On the second day of boot camp I was selected for the platoon scribe position. My job would be to assist the drill instructors in administrative duties such as completing sick-call chits, training schedules, and travel manifests. My first task required me to draw on the barracks chalkboard the proper layout of our footlockers. Drill Instructor Burke handed me a photocopy of the footlocker display and ordered me to create a masterpiece.

Burke, like most DIs, didn't speak as much as growl. His chest was as thick as a butcher block. His eyes looked dead, as though he'd lost them for a few years and found them washed up on the beach.

When he yelled, every vein in his body jumped. He wore, I would learn, the Charlie Uniform: olivedrab wool trousers and short-sleeve beige shirt with ribbons and badges. Expert badges for rifle and pistol were pinned to his left pocket flap. Above the badges he wore ribbons from Beirut. Later that night he'd tell us „Beirut bedtime stories” about digging dead buddies from the rubble.

I suppose there was confusion over what capabilities a scribe should possess, and drawing had never been my strong suit. I struggled through a poor representation of the schematic I held in my hand. I attempted to concentrate on the task while Burke ran up and down the squad bay, agitating and insulting my fellow recruits, making accusations about bestiality and other dark secrets the recruits were hiding. I took some pleasure in that scribe duty might keep me out of the line of verbal fire.

He yelled to a recruit, „I can't believe my fucking eyes! Did you piss your trousers, boy? Did you piss your trousers like a little girl?”

„Sir, no, sir!”„You had an orgasm, is that it? You think I'm so sexy you jizzed in your trousers? Where are you from, boy?” „Sir, Olympia, Washington, sir.”

„Fuck me standing! My mother lives in Olympia. She don't piss her pants. Where'd you learn to piss your pants, boy? From your mama?”„Sir, the recruit's mother is dead, sir.”„One less bitch I got to worry about her calling her senator because her cunt son can't handle my Marine Corps!”„Sir, my mother was not a bitch, sir. Sir, I am not a cunt and I can handle your Marine Corps, sir.”

Burke punched the recruit square on the forehead. He swayed but his knees did not give. The recruithad made the mistake of using personal pronouns, which the recruit is not allowed to use when referring to the drill instructor or himself. The recruit is the recruit. The drill instructor is the drill instructor or sir.

Burke surveyed the platoon, hands clasped behind his back.

He yelled, addressing us all, „I am your mommy and your daddy! I am your nightmare and your wet dream! I am your morning and your night! I will tell you when to piss and when to shit and how much food to eat and when! I will teach you how to kill and how to stay alive! I will forge you into part of the iron fist with which our great United States fights oppression and injustice! Do you understand me, recruits?”
„Sir, yes, sir!”„If your daddy is a doctor or if you come from the projects in East St. Louis or a reservation in Arizona, it no longer matters. Black. White. Mexican. Vietnamese. Navajo. The Marine Corps does not care! Your drill instructors do not care! You are now green! You are light green or dark green.You are not black or white or brown or yellow or red. Do you understand me, recruits?”„Sir, yes, sir!”Burke approached me and the chalkboard. „What in the fuck is that, scribe?”

„Sir, it's the recruit's drawing of the footlocker, sir,” I said.

„Jesus, Joseph, and doggy-style Mary, that looks like a pile of dogshit! My three-month-old daughter can draw better than that.”„Sir, the recruit has never been good at drawing, sir.”„Why the fuck are you my scribe? Isn't my scribe supposed to know how to draw?”„Sir, the recruit doesn't know. The recruit thought the scribe was supposed to write, sir.”„Of course the recruit doesn't know! The recruit doesn't know because I haven't told him! And don't fucking tell me what my shithead scribe is supposed to do. You are my shithead scribe because someone fucked up! You should be in the retard platoon, learning how to draw with crayons and throwing your shit on the bulkheads!”

