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Outside Magazine February 2002
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Winter to the Corps (Cont.)

I AWAKE SOMETIME LATER and sit up. There is a sentry standing watch beside me. He is motionless, rifle shouldered, staring out into the night.

I don't know this marine. It occurs to me how little of themselves—their individuality, their singularity—these would-be instructors have revealed in the past few days. Each of them has volunteered to live in a world where personalities are less important than the task, and the task can only be accomplished by a team. They have subjugated their own egos in order to work together, to stay focused, to forge a unified fighting force. So they don't whine. They don't psychoanalyze. They don't obsess. They do.

This absence of self-dramatization is a rare phenomenon. I've been on dozens of expeditions. Whenever one fails we blame it on the weather, the avalanche conditions, the rockfall. And sometimes such objective factors are decisive. But often it's about failing to figure out how to pull together.

Before I fall back to sleep, I remember asking Captain Culp to define, in one sentence, what it means to be a marine.

"It's all about discipline," he replied, and his smile seemed to acknowledge that, imbedded in this cliché, there was life-or-death truth.

The next night—our last—after a day of patrols and ambushes, the final stage of the Instructor Qualification Course begins: another grueling cross-country attack.

"Men," says Major K, "I know you're cold. I know you're exhausted. Sometime tonight you may feel so whipped that all you want to do is stop and lie down in the snow. Well, listen up, marines, that's what this field exercise is all about! This environment is enemy number one. You have to whup the cold before you can whup the enemy. You have a mission. The mission is to attack the objective. That means to kill somebody who's trying to kill you. Don't fucking forget it."

He stops and looks for a long moment at his haggard men.

"Suck it up."

The squad is under noise-and-light discipline. Signals are passed along by hand; no one is allowed to use flashlights or headlamps.

Starlight reflects faintly off the boundless snow as the marines fan out on snowshoes behind scout skiers who have already vanished ahead. The soldiers are all but invisible in their overwhites—huge, hooded jackets and baggy pants—and their bulbous white vapor-barrier boots, white mittens, and white backpack covers. It's a squad of ghosts.

After four hours of continuous movement, they reach the edge of a forest. They slip into the woods, then stop. A message is whispered back from man to man—"Overwhite top off." The men are staggered through the dense forest in a wedge formation, each man kneeling behind a tree. Every other man silently drops his 70-pound pack and strips off his monkish cloak while the rest stand watch. In minutes the squad is retailored to match the black-and-white terrain.

Once again the scout skiers are sent ahead to recon the approach. As they have a half-dozen times during this night attack, the rest of the marines wait. Kneeling in the snow, acutely alert, wordless, they're motionless as ice sculptures. Something has coalesced inside these men. They seem to have regained their strength and confidence. You can feel it.

When the scout skiers return, another message is passed back through the men: "Ranger file." The marines slide laterally into a strung-out line, ten meters between each soldier, and begin walking through the forest, M-16s in their arms.

Twenty minutes later, barely enough time to get the icy sludge of blood flowing again, the patrol halts. The men wait. And wait. No word is passed. The marines kneel in the snow beneath their giant packs with their weapons on safety and stare into the darkness.

Finally word comes: "Column file, five meters."

The men form two lines with five meters between each soldier, and advance. They halt again in less than ten minutes. A string of commands and information gradually moves back through the platoon. The objective is fewer than 150 meters dead ahead. Drop the packs. Have weapons and magazines ready.

Major K touches me on the shoulder and we walk up through the heavily armed men crouched in the snow. To the right is a clearing. We step to the edge and Major K hands me a pair of infrared night-vision goggles. Instantly the cover of night is obliterated. Black is transformed to a ghoulish green, all lighter colors to shades of orange. Everything is fuzzy but visible. Through the pines I can clearly see the objective: a group of metal buildings. There is a chain-link fence around the compound. The platoon commander's navigational skills are impeccable. After moving for miles in the dark, sometimes through open country with no landmarks, sometimes through thick forest, he has hit the objective precisely.

I turn and study the soldiers. They are all kneeling beside their packs, rifles up, eyes burning blindly in the dark. I can see the tension in their bodies, their predatory anticipation, their primal desire to fight.

Major K and I move back to the rear of the squad and wait. He leans over and whispers, "By God, they pulled themselves together."

Apparently the scout skiers have breached the chain-link fence. The marines remove their snowshoes and begin advancing very slowly, carefully stepping in the snow holes of each other's footprints, ducking beneath branches.

In what happens next, the bullets and mortars are blanks. And yet, stripped clean by exhaustion and suffering and their shared ordeal, the men become what they've trained to become.

Somebody snaps a trip wire and the entire forest explodes. The detonation sends a concussive wave slamming through the air, and burning flares light up the night. The noise is shattering: machine-gun fire and mortar rounds. The marines rush forward, plunging through the trees, the whole scene lit up by a shifting incandescent glare, orange muzzle-flashes popping everywhere. The men are running for the breach in the fence, firing their weapons and screaming, tripping and falling in the drifts and pulling each other up.
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