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On the Frontline

Random House

Chapter One

Challenge. The word could be synonymous with "military." In fact, you probably entered the military welcoming the challenge, seeking to test yourself against the best. You wanted to prove you have what it takes, and you did prove it. You earned a place in the United States military, the most powerful fighting force known to man. You have gained hard-won experience. and you're making your mark in the military. But, of course, the demands don't get any lighter. There is no other profession as pressure packed as serving in the armed forces. Some days you love it, I know. And some days you probably ask yourself why you chose this career path.
The good news is that God has you where you are for a reason, and he wants to use you in a way that will amaze even yourself. The pressure and hardship might seem overwhelming at times, but you serve a limitless God. And not only that, you number among the most disciplined and the most highly trained warriors on the planet. Obedience and discipline are keys to success in the military, just as they are in the Christian life and life in general. The lessons you are learning will serve you well for the rest of your life. In Iraq, our military is battling not only the insurgency but also the incredible, stifling heat. It fills the air and radiates from the ground. If you don't stay hydrated, you can die.First Lieutenant Adam Morehouse, an artillery officer by training, is all too familiar with the deadly desert heat. It can become almost a living thing that crushes the breath out of men and women conducting missions in Iraq. And the demands are mental as well as physical--the pressure can be overwhelming.
Morehouse describes a battalion-sized cordon-and-search missionin a neighborhood near Baghdad, conducted by the Second Infantry Division. His job was to take a team of soldiers and blockoff one of the highways into town. They were going to be sitting along a road, out in the open, for as long as ten hours. Long before the mission was to start, Morehouse racked his sleep-deprived brain: Does everyone know his job? Do we have everything we need? Will we get hit? He collapsed onto his cot, trying to get some rest. His fear was intense. He prayed to God, asking for wisdom and peace. Finally, he drifted off to sleep.
"After I woke up," he said, "I felt almost a day-and-night change. I felt a complete sense of peace. I'd done everything I could. We were in God's hands."
The mission went off without a hitch and without anyone getting hurt. Recently, Morehouse looked back at that experience. "It was the most tangible time in my life that God had directly, instantly, quickly answered a prayer in an obvious way," he said. Without his faith in God, Lieutenant Morehouse is not sure how he could have handled the pressure. "At every stage of your life you have to make a fresh decision to obey him," he said. "You can't make just one decision and coast on it for the rest of your life. You have to decide every day at being obedient to the Lord and work
hard at it. I believe God has me in the Army for a reason, and I trust that he's still taking care of me. You have to continually seek God's face."