While he spoke, he spit in my face, and he bashed the brim of his Smokey Bear cover into my nose and pressed his index finger into my chest. He asked me to read what I'd written and point out exactly where the skivvies and running shoes were supposed to go. I couldn't decipher my chalk drawing. He slapped me on the back of the head a few times, as though slowly contemplating some further violence, winding me up, and then he shoved my head into the chalkboard. The board was affixed to the cinder-block barracks wall, so that after my head broke through the chalkboard, it stopped at the cinder block. I did not really feel the assault. It's possible it was minor enough, and that's why I didn't feel it, or I was in shock. The large bump on my head would fade away by the end of the week.
 
Burke leaned in close to my face and I could feel his moist, cruel breath in my ear, and he said,„Boy, you just entered my killing zone.”

He continued berating me, and he complained that I'd ruined his goddamn perfectly goodchalkboard, which was, according to Marine Corps Logic 101, absolutely true. He ordered me to prepare my own footlocker as a model for the rest of the platoon. While I labored over this task, he allowed my platoon mates to write letters home.

Eventually I finished, and did not a bad job, for the first time in my life attempting to fold skivvies into four-by-six-inch squares, for the first time in my life actually referring to underwear as skivvies,pants as trousers, a hat as a cover. Now, hands were dickskinners, the mouth was a cum receptacle,running shoes were go-fasters, a flashlight was a moonbeam, a pen was an in sticky a bed was a rack, a wall was a bulkhead, a bathroom was a head, a shirt was a blouse, a tie was still a tie, and a belt a belt, but many other things would never be the same.

Burke didn't touch me again, but he beat on other recruits. I'm sure he had only the best intentions,and now when I consider him and his acts of violence, they seem petty, not severe enough. I wish that that night at the chalkboard, after he'd shoved my head into the wall, he'd have put me to the floor with a swift knee to the stomach, followed by a boot to the face, and another boot, and that he'd have continued beating me, while the other recruits watched, horrified, observing their future.

Perhaps this is only the luxury of distance and time and the reemergence of the blind stupidity and dumb loyalty that first led me into the Corps and helped carry me out alive. But a further beating wouldn't have damaged me, a further beating wouldn't have caused me to run.

One morning during a heavy rain, we shoved our racks to the bulkheads and turned our barracks into a mini-drill-field and practiced close order drill. We'd been issued our weapons the day before,and even for a farm boy raised with a rifle in his lap, the particulars of COD are difficult. You don't throw the weapon over your shoulder and a piece of straw into your mouth, like you used to do before diddying down to the local hot spot for squirrels.

We dropped our rifles, confused port arms with shoulder arms, and along the way Burke became angrier and angrier, until he grabbed a recruit's rifle and rifle-butted him in the chest. The recruit fell backward a few ranks, and Burke threw the recruit's weapon at him and stormed out of the barracks. Unfortunately for Burke, the company commander stood at the back stairwell and had watched him train us and eventually lose his temper.

A few hours later, a command lieutenant spoke to our platoon and ordered anyone who'd been physically assaulted by Burke to come forward. Along with others, I chose to speak, and I wrote a report of what had occurred the first night of training when Burke had introduced me to the chalkboard. Partly I did this because I believed that no one had a right to put his hands on me. I briefly fantasized that the Marine Corps would apologize to me and buy me a ticket home, no questions asked. But mostly I hoped that reporting Burke's brutality might somehow put me in danger, increase the odds against my survival, that his fellow DIs would fuck me further and longer than anyone else, and I welcomed this imagined challenge. I'd increased the likelihood of myfailure.

Burke was transferred to another platoon in our training company, and we rarely saw him. The matter didn't surface again, and I left boot camp and never spoke about the event. Sometimes I'd think that my reporting Burke would surface and reflect poorly on me. I had daydreams of running into Burke in a bar on Okinawa, where I'd apologize to him for being so weak, ask his forgiveness,and let him beat on me more, as I assumed he'd have liked to that second night at boot camp.