When I was fourteen, a friend of my parents who was a retired Marine, suggested that I go to Devil Pups. Devil Pups is a two week program for boys aged 14 to 17 (and now girls) “from all backgrounds to gain self-confidence and learn to take responsibility for their actions.” It was two weeks of military equipment demonstrations, forced marches, military style physical training, and barracks life. According to their website Devil Pups, “is not a ‘mini boot camp,’ para-military, or recruiting organization for the Marine Corps.” But it sure had that effect. For two weeks I was a badass, and it was hard, and it was fun, and I got to see a lot of the cooler side of the Marine Corps. I was in love.

I was ready to fall in love with the Marines by the time I was fourteen. I had played with GI Joe, I had been around guns, and I thought that this was part of what it meant to be a man. I didn’t know that I was going to join. Or maybe I did know, but it never occurred to me because it was so inevitable by then. I was also bright enough that it was assumed I was college-bound. So I decided the thing for me would be to join the reserves. That way I could serve as an enlisted Marine, and get that experience before becoming an officer after college. That later became, “So I can decide if I want to make it a career.” After getting back from Iraq it became, “I’m glad I’m not at OCS right now.”

At first, I wanted to go so bad that I thought I could go to boot camp between my junior and senior year of high school, then go to my advanced training the next summer, then go to college through the “Spit-Option Program,” which actually works that way, but not until after you’ve graduated high school. Yet when I went to boot camp, it was two weeks after graduating from high school, and I deferred college for a year so that I could, “do all my training in one go, so I can get that experience.” When I enlisted, I had to fill out a form that said why I was joining. Even before it was cool, I said that I was joining for patriotism. I also said that I was joining for the challenge and the experience. I wanted to face the ultimate test of manhood.

When I got to boot camp, I still was in love with the image of boot camp that had been crafted from movies, legends, and Devil Pups for the previous eighteen years and four and a half months. I distinctly remember my first week at boot camp during the in-processing phase and being bunk mates with another young man who was equally as excited as I was to be there. We were both very eager and smiled way too much for people in boot camp. While I maintained a positive attitude throughout, that enthusiasm soon waned.

I was even hardcore enough to become a squad leader half-way through. It’s easy to be picked almost at random for squad leader at the beginning and to keep one’s post, but it is a feat to be selected in the middle of boot camp after everyone has had a chance to mess up or disappoint the Drill Instructors. I was no disappointment.

It was soon after this, however, that in the course of having to “take care” of some members of my squad that I realized some people were going to graduate who I did not think should be Marines. When they did graduate with me, I was certain that they did not meet my definition of what it meant to be a man, and it lessened the meaning of it for me. When a fellow squad leader failed a big test at the end of our garrison phase, he was fired. When he passed the test two weeks later, he was “re-hired” and was supposed to replace the man that temporarily replaced him, but our Senior Drill Instructor was confused, and he replaced me, becoming my squad leader. Upon this becoming apparent, I remained fired, and spent the rest of the time trying to just enjoy myself. Had I been a squad leader upon graduation, I would have been meritoriously promoted to Private First Class. When my dad saw me at graduation, the first thing he asked me was, “Where are your stripes?”

There was another turning point for me. One day, we had to field strip our MREs, (Meals Ready to Eat) which means removing all extraneous packaging and discarding the candy and the condiments. This was for a field op the next day, and at some point that evening, the squad leaders were sent to inspect the pack of every man in his squad. My favorite part of every MRE is the pound cake, and I was delighted to find one in my MRE that evening. I field stripped it and put it in my pack for the next day.

When we were sitting around at the machine gun range eating chow the next day, I noticed it was missing. I was pissed. I was so pissed, that later that afternoon, my Senior Drill Instructor noticed. I was sitting on the ground in the official cross-legged position with my hands on my knees when he said, “Kokesh, why are you so pissed off? What’s wrong with you?” And I told him, “Private _____ stole my pound cake.” He said something trite and appropriate to make fun of me, but I replied, “How can I trust him in combat as a fellow Marine to have my back, if I can’t trust him in boot camp with my MRE?”