Standing Up Under Pressure
The pressure begins the moment you enter basic training. In fact, you feel the force of it as soon as you step off the bus. In my case, it was late, nearly midnight. I'd spent the past five hours on a Greyhound bus traveling from Jacksonville, Florida. We had a short layover in Savannah, Georgia, before pulling out of the bus station, over the towering Savannah bridge and into the night, headed into the South Carolina lowlands. I had only a vague idea of what lay ahead, even though I had volunteered for it. I sat by myself in the dark, watching trees that dripped Spanish moss flash by in the bus's headlights. As we wound through the back roads, riffs from that summer's Top 40 hit "Love Will Keep Us Together" kept playing in my mind, crowding out thoughts or doubts before they formed. I didn't want to think about why I was riding this bus or whether this was what I really wanted to be doing.
There were occasional mileage signs along the way: Hilton Head, 25 miles; Hardeeville, 10 miles; but there were no signs for where we were going. About an hour after the bus left Savannah, we rounded a curve and there it was. A sentry booth guarded the entrance to a long causeway where a large red sign with gold lettering read: Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. I had arrived.
The driver stopped on the curve and opened the bus's door with a hiss of escaping air. I joined five other young men getting off the bus, as the passengers bound for Beaufort and points beyond busied themselves with newspapers or buried their faces deeper into makeshift pillows. At the door we were greeted by a puff of warm, humid air that smelled of swamp. We headed toward the sentry booth, where a Marine in blue trousers, khaki shirt, and white garrison cap stood, hands on hips, awaiting our arrival. We sauntered across the road, joking in subdued voices.
"GET OVER HERE--NOW!" he roared.
His voice shook me. The muscles of my legs and buttocks reacted almost involuntarily, as if jolted by a cattle prod. I ran to the gate.
"GET IN LINE! STAND AT ATTENTION!"
We ran to the curb the sentry pointed to, and I fell in at the end of the line. Assuming my best high-school-marching-band position of attention, I remembered not to lock my knees. The sentry didn't seem to know what to do with us; this apparently was not the usual way for recruits to arrive. They normally came in a full bus and were driven to the receiving barracks on base. He made a phone call, constantly looking toward us as if we were going to run away. He concluded the conversation. "Okay, they'll be waiting for you."
The sentry turned to us, his voice only a few decibels lower than when he previously addressed us. "Stand there. A van will be out to pick you up."
So we stood there in the humid South Carolina night. Meanwhile, cars full of Marines returning from liberty entered the gate. We were pelted with laughs, jeers, you'll be sorrys. We must have looked ridiculous, standing there at awkward attention in our civilian clothes and long hair. I was disoriented and a bit afraid. I realized later that this was nothing more than the age-old tradition of hazing new members of an elite organization. It was an affirmation of pride; we were the outsiders who had not yet proven our worthiness to belong to their Marine Corps. Soon a van approached the sentry booth, and an avuncular black man in civilian clothing got out and spoke with the sentry. We were told to climb into the van, and I immediately felt a sense of impending judgment. What had I gotten myself into? The driver only added to my confusion. After the gruffness of the sentry, he was friendly and talkative. As we drove down a long causeway lined with palmetto and neatly trimmed shrubbery, he told us that if we had any weapons, particularly knives, we should throw them out the window now before we got to the receiving barracks. On the island, we drove past maintenance buildings and then barracks. Huge steam pipes lined the road, snaking and curving over and around obstacles. On the left was a paved drill field, empty this time of night. The only illumination came from streetlights and stairwell lights in the barracks. We made a right turn, then a left, and stopped outside a twostory white clapboard building. I recognized the sign over the doorway: "Through this portal pass prospects for the world's finest fighting force." It struck me as being in the same vein as Dante's counsel: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
A man in a Smokey Bear hat waited, hands on hips, as the van pulled up. Before one of the other new arrivals could open the van's door, this man--a drill instructor, otherwise known as a DI--
barked out a Neanderthal sound. I don't know what he yelled. The mere fact that we were the objects of his wrath jerked us into motion. We tumbled out of the van.
"GET ON THE YELLOW HOOF PRINTS! YOU BETTER HURRY UP."
I saw a formation of yellow footprints painted on the pavement, but due to my fright or naiveté I looked for yellow horseshoe prints. I finally figured out what he wanted and jumped on the first pair of footprints I saw. I was first in line, so I could see into the door of the barracks. Many other men in civilian clothes, recruits who had arrived earlier that evening, for some reason stood at rigid attention next to tables with silver tops. The DI came up behind me, bending close to my ear.
"Do you see that private in there?" he asked in a menacing voice. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I didn't see any private. I couldn't see anyone in uniform. I hadn't yet caught on that we were all privates, and the one in question was the man standing closest to the open door. Still, I nodded.
"I want you to go in there and stand at attention next to him," the DI said. I nodded again, and he grunted out a loud, "MOVE!" I jumped a few inches in the air, as if in a Tex Avery cartoon, and ran up the few steps and into the brightly lit room. Taking a chance, I stopped next to the first man, the private in question. The long room was full of other men standing at attention.
Some already had their heads shaved, although they still wore civilian clothes. A large desk such as you might find in a police station dominated the middle of the room, and several uniformed Marines lounged around it. On the walls of the room were red wooden signs with yellow lettering:
"The first and last word out of your mouth will always be 'Sir!'" "If you want to use the rest room, you will ask the drill instructor: 'Sir, Private ____ requests permission to use the head, sir!'"
"You will respond to all orders by sounding off 'Aye aye, sir!'"
The Marines' recruiting slogan offers no compromise: "We Don't Promise You a Rose Garden."

