Where civilians become Marines

Boot camp - grueling training for NY's 155 recruits and others - is where road to Iraq begins

BY GRAHAM RAYMAN | Newsday Staff Correspondent

March 21, 2006

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

PARRIS ISLAND, S.C. - On a broad field, Gavin Dornemann, a former stock broker and sheet metal worker from East Islip, has his chest in the dirt. His face is drenched with sweat. His ears are filled with the raspy bark of a drill instructor delivered from a range of about six inches.

In his 14th training day here, Dornemann, 25, has already lost his voice three times from repeatedly shouting "Aye, sir!" at the top of his lungs. He has dropped 12 pounds from physical exertion. Deadpan, he describes the training as "rigorous."

"It's pretty much about concentrating and pushing on," he says during a break. "It's preparing you for what's out there."

Welcome to Marine Corps boot camp, the place where the road to Iraq begins. "We try to make you question your decision," says 1st Lt. Todd Crumbo, who was overseeing the physical training. "Generally speaking, if you let people go to what they think is their limit, they will accomplish about half as much as they probably should."

As the war enters its fourth year, about 155 recruits from Long Island and New York City - each with different reasons for joining - face not only the grueling days and nights of training, but also the specter that they might eventually be sent to Iraq.

"It hits in my heart because I realize that if you mess up here, you just get yelled at, but if you mess up over there, people get hurt," says recruit Ryan McLaughlin, 19, of Ronkonkoma. "It's a reality check."

Meanwhile, back home, in East Islip, Lindenhurst, Bellmore and Woodside, the parents of some of these recruits struggle between the pride they feel for their children and their own discomfort with the war.

About 20,000 Marine recruits pass through Parris Island each year. The barracks here may now be air-conditioned, but the 95-year-old training center is still an essentially timeless place of sand fleas, austere rows of sit-up racks and pull-up bars, functional brick buildings and the hard call-and-response of drill instructors and their recruits.

There is but one road in or out, and the magazine stand at the commissary stocks sports and military magazines, but not current news magazines such as Time or U.S. News & World Report.

According to Lt. Col. Peter Delorier, the commanding officer of the support battalion at Parris Island, about one in five of the recruits who choose the infantry will end up in Iraq.

"Our practice is not to take a recruit who has graduation on Friday and on Monday they are heading to Iraq," says Delorier, of Katonah, N.Y. "It might be six months to a year beforehand."

Dornemann joined the Marines last Thanksgiving. "It's something that I always wanted to do, and if I waited much longer, I would've been too old," he says of his personal standard. A friend who could not join because of cancer also motivated him.

Parents' doubts

He had to weather a somewhat unhappy reaction from his parents. "My mother was a little more upset than my father," he says. "She's my mother. And she watches the news every night and she knows what's going on."

Dornemann's father, Robert, recalls the day that his son told him that he had joined. "He said 'I have a surprise,'" Robert says from his home in East Islip. "I said 'What's that? You're pregnant?' He says 'I signed up.' I told him, 'Your timing stinks.'"

Dad was only half-joking. While he is proud of his son's achievements, Dornemann senior also expressed misgivings about the war. "Here we send troops there and spend billions to help that country, and somehow it's not appreciated," he says. "That's what upsets me the most. So much infighting and anger that you wonder whether it's something we should continue with."

Jesse Phillips, 26, of Lindenhurst left the Navy to join the Marine Corps, hoping to gain entry into scout-sniper school and the Marines' special forces unit, Force Recon.

"I ultimately will volunteer for a battalion going over to Iraq," he says. "I want to go over there as soon as I can."

Though they are close, Phillips' father, Patrick, 47, differs with his son on the war. "I don't think we belong in the war, and I don't believe in killing people," he says from his Lindenhurst home, as he happens to watch "Jarhead," a recent movie about the Marine Corps. "My beliefs are that we're there for political reasons. But he's a special individual, and he believes what he's doing is right. I'll still be down there to support him when he graduates."

A 9/11 tribute