Life Lessons : Basic training leads 3 Valley recruits down different paths

CAMP PENDLETON —  It’s shortly before 8 p.m. on a high, windy bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and 481 young men are chanting about death in their underwear.

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“Ready to fight! Ready to kill! Ready to die, but never will!”

Rising in a round of crescendos from a low hum to a full-tilt holler, these U. S. Marine Corps recruits’ bedtime fight song seems to echo to the moon and back from their cold and dusty bivouac.

“Ready to fight! Ready to kill! Ready to die, but never will!”

Scrunching his face and howling toward the sky louder than most is tall, reedy Victor Rustandi. A month and a half ago, the 18-year-old Cleveland High School graduate slept late, mocked authority and could lie around the house all day watching television. Tonight he appears ready to bust a vein in his neck trying to impress his drill instructors, projecting his combat consciousness to the stars.

“READY TO FIGHT! READY TO KILL! . . .”

The change has astonished him.

“I didn’t know I had this in me,” Rustandi said in a private moment later. “I love shooting. I love throwing grenades. . . . I feel like I’ve found myself in boot camp.”

Twenty yards away, also chanting with manic ferocity, stood another of the three recruits from the San Fernando Valley whom this series has accompanied into boot camp. He had not discovered so clear a path in Platoon 1017 since training began in July.

Still stoic and introspective, Gilbert Escobedo seemed unwilling to throw his soul into the fire at boot camp and discover what parts of his past might melt away. He studied each command from drill instructors, derived little amusement from firing automatic weapons and hurling grenades, ran or yelled only as hard as necessary to keep up with his peers, and sometimes prayed at night alone rather than with other Catholics.

Even moments after completing a difficult infiltration training course--in which rifle-toting recruits crawl 200 yards under barbed wire while simulated mortar explosions pound the ground--Escobedo declined to subscribe to the cliche that basic training is making him into a man.

“I’m always going to question: What is a man? Am I a man? Are you a man when you marry, or when you have a family? You never know until it happens,” he said, as filthy beads of hot sweat coursed down his camouflage-painted face.

Meanwhile, a third recruit from the Valley, Bill Norris, arrived at a more definitive moment of self-knowledge at boot camp, dropping out three weeks into training.

The monthlong first phase of boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Training Depot in San Diego had served as the youths’ transition from civilian life to military life. Under a constant barrage of yelling from drill instructors, they learned to march, to never utter the word “I,” to perform all tasks at top speed, to exercise at the limits of pain, to end every statement to a superior with the word “Sir!” and--during the rare times they were not doing anything else--to study USMC history and customs from a book of “knowledge” kept in their trousers.

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Despite training so intensely that he was made a squad leader, Norris suffered a return of the deep depression that afflicted him after the breakup of his parents and the death of a grandmother.

Norris says he told his recruiter about his illness. But he admits he did not come clean at subsequent interviews, including the “moment of truth” a few hours after arrival in San Diego when recruits are given a last chance to acknowledge previously undisclosed crimes or ailments.

Although training officers decided Norris had enlisted fraudulently, they offered him a chance to continue. But Norris quit on his own.

“My depression has gotten worse . . . my head’s just cracked up,” the Birmingham High graduate said just before his discharge, upset that he had not received more letters from his mother. “I didn’t feel I was mentally ready.”

Sitting alone in a dank San Diego bus terminal as his former platoon mates learned to fire M-16 rifles, he looking lost and anxious. He said he hated wearing civilian clothes. “They feel tacky. . . . This is what I’m coming back to, huh?”

Norris’ decision to drop out shocked and disappointed drill instructor Bruce Knapp, an infantry sergeant who so liked Norris’ hard-fisted intensity that he was grooming him for the platoon’s top leadership role.

The quality of the recruits is more than an academic concern to the drill instructors, called DIs for short. Most wear their elite emblem--a “Smokey Bear” hat--only two years before returning to their usual duties, and could one day find themselves leading these same raw youths on a battlefield.

“That’s why I take all this so personally,” said Knapp, shaking his head in disgust one afternoon as he gazed on a truckload of recruits who had twisted their ankles or complained of colds.

“You’re only as fast as your slowest Marine. You want to make them feel like they’re unstoppable, unbreakable. I was hard-trained, and when it works for you, you want to train recruits that way.”

It is a question raging throughout the Corps: How much pain is acceptable in training? Old-timers bellyache that DIs are turning out ever-more truculent and weak Marines unprepared for the pain and terror of real warfare, while parents and lawmakers complain that leadership alone should replace the rough tactics of the past.

As recently as 1971, said one longtime sergeant, DIs commonly punched recruits. Today, the Corps would bust a DI for that. Profanity is strictly prohibited too, so to keep the intensity level up, instructors such as Knapp must learn to project meanness through facial expressions backed by such expletive-substitutes as “daggone,” “freakin’,” “nasty” and “trash.”

“They’re trying to make this too much like the Boy Scouts,” Knapp complained. “Marines work in a combative environment and you have to be ready for stress. I think we should lay it on.”