What Are You After?
For me, this was the culmination of a dream. Okay, it was the beginning of the culmination. One of my earliest memories is as a first-grader sitting at my desk at Hoover Elementary School in Crawfordsville, Indiana, daydreaming about being the youngest member of the Marine Corps, riding to school in the back of a Jeep while wearing the Corps' Dress Blue uniform, chauffeured by two adult Marines wearing their own snappy Dress Blues. Shortly after that my family moved to Florida, and I played Marine in the surf at the beach, fantasizing amphibious assaults on the sands of the Sunshine State. As a teenager, I devoured books on military history and strategy.
Still, enlisting in the military was not the popular thing to do at the time. America's involvement in the Vietnam War had officially ended two years earlier, but the situation that spring of 1975 was far from peaceful, and there was fear the United States could be dragged back into the war. Ironically, on the day I signed the dotted line--March 10, 1975--North Vietnam launched a final offensive that would culminate in the fall of South Vietnam in less than two months. My high school friends just couldn't understand my decision. Why the Marines?
On the surface, a life of rigorous discipline and obedience doesn't look all that appealing. Some of the strongest natural tendencies inside us rebel at the thought. And at the time I couldn't put into words why I wanted to join the military. As I look back, though, I realize I wanted to be part of something larger than myself, I wanted adventure, and I wanted to be challenged.
My friend Chuck Holton, a former Army Ranger, was much more articulate about his yearnings as a fifteen-year-old. He wrote in his journal:

There's so much that I haven't done that I want to do. So many things I haven't seen, been to experienced. I'm anxious and excited! What's God got for me? It's like I'm standing on the edge of an ocean of possibilities. I can't see the other side, but I know it's great. I can't wait to cross, and I know that although there will always be the peaks and the troughs, every step is an adventure. Life is LIFE! Fill me to overflowing.

Holton had a big advantage over me because he knew God. I did not. But in my case, God was using the Marines as a first step in bringing me to himself. I recognize now that, deep down, my desire to become a Marine was a desire for significance. I needed to do something that mattered. Everyone has a yearning for something bigger than himself. It has been described as the God-shaped hole that we all seek to fill in some way. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote of God, "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."2 Sometimes, though, filling the restless void can be a lot harder than we imagine. Sometimes God takes us through a wilderness experience to teach us something important. One big reason why is that sometimes the lesson won't stick any other way.

Learning Discipline in the Wilderness
Moses had to wander on the back side of the desert for forty years before he was prepared for God to use him to confront pharaoh and lead the Hebrews to freedom. Later in the history of Israel,
God chose a shepherd boy, David, to be king of Israel. But David first had to spend months in the wilderness, running from his enemy, Saul, before he was ready to assume the throne. Various Old Testament prophets also had to endure tough times as part of fulfilling God's purposes. Even Jesus spent forty days fasting in the Judean desert at the beginning of his ministry.
Basic training, in its own way, is like being trained in the wilderness. The process takes us outside ourselves and makes us think in ways we haven't had to before. It breaks us down so that the military can mold us into men and women who can fulfill a mission. It trains us to be sensitive to orders and to understand the importance of obedience. The biblical figures who were trained by God in the wilderness learned these same lessons. Knowing in the abstract that boot camp will be tough and coming face to face with a tough DI are two entirely different things. I was standing in a room full of frightened recruits being stalked by madmen wearing funny hats. It was late and the heat was sweltering, even at night. Never mind my lifelong dream to be a Marine--I wanted to be anywhere but there. The early days of boot camp, called First Phase, were the hardest. But slowly, gradually, I toughened both physically and mentally. The physical training became a little easier.

Continues...

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Excerpted from On the Frontline by Tom Neven Excerpted by permission.
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