Post by Moses on Jan 2, 2006 0:01:21 GMT -5
Parents Beware!!! Your child's teachers, Guidance Counselor, and Prinicpal may be recruiting for the military:
Walking in Marines' footsteps
"The purpose of the educators' visits is to help our recruiting," said Maj. Guillermo Canedo, public affairs director at Parris Island.
By Nirvi Shah
This is no ordinary boot camp.
These are no ordinary recruits.
It takes just four days for the U.S. Marine Corps to transform 80 teachers, guidance counselors and principals from South Florida schools into a more patriotic, informed group armed with an attitude to help it recruit students.
Twelve weeks a year, the Marines invite teachers from anywhere east of the Mississippi to visit their training depot on marshy Parris Island in South Carolina. During the all-expense-paid trip, teachers watch recruits at nearly every phase of training, from initial physical-strength tests to a grueling 54-hour segment called The Crucible.
Teachers fire rifles with live ammunition. Alongside recruits, they eat prepackaged meals that can be heated without stoves, the kind eaten on the battlefield. They see recruits reunite with their families. They tackle parts of an obstacle course and battle each other with giant Q-tips called pugil sticks to practice martial arts.
The Marines ask only that they set aside their political views about the current war and their skepticism.
Before the trip, Kane More didn't know a lot about the Marines. "Now I know they are Marines, not soldiers," said More, who teaches at West Boca Raton High. "I now know Marines are more real, normal kinds of people who very much believe in what they are doing." [After having their personality and independent thought removed]
Although Marines from the Fort Lauderdale recruiting station are regulars at 133 high schools in South Florida, giving teachers a recruit's-eye view of boot camp is a way to create a legion of advocates when Marines aren't around.
Especially when some Iraq war critics are campaigning to bar recruiters from campuses.
"The purpose of the educators' visits is to help our recruiting," said Maj. Guillermo Canedo, public affairs director at Parris Island. "It's such a different world. It's such an insular world to some extent. It's hard for the American public to understand."
'Get off the bus right now!'
The Marines immersed teachers in recruits' lives, starting with the recruits' first minutes on Parris Island.
Their long, white bus pulled up behind an unusual set of markings painted onto the concrete: pairs of yellow footprints, heels together, toes apart.
"Get off the bus! Get off the bus right now! Get off the bus!" a drill instructor growled in the teachers' faces. [Wow, this is the fantasy of these teachers, isn't it?]
They obeyed, lining up on the peculiar formation outlined on the ground while the screaming raged on.
They didn't know it, but they had formed a platoon by lining up four people across and a few dozen deep.
"You should be standing at the position of attention," the drill instructor continued in his guttural bark. "You will do what you are told to do without question. [This is the teacher's ideal, isn't it?] The success of the Marine Corps depends on teamwork. You will eat, sleep, live as a team. Tens of thousands of Marines have begun their careers on the very yellow footprints you're on now."
Those footprints are the beginning of 13 weeks of grueling workouts, isolation from family, bunk-bed sleeping, silent eating and bald heads. Of one scripted phone call home. Of not being able to use the words "me," "my" and "I."
Peggy Rickman, who teaches at Fort Pierce Central High, tried to look stoic. She ended up at the front of the formation, spitting distance from the drill instructor.
"I'm sure if it was the real thing, it would be a lot worse," said Mary Chandler, an assistant principal at South Tech Academy in Boynton Beach.
"Well, we knew we got to come back on the bus," Rickman replied.
200 contacts yield one recruit
The Marines, as with other branches of the military, have had trouble recruiting enough men and women to supply the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. That's despite graduating 15,628 from Parris Island last year alone.
But recruiting is an arduous task, with a typical recruiter making 200 contacts before signing up just one future Marine, at an estimated cost of $11,000. The Army, National Guard and Marines signed up as few as a third of the special forces soldiers, intelligence specialists and translators they had aimed for during the past year, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office.
Of the 4,600 recruits typically in training on Parris Island, many will eventually serve in the ongoing war.
"These kids are probably going somewhere hot and sandy in the next six months, at least 80 percent," said Second Lt. Scott Miller, a Parris Island spokesman.
The day teachers returned to South Florida from Parris Island, a makeshift bomb in Iraq killed 10 Marines and wounded 11.
Barbara Johnson, who teaches history at West Boca Raton High, asked: Are recruits told about deaths overseas?
Maybe, maybe not. They have no access to phones, the Internet, e-mail, newspapers, television or radios.
"The purpose of boot camp is isolation," Maj. Eric Litchfield said, "to make that change we're talking about."
