Whether all that will boost enlistment is a matter for the brass to determine. Rather, they waited for someone to prop a ladder against the rear bumper. When some fake roadside bombs hit a training convoy, the recruits didn’t bail out of their trucks, hit the dirt rolling, and secure a perimeter. On the contrary, the privates were surveyed on whether they had been allowed to eat everything on the menu, including dessert, and whether there was enough for seconds.
In the mess hall, sergeants no longer policed the meal trays of tubby recruits. Instead, a colonel made a speech thanking them for signing up. At the fort, new soldiers were no longer welcomed by sergeants’ “shark attacks”-the roaring, spit-in-your-face initiation that had terrified previous generations of incoming GIs (“Some rattled recruits would make mistakes,” the Journal reported. The Army, it seemed, was seeking to lure more recruits by initiating a kinder and gentler boot camp regimen.
There was no mistaking the scorn among the marines who were spreading the news. The article had been e-mailed back and forth around the world, from North Carolina to Iraq to Japan, until a dozen little forwarding arrows nudged every line into the right margin. Early last year, my cousin, a Marine captain based in Okinawa, sent me a Wall Street Journal story about changes in Army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
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