation, without losing touch with the big picture.

The boot camp parts are interspersed with musings on what the Marines might do going into the 21st century. It's been over 20 years and two medium-sized wars, so a lot of this Clinton-era speculation feels very dated. But even with a pre 9-11 mindset, Ricks manages to grasp the essential contradictions of a highly disciplined warrior elite in a nation that is increasingly anything but. show less