Some never transform. About 10 percent of men and 18 percent of women don't make it through training. One recruit, Jason Tharp of West Virginia, died in the training pool at Parris Island in February.
Still, the discipline, obedience, concentration and physical skills the Marines foster in those who stay made an indelible impression on people who work with undisciplined high school kids all day.
"I would feel comfortable now saying, 'Here's an option for you,' " Rickman said. "Some of my kids would do so well in this environment."
Her brother is in the Marines — he finished boot camp in April and works in nearby Beaufort, S.C. — so Rickman said she wouldn't make such a recommendation lightly.
"But the pride they come out with is absolutely incredible," she said. "At 18 years old, to have that respect for something like the military, I think that's awesome. In 13 weeks, they can turn these kids into more of an adult than I think I can sometimes."
The Marines have hosted visits like these for seven years, all targeting high school and community college educators. They spend about $57,000 for each trip — or $684,000 a year on this public relations campaign.
The goal is to give about 1,000 teachers a year the Marine experience in hopes they will send students to Parris Island.
"The recruiters are coming into the schools — before school, after school, during school — and then they (the students) are coming back to the classroom with more questions," said Miller, the Marines spokesman.
More kids than ever are learning about the military [sic] because a federal education law, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, requires schools to provide students' information to military recruiters unless parents opt out.
Rifle range, with live rounds
Young Marines must wait until seven weeks into training to get to the rifle range, firing from 500 yards, 300 and 200. The teachers waited just two days before firing live rounds from the same M-16 rifles used on the battlefield. None turned down the opportunity.
"I didn't realize how heavy it was," said Johnson, who is short and has arms to match. But her son, who is in the National Guard, uses a similar weapon, and she wanted to see what he deals with on the job.
"It's long and awkward," she said.
An acrid odor hung in the air from the 700 rounds that other teachers had fired. Teachers, who wore earplugs to drown out the field-echoing bangs, were paired with Marines to help them with their aims.
Johnson crouched and rested the weapon on the sandbag in front of her.
"Hit ma'am," Cpl. Christopher Vaughn said.
"Oh my gosh."
"Hit.
"Hit.
"A little to the right, ma'am."
"Hit.
"Hit.
"Phew. Oh my gosh."
A few minutes later, Johnson joked about telling students about her newfound skills: "I'm going to threaten them with it. I'm going to tell them I'm good. I only missed three."
The trip was affirming the attitude she already had about the military and the discipline, the dedication, the future it provides for so many, such as the staple-flinging, wise-cracking former student who sometimes visits her classes.
"I'd like to think, how can I enlist right now? I feel like I missed out," Johnson said.
But when she graduated from high school, Vietnam was in full swing. The military wasn't a popular life path.
54 hours, four meals, little sleep
While the teachers were gathering at the Fort Lauderdale Recruiting Station, recruits on Parris Island were embarking on another kind of journey.
During the 54 hours of The Crucible, recruits walk 42 miles, eat only four meals, sleep a total of eight hours and endure grueling physical tests.
In one obstacle course, they must carry a wounded comrade — a dummy — on a stretcher over wooden and metal obstacles, plotting as a team how to overcome each barrier. One is an 8-foot-high horizontal metal pole. Another is a set of sloped logs. They must drag their tired, heavier-than-ever bodies over and under and through.
Yet another is a wall without a single chink to ease climbing it. At the end of the course, these former video-game-loving kids must hoist themselves up 20 feet of rope.
In another obstacle course, the recruits slide on their backs under nests of barbed wire, with smoke clouding their vision. Once through, they flip onto their stomachs, feeling the ground in front of them with their hands for booby traps. Sounds of booming artillery fire from Saving Private Ryan blare from speakers, so loud that onlookers wear earplugs.
They are at war.
The teachers see all of that, too.
A young woman's journey to Marine
The Marines answered the teachers' never-ending stream of questions bluntly, almost too bluntly. When one captain complimented a Marine he worked hard to recruit by using the adjective "killing," the group went silent.
"Killing, it's just an expression. I mean it figuratively, not literally," Capt. Mark Burns said.
Teachers also spent two meals talking with recruits.
During lunch in the chow hall, More and Johnson chose a redhead from Melbourne who was a week from graduating.
Anna DeKing, 19, wanted to be in the military since she was a preteen.
"The Marines really are the ones that get the job done," she said.
In this last phase of training, recruits are allowed to speak normally; no more "this recruit" when referring to themselves.
"You have to learn to trust each other without even talking to each other, without even knowing each other's first name," DeKing said. "Some of my friends call it brainwashing, but it's not.