We had a system for talking with the Senior Drill Instructor if we had a personal problem. After lights out, we would line up by the hatch to his office at the front of the squad bay in our underwear and skivy shirts as we were wearing when given the order to get in our racks. We would go in one at a time and report at the position of attention, then state our problem. “Recruit Kokesh, reporting with a personal problem sir.” “Go ahead.” “This recruit [we were not allowed to refer to ourselves in the first person] has lost faith in the integrity of the Marine Corps.” I was so frustrated and angry that I started crying. He told me to sit down and I told him what it meant to me to see that some of the shit-bags in our platoon would be graduating with us, and about my pound cake getting stolen. He said something about the reality of the Marines, and briefly tried to console me before dismissing. It’s true, boot camp has gotten soft. And that was seven years ago. It’s even softer now from everything I’ve heard.

After boot camp, all Marines go to infantry school or Marine Combat Training, which is infantry training for non-infantry Marines. That was a lot of fun, and we got to carry disposable cameras, and I was the jackass who jumped behind every machine gun at every possible moment for a photo-op. This was seventeen days almost completely in the field, but it was also seventeen days of disillusionment. The first day I learned that some of the guys in our platoon had gone UA (Unauthorized Absence) and were restarting their training. The very idea blew my mind. Who would want to go UA? Wasn’t everyone having as much fun as I was? I realized then that the Corps was not really the disciplined well-oiled machine it claimed to be. It was the first time I really saw a lack of professionalism in my seniors. The Marines in charge of us were Sergeants and Staff Sergeants, but even some Corporals gave us classes and ran some of our training. They cussed, talked shit about Drill Instructors, took naps in front of us, and even talked shit to us Privates.

Then it was on to Fort Sill, by Lawton, Oklahoma, also known as the asshole of America, for artillery training known as the Cannon Crewman Course. I got there on a Saturday and a new five-week training cycle was to begin the following Monday, but it was full with eighty students. So I waited five weeks for the next cycle to begin and since it would be the last one before Christmas, and the officer who decides these things thought it would be bad to have more Marines around than necessary over the holidays, he enlarged the class size to one hundred twenty. That’s what Marines fondly refer to as “the big green weenie.” I spent most of the five weeks of waiting in Holding Platoon listening to jaded Sergeants drone on in “general knowledge classes,” cleaning the squad bays, and sleeping in wall lockers. Only four months into my Marine Corps career and I was already malingering.

By the time I got to my reserve unit, I had heard so much shit-talking about the reserves, that nothing could surprise me. The standards were at least low enough that I was named NCO of the year. Then the war started, and we missed out. But I jumped at the chance to volunteer to go with a Civil Affairs Group, not even knowing what that was. When I finally got accepted, I was very excited to learn that what we would be doing in Iraq was exactly what I believed in. I was against the war, but was proud that we were taking responsibility and cleaning up our mess. Or so I thought.

When I left for Iraq, I thought that our mission in Civil Affairs was the shit. It was exactly what Bush was saying we were doing in Iraq when he bragged about all of the great things we were accomplishing and how we were “rebuilding” Iraq, and I bought it. When we got there, we found ourselves constantly fighting to justify our existence. We had six man teams attached to Battalions, or the Regiment in our case, and you couldn’t go anywhere around Fallujah without at least six vehicles with at least three Marines and a machine gun in each. We had to beg to tag along with convoys in order to accomplish our missions. We had to sell ourselves to the infantry commanders, and our slogan was, “We care, so that you don’t have to.”

When we first got to Iraq, we had a high-back humvee that didn’t have any armor. The unit that used it previously only moved cargo with it and never had to ride around in the back, and it wasn’t an issue, but we had to get our whole team in there. So we sandbagged it. Our clever Corporal used cardboard from MREs to hold sandbags in place and tied them all together with twine. I wrote on the outside of the cardboard, “THIS IS STEEL (don’t even bother shooting at it).” Of course, this meant no rear coverage, made riding in the back very uncomfortable, and if we were to get shot in the sandbags, we would probably have been sprayed with high velocity sand. But I didn’t even give this a second thought, it was just, “Welcome to combat. Welcome to the Marines. What did you expect? We never promised you a rose garden.”

The image of the Marine Corps that I fell in love still has a special place in my heart, and it always will. It is an ideal that doesn’t exist and never will, but on some level the Marine Corps is attempting to live up to its own legend, and for that I still love it. The Marine Corps of reality is the closest we will ever have to the Marine Corps of our fantasies. And for all the personal reasons that I hate it, I love it all the more. Because even in the love-hate relationship that all Marines have with the Corps, the love is deeper with a deeper understanding. As they say, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”