Discipline and Death

The three months that I spent as a Canadian cadet at Three Rivers during World War II were undoubtedly the hardest of my life. In addition to the regimen under the eye of an ex-Guards sergeant major there was the psychological handicap of knowing that one out of three of us would never graduate. Yet for all the hardness of its days it was a good time, not just retrospectively but in the actual moment. What we endured made us respect ourselves. None of us would have exchanged his lot for that of a civilian. On the other hand, a few years earlier as a private in the American Army, I experienced arbitrary exercise of authority by those unfit to wield it. It may sound trivial now; but then, as one of a group of grimy KPs, to scrub and set up a mess hall only to have the mess sergeant stride along overturning our tables and sending the tin plates and cutlery skittering across the floor filled me with as hopeless and impotent a rage as I have known. Technically we might have had redress from the drunken lout who drove us. Actually there was none.

These are the two poles of military discipline. The second and more publicized is the easier for the civilian to comprehend. The Marine tradition is the first. It produces an elite, a man proud of himself and that he has had it hard. For generations the Corps has taken its raw material, often unpromising enough, and molded it at Parris Island into a Marine. Such boot training has been rough, humiliating and exacting, but it has not been capricious. On the whole it has justified itself by the men it has produced.

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Francis Russell

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The three months that I spent as a Canadian cadet at Three Rivers during World War II were undoubtedly the hardest of my life. In addition to the regimen under the eye of an ex-Guards sergeant major there was the psychological handicap of knowing that one out of three of us would never graduate. Yet for all the hardness of its days it was a good time, not just retrospectively but in the actual moment. What we endured made us respect ourselves. None of us would have exchanged his lot for that of a civilian. On the other hand, a few years earlier as a private in the American Army, I experienced arbitrary exercise of authority by those unfit to wield it. It may sound trivial now; but then, as one of a group of grimy KPs, to scrub and set up a mess hall only to have the mess sergeant stride along overturning our tables and sending the tin plates and cutlery skittering across the floor filled me with as hopeless and impotent a rage as I have known. Technically we might have had redress from the drunken lout who drove us. Actually there was none.

These are the two poles of military discipline. The second and more publicized is the easier for the civilian to comprehend. The Marine tradition is the first. It produces an elite, a man proud of himself and that he has had it hard. For generations the Corps has taken its raw material, often unpromising enough, and molded it at Parris Island into a Marine. Such boot training has been rough, humiliating and exacting, but it has not been capricious. On the whole it has justified itself by the men it has produced.