"My mom kept writing me, asking, 'Can I put the sticker on yet?' " The sticker said Marine Mom. "I said after The Crucible you can."
DeKing told the teachers she passed The Crucible and told her mother. "So bright and early on Thanksgiving Day, she went out and put it on."
After hearing the story, More wiped away tears.[?!] By then, she and Johnsonhad adopted DeKing. They asked her to come to their classes and to keep in touch.
DeKing, who looks younger than she is, told them she misses slouching and her long hair. Her drill instructor told her it looked freakish when she tied it up when she first got to boot camp, so she cut it the requisite shortness: It can't touch her collar. But she has no regrets.
DeKing tells them to tell any girl considering the Marines that if they think they can't do it, they can.
Marine mug joins Harvard mug
They will. They'll do more than that, too.
At the Marine Corps Exchange, and even in the makeshift shop set up in the hotel hallway, teachers couldn't hold back.
Rickman will hang a USMC flag in her office. Callie Berger, a guidance counselor at South Tech Academy, will display a photo of all the educators on the trip. More has set her "Marines Parris Island" coffee mug right next to the one from Harvard to symbolize that it's an opportunity, too. Johnson carries her Semper Fi backpack all the time now.
Along with these tangible souvenirs come the ones embedded in their minds.
On Parris Island, Brig. Gen. Richard Tryon talked to teachers about changing the attitude high schoolers have toward the military.
"You can do college and the military," Johnson said he told them. "Everything now is college, college, college. But 55 percent drop out of college." [And what are the percentage of Marines who graduate from college, teach?]
On her first day back in school after the trip, she wore her Yellow Footprints T-shirt. She wrote "transformation" on the dry erase board in her room. She talked to her students about what it means and how transformation in civilian life is fostered by Marine training.
"I believe that there is a misconception as to their programs and actual benefits," Johnson said. "The students only view or hear about wartime experiences via the media."
The result: more students who are patriotic and politically conservative but unwilling to join the military.
"They're scared," Johnson said.
So Johnson is making arrangements for the Marine Corps band to visit West Boca Raton High. More will keep up her correspondence with troops in Iraq, troops who are showing her students they are more alike than they think.
"If we can get kids to turn out like these guys," she said, "I'd be thrilled."
— Nirvi Shah
Palm Beach Post
2005-12-31
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walking in Marines' footsteps
"The purpose of the educators' visits is to help our recruiting," said Maj. Guillermo Canedo, public affairs director at Parris Island.
By Nirvi Shah
This is no ordinary boot camp.
These are no ordinary recruits.
It takes just four days for the U.S. Marine Corps to transform 80 teachers, guidance counselors and principals from South Florida schools into a more patriotic, informed group armed with an attitude to help it recruit students.
Twelve weeks a year, the Marines invite teachers from anywhere east of the Mississippi to visit their training depot on marshy Parris Island in South Carolina. During the all-expense-paid trip, teachers watch recruits at nearly every phase of training, from initial physical-strength tests to a grueling 54-hour segment called The Crucible.
Teachers fire rifles with live ammunition. Alongside recruits, they eat prepackaged meals that can be heated without stoves, the kind eaten on the battlefield. They see recruits reunite with their families. They tackle parts of an obstacle course and battle each other with giant Q-tips called pugil sticks to practice martial arts.
The Marines ask only that they set aside their political views about the current war and their skepticism.
Before the trip, Kane More didn't know a lot about the Marines. "Now I know they are Marines, not soldiers," said More, who teaches at West Boca Raton High. "I now know Marines are more real, normal kinds of people who very much believe in what they are doing." [After having their personality and independent thought removed]
Although Marines from the Fort Lauderdale recruiting station are regulars at 133 high schools in South Florida, giving teachers a recruit's-eye view of boot camp is a way to create a legion of advocates when Marines aren't around.
Especially when some Iraq war critics are campaigning to bar recruiters from campuses.
"The purpose of the educators' visits is to help our recruiting," said Maj. Guillermo Canedo, public affairs director at Parris Island. "It's such a different world. It's such an insular world to some extent. It's hard for the American public to understand."
'Get off the bus right now!'
The Marines immersed teachers in recruits' lives, starting with the recruits' first minutes on Parris Island.
Their long, white bus pulled up behind an unusual set of markings painted onto the concrete: pairs of yellow footprints, heels together, toes apart.
"Get off the bus! Get off the bus right now! Get off the bus!" a drill instructor growled in the teachers' faces. [Wow, this is the fantasy of these teachers, isn't it?]
