Boot camp’s bookshelf is full — basic’s is empty - Entertainment, Books - Army Times

Boot camp’s bookshelf is full — basic’s is empty

Do a search for “basic training” on the website of your favorite bookstore or library and you’ll find a dearth of first-person accounts.

Do a search for “boot camp” and you’ll find several titles, including the newest addition, Kieran Michael Lalor’s “This Recruit.”

“This recruit” is how lowly Marine recruits must refer to themselves, and “This Recruit” is all about one recruit’s personal journey at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C.

The book is a verbatim diary from 2000 with a mention that the author’s Reserve unit was activated twice, deploying to Iraq in 2003.

The then-24-year-old social studies teacher joins as a way to avoid feeling “like a pansy” when he hears “The Marines’ Hymn” and to “fulfill a boyhood dream, follow in the footsteps of the generations of American men [including his father and older brother] who have served in the Marine Corps and exorcise the demons of VMI.”

What demons? He left Virginia Military Institute after two semesters when he realized “my high school buddies were doing keg stands and chasing girls.”

At boot camp, he chases dreams, including weight loss, dropping 46 pounds in 64 days. He learns to adjust to the “monotonous and mindless things we do at this place.”

He wishes he were “eloquent enough to articulate how awful drill is.”

A reader searching for more Marine Corps boot camp memoirs might consider:

• “Boot” (1987) is a chronological narrative of Marine training by journalist and former Marine Daniel Da Cruz.

• “Making the Corps” (1997) by Thomas E. Ricks presents boot camp as an emblematic experience of the military in society.

• “Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps” (2002) by John Schaeffer and his father, novelist Frank Schaeffer. Both undergo transformations while John is at Parris Island.

Why don’t more soldiers, sailors and airmen publish books about their transitions into the military?

“Because the USMC boot camp experience is so much more intense,” says author and historian Charles P. Neimeyer, Ph.D., a former Marine lieutenant colonel who heads the Marine Corps history division. “Other boot camps are tough, but nothing like the USMC’s.”