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Forsaking real training in terror management might make politicians and moms feel good in peacetime, veterans say, but could prove disastrous if these young men find themselves at war. Indignant veterans point to Marine history, filled with tales of small units such as these platoons surviving jungle combat only by sheer will.

“The kids here are constantly humping to meet our standards, but the standards have been repeatedly lowered,” said Staff Sgt. Mitchell Ferrell, the senior drill instructor for Platoon 1017. “Kids are much less active than we were--they’re watching TV or playing Nintendo. They’re preconditioning themselves to failure.”

Both Escobedo and Rustandi idolize Ferrell, who leads occasional “core values” rap sessions to complement field training. With the recruits gathered around him one cool evening, Ferrell taught Corps values as he sees them.

“You’re gonna be a helluva lot better when you graduate than when you started, and you gotta act that way! You know I think this generation’s screwed up, right?”

“Yes sir!” chorus the recruits.

“Well now you’re a good part of society. The best part. You understand that, right?”

“Yes sir!”

Ferrell has so smitten Escobedo with his humor, bearing and force of character that the Canoga Park youth calls him the first real father figure in his life.

“We want to make him proud of us,” he said one night while cleaning his rifle.

Of his estranged natural father, he added: “I don’t think he’d be proud if he knew what I was doing. He’d probably think I’m a pig for wanting to be a Marine and a cop.”

Ironically, Ferrell was himself orphaned at 14 and survived a childhood punctuated with small-time drug abuse and petty thievery. He credits high school counselors and the Marines with pulling him out of an abyss he says still traps his beloved twin brother.

Now Ferrell must forge family ties among his recruits. One of many slogans that decorate the recruits’ bathroom in San Diego defines “gung ho” as “working together.” Before dinner in the field, they strip naked but for a tiny waist towel and wash and shave each others’ faces.

“When you get that close to 84 naked men, that’s trust,” said Ferrell, grinning. “They learn to treat each other like brothers.”

So far, he’s impressed with much of his handiwork.

“Rustandi is going to be an outstanding Marine,” he said. “His discipline is good to go. He’s got the heart, the talent and the physical skills.”

Indeed, Rustandi has stumbled only once during training at Pendleton--panicking during practice in a tear-gas-filled chamber meant to train recruits how to put on gas masks during chemical attacks. After taking a few painful breaths with the mask off, he repeatedly failed to clear its air hoses properly before replacing it, twisting in pain and fear as two instructors barked instructions at him.

“I couldn’t think worth a damn--I feel awfully stupid, just ashamed,” he said afterward, looking drained and morose.

In contrast, Ferrell observed, Escobedo has never blundered badly. But he hasn’t soared either.

“Escobedo is a slow blossomer. Seems to be content in the middle of the pack,” he said. “He’s an introvert. In this scenario, you need a stronger personality.”

An unwillingness to boss people around is Escobedo’s handicap. He hates to see squad leaders abuse their authority, yelling profanely at fellow recruits to shut up, get in line or march faster.

“Ever read ‘The Prince’?” Escobedo asks one afternoon, referring to the classic work on leadership by Machiavelli. “You have to give someone a reason to follow you. The squad leaders just cuss and get hostile and try to push us around. I started off wanting to be one, but I’m not the type of person to get in your face. . . . I’d try to counsel people instead of order them.”

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Escobedo’s style actually matches up better with the handful of officers on hand. As easy-going as the drill instructors are harsh, the three captains and a lieutenant attached to Delta Company supervise the DIs to prevent them from driving recruits into the ground.

The officers come into direct contact with recruits only during an incongruously peaceful round of mid-course interviews that many DIs consider meddlesome. One hot afternoon, Capt. Gary Bash hauled 10 recruits out of the sun and, relaxing in a rare shady spot, told each individually he wanted to cut through the “rigidness” and talk freely.

Playing the anti-DI, he asks whether they’ve had enough food, enough sleep, had a chance to attend religious services, and been able to ask questions of the senior DI. They all answer affirmatively, though each hesitates a moment before answering “No sir” to the question: “Have you witnessed any verbal or physical abuse?”

Bash compliments Escobedo on his improvement from two pull-ups to 10. Asked if he has any complaints, Escobedo replies that it’s unfair that he’s still classed as an overweight “diet” recruit even though he’s lost many pounds and now runs at the front of the pack.

A week later, Escobedo proved his physical worthiness in the crowning event of the second phase of training--a 10-mile march. While one notoriously steep hill called the “Grim Reaper” left a few gasping recruits in other platoons tasting dirt instead of triumph, the hike proved joyously anticlimactic for the two Valley youths.

“I was in burst mode,” said Rustandi, beaming. “I screamed through the whole thing. From now on, we should be good to go.”

His senior drill instructor marvels at the transformation.

“It’s an amazing process,” Ferrell said. “You take a selfish kid, bring him in here and put him through this training, and suddenly he has initiative, responsibility, goals, leadership. I look at the final product and I wonder, ‘How did this work? When did it kick in?’ ”

In a month, at graduation in San Diego, he may have his answer.

Markman is a Times staff writer and Bohrer is a free-lance photographer.