They obeyed, lining up on the peculiar formation outlined on the ground while the screaming raged on.
They didn't know it, but they had formed a platoon by lining up four people across and a few dozen deep.
"You should be standing at the position of attention," the drill instructor continued in his guttural bark. "You will do what you are told to do without question. [This is the teacher's ideal, isn't it?] The success of the Marine Corps depends on teamwork. You will eat, sleep, live as a team. Tens of thousands of Marines have begun their careers on the very yellow footprints you're on now."
Those footprints are the beginning of 13 weeks of grueling workouts, isolation from family, bunk-bed sleeping, silent eating and bald heads. Of one scripted phone call home. Of not being able to use the words "me," "my" and "I."
Peggy Rickman, who teaches at Fort Pierce Central High, tried to look stoic. She ended up at the front of the formation, spitting distance from the drill instructor.
"I'm sure if it was the real thing, it would be a lot worse," said Mary Chandler, an assistant principal at South Tech Academy in Boynton Beach.
"Well, we knew we got to come back on the bus," Rickman replied.
200 contacts yield one recruit
The Marines, as with other branches of the military, have had trouble recruiting enough men and women to supply the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. That's despite graduating 15,628 from Parris Island last year alone.
But recruiting is an arduous task, with a typical recruiter making 200 contacts before signing up just one future Marine, at an estimated cost of $11,000. The Army, National Guard and Marines signed up as few as a third of the special forces soldiers, intelligence specialists and translators they had aimed for during the past year, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office.
Of the 4,600 recruits typically in training on Parris Island, many will eventually serve in the ongoing war.
"These kids are probably going somewhere hot and sandy in the next six months, at least 80 percent," said Second Lt. Scott Miller, a Parris Island spokesman.
The day teachers returned to South Florida from Parris Island, a makeshift bomb in Iraq killed 10 Marines and wounded 11.
Barbara Johnson, who teaches history at West Boca Raton High, asked: Are recruits told about deaths overseas?
Maybe, maybe not. They have no access to phones, the Internet, e-mail, newspapers, television or radios.
"The purpose of boot camp is isolation," Maj. Eric Litchfield said, "to make that change we're talking about."
Some never transform. About 10 percent of men and 18 percent of women don't make it through training. One recruit, Jason Tharp of West Virginia, died in the training pool at Parris Island in February.
Still, the discipline, obedience, concentration and physical skills the Marines foster in those who stay made an indelible impression on people who work with undisciplined high school kids all day.
"I would feel comfortable now saying, 'Here's an option for you,' " Rickman said. "Some of my kids would do so well in this environment."
Her brother is in the Marines — he finished boot camp in April and works in nearby Beaufort, S.C. — so Rickman said she wouldn't make such a recommendation lightly.
"But the pride they come out with is absolutely incredible," she said. "At 18 years old, to have that respect for something like the military, I think that's awesome. In 13 weeks, they can turn these kids into more of an adult than I think I can sometimes."
The Marines have hosted visits like these for seven years, all targeting high school and community college educators. They spend about $57,000 for each trip — or $684,000 a year on this public relations campaign.
The goal is to give about 1,000 teachers a year the Marine experience in hopes they will send students to Parris Island.
"The recruiters are coming into the schools — before school, after school, during school — and then they (the students) are coming back to the classroom with more questions," said Miller, the Marines spokesman.
More kids than ever are learning about the military [sic] because a federal education law, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, requires schools to provide students' information to military recruiters unless parents opt out.
Rifle range, with live rounds
Young Marines must wait until seven weeks into training to get to the rifle range, firing from 500 yards, 300 and 200. The teachers waited just two days before firing live rounds from the same M-16 rifles used on the battlefield. None turned down the opportunity.
"I didn't realize how heavy it was," said Johnson, who is short and has arms to match. But her son, who is in the National Guard, uses a similar weapon, and she wanted to see what he deals with on the job.
"It's long and awkward," she said.
An acrid odor hung in the air from the 700 rounds that other teachers had fired. Teachers, who wore earplugs to drown out the field-echoing bangs, were paired with Marines to help them with their aims.
Johnson crouched and rested the weapon on the sandbag in front of her.
"Hit ma'am," Cpl. Christopher Vaughn said.
"Oh my gosh."
"Hit.
"Hit.
"A little to the right, ma'am."
"Hit.
"Hit.
"Phew. Oh my gosh."
A few minutes later, Johnson joked about telling students about her newfound skills: "I'm going to threaten them with it. I'm going to tell them I'm good. I only missed three."
The trip was affirming the attitude she already had about the military and the discipline, the dedication, the future it provides for so many, such as the staple-flinging, wise-cracking former student who sometimes visits her classes.
"I'd like to think, how can I enlist right now? I feel like I missed out," Johnson said.
But when she graduated from high school, Vietnam was in full swing. The military wasn't a popular life path.
54 hours, four meals, little sleep
While the teachers were gathering at the Fort Lauderdale Recruiting Station, recruits on Parris Island were embarking on another kind of journey.
During the 54 hours of The Crucible, recruits walk 42 miles, eat only four meals, sleep a total of eight hours and endure grueling physical tests.
In one obstacle course, they must carry a wounded comrade — a dummy — on a stretcher over wooden and metal obstacles, plotting as a team how to overcome each barrier. One is an 8-foot-high horizontal metal pole. Another is a set of sloped logs. They must drag their tired, heavier-than-ever bodies over and under and through.
Yet another is a wall without a single chink to ease climbing it. At the end of the course, these former video-game-loving kids must hoist themselves up 20 feet of rope.
In another obstacle course, the recruits slide on their backs under nests of barbed wire, with smoke clouding their vision. Once through, they flip onto their stomachs, feeling the ground in front of them with their hands for booby traps. Sounds of booming artillery fire from Saving Private Ryan blare from speakers, so loud that onlookers wear earplugs.
They are at war.
The teachers see all of that, too.
A young woman's journey to Marine
The Marines answered the teachers' never-ending stream of questions bluntly, almost too bluntly. When one captain complimented a Marine he worked hard to recruit by using the adjective "killing," the group went silent.
"Killing, it's just an expression. I mean it figuratively, not literally," Capt. Mark Burns said.
Teachers also spent two meals talking with recruits.
During lunch in the chow hall, More and Johnson chose a redhead from Melbourne who was a week from graduating.
Anna DeKing, 19, wanted to be in the military since she was a preteen.
"The Marines really are the ones that get the job done," she said.
In this last phase of training, recruits are allowed to speak normally; no more "this recruit" when referring to themselves.
"You have to learn to trust each other without even talking to each other, without even knowing each other's first name," DeKing said. "Some of my friends call it brainwashing, but it's not.
"My mom kept writing me, asking, 'Can I put the sticker on yet?' " The sticker said Marine Mom. "I said after The Crucible you can."
DeKing told the teachers she passed The Crucible and told her mother. "So bright and early on Thanksgiving Day, she went out and put it on."
After hearing the story, More wiped away tears.[?!] By then, she and Johnsonhad adopted DeKing. They asked her to come to their classes and to keep in touch.
DeKing, who looks younger than she is, told them she misses slouching and her long hair. Her drill instructor told her it looked freakish when she tied it up when she first got to boot camp, so she cut it the requisite shortness: It can't touch her collar. But she has no regrets.
DeKing tells them to tell any girl considering the Marines that if they think they can't do it, they can.
Marine mug joins Harvard mug
They will. They'll do more than that, too.
At the Marine Corps Exchange, and even in the makeshift shop set up in the hotel hallway, teachers couldn't hold back.
Rickman will hang a USMC flag in her office. Callie Berger, a guidance counselor at South Tech Academy, will display a photo of all the educators on the trip. More has set her "Marines Parris Island" coffee mug right next to the one from Harvard to symbolize that it's an opportunity, too. Johnson carries her Semper Fi backpack all the time now.
Along with these tangible souvenirs come the ones embedded in their minds.
On Parris Island, Brig. Gen. Richard Tryon talked to teachers about changing the attitude high schoolers have toward the military.
"You can do college and the military," Johnson said he told them. "Everything now is college, college, college. But 55 percent drop out of college." [And what are the percentage of Marines who graduate from college, teach?]
On her first day back in school after the trip, she wore her Yellow Footprints T-shirt. She wrote "transformation" on the dry erase board in her room. She talked to her students about what it means and how transformation in civilian life is fostered by Marine training.
"I believe that there is a misconception as to their programs and actual benefits," Johnson said. "The students only view or hear about wartime experiences via the media."
The result: more students who are patriotic and politically conservative but unwilling to join the military.
"They're scared," Johnson said.
So Johnson is making arrangements for the Marine Corps band to visit West Boca Raton High. More will keep up her correspondence with troops in Iraq, troops who are showing her students they are more alike than they think.
"If we can get kids to turn out like these guys," she said, "I'd be thrilled."
— Nirvi Shah
Palm Beach Post
2005-12-31
------------------------------------------------------------------------
