By Jeff Tietz
Rolling Stone
April 20, 2006


To manufacture tens of thousands of battle-ready soldiers, Army drill instructors have to short-circuit the most fundamental human instinct: Thou shalt not kill. They use a system called Total Control, a carefully crafted hell that hard-wires kids for combat.

“We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school.”

–Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War,
Cited in the U.S. Army’s Initial Entry Training
Soldier’s Handbook

Humans have always been averse to killing one another. The human instinct against intraspecies killing is millions of years old. It is nearly immutable. Our ancestors killed each other only in extreme or ritualized circumstances; if they had murdered capriciously, we would not have survived as a species. Of every hundred thousand people threading their way through a year on Earth today, only ten resort to murder.

The world’s least murderous country, Qatar, produces one murderer for every million people. In the absence of psychosis or a severe threat—personal, tangible and inescapable—humans renounce killing almost entirely. Raising an army, therefore, has always been hard. You can’t get people to slaughter each other for ideals or promised gold or the value of territories they did not establish and cannot visualize.

The Roman military tactician Vegetius attributed his army’s conquest of the known world to the fact that its soldiers had been meticulously conditioned to stab people. At the time, soldiers in every other army—Gaul, Greek, Visigoth, Berber—delivered a lot of slashing blows but shrank from stabbing, because stabbing killed. Napoleon’s soldiers shot so reluctantly he refused to go to war without a large artillery advantage—his men could fire cannons without contemplating individual enemy soldiers. During the American Civil War, attacking forces often advanced to within a hundred yards of the enemy line and stayed there for hours or even days—both sides were shooting to miss. The battles were bloody only because they lasted so long.
During World War II, an Army historian named S.L.A. Marshall decided to study combat behavior. He followed soldiers into battle and interviewed them after engagements. In 1947, he published his findings in a book called Men Against Fire.

 Seventy-five percent of American soldiers, he claimed, had failed to shoot back when fired upon. Marshall’s methodology remains controversial, but his central claim doesn’t: If soldiers are not specifically trained to kill other human beings, they usually won’t.

Before World War II, basic training sought to produce disciplined men, not killers. The closest you got to battle was shooting at bull’s-eye targets and bayoneting hay bales. Less than a year after Men Against Fire appeared, the Army began distributing a “Revised Program of Instruction” to its officers and drill sergeants. Marshall considered it essential to “free the rifleman’s mind with respect to the nature of targets”—to keep soldiers from thinking human before shooting. On his recommendation, the Army began trailing recruits in “massing fire”—shooting at the types of inanimate cover they would see in combat: tree lines, embankments, ridges. It also began downplaying its standard exhortation “Kill the enemy!” and emphasized instead a rifleman’s responsibility to deliver his comrades from danger. “Protect your buddy!” and “Protect the integrity of your unit!” became common maxims.

The value of applied psychology soon became apparent: The firing rate during the Korean War rose to nearly sixty percent. In Vietnam it was ninety percent, and in the first Gulf War it reached ninety-eight percent. In Iraq, the number of soldiers who fail to fire is thought to be statistically insignificant. American forces never lost a major engagement in Vietnam, and they have not lost one since.

The Army now spends nearly $2 billion annually on basic training. It employs thousands of people: to invent virtual-reality environments, to calculate the maximum volume of information a recruit can absorb in fourteen weeks, to determine the emotional state in which recruits will most freely shoot at the human form, to discover how much punishment their bodies can take, to build mock urban battlefields that replicate mosque spires and the sound of a muezzin’s call to prayer. The Army’s infantry schools graduate nearly 20,000 soldiers a year. No institution in history has come close to training so many people to kill so effectively in such a short time. Almost every element of today’s basic training, from the bewildering intake process to the witchy initiation ceremony, contributes to lethality.

Most American infantry soldiers are trained at Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia. When you arrive at the intake center, barbers shear you bald. Your clothes are taken and you are dressed in gray. If you wear eyeglasses, technicians remove and discard them and re-grind the lenses to standard contours and hand you outsized, crap-brown glasses—the only glasses worn by infantrymen in the U.S. Army. Nameless doctors and nurses examine your teeth and feet and draw your blood and administer a half-dozen immunization shots in a clinic whose padded floor mats will keep you from injuring your head should you pass out. You are assigned a company and platoon and barracks room and bunk bed. The morning after you first lie down, raw-scalped, in your new bed—your head producing on the pillow an unfamiliar sensation, unconsciously perceived—an air horn wakes you at 5 A.M., and you have five seconds to be on the floor doing push-ups.

For 900 of the next 960 minutes, until lights out, at 2100 hours, your actions will be involuntary. You will not be allowed to choose your food. When you are in line in the base cafeteria and the server asks you what you want, you will say, “Ma’am, I am not allowed to say what I want, ma’am.” (During the meal, you will not be allowed to speak.) Your sergeants will “mandate fluids.” They will tell you when you can relieve yourself of those fluids and of the solids the cafeteria workers tell you to eat.
This first phase of training is called Total Control. It lasts for three weeks and is richly excruciating throughout. Each of those controlled daily minutes constitutes a high-quality opportunity to bring suffering upon yourself and your platoonmates. In the morning, after push-ups and other calisthenics, you have various tasks to execute before inspection. These are complicated by the fact that you are not allowed to touch ninety percent of the platoon bay’s floor, unless you are buffing it in your stocking feet. The inviolate space is ‘the kill zone’ or “God’s alley.” You move along a perimeter rectangle painted on the floor just beyond your bunk, whose corners you must not cut; perimeter traffic is one-way.

The small items on your locker shelf have to be correctly ordered and flush with the shelf’s front edge. An inch-deep setback is cause for punishment. The clothes in your locker must hang as worn: buttoned, zippered, creased. Your laundry bag must hang, centered, from the bed frame, the drawstring tied in a half-hitch knot. The angle prescribed for your hospital-bed corners, forty-five degrees, will be checked. You must fold the tops of your sheet and blanket together, to a width of six inches, the fold eighteen inches from the headboard. Your pillowcase opening must form a smile, not a frown.

Recruits struggle to remind themselves who they are. “You find these little ways to cope,” a private named Matthew Stillwell tells me recently when I visit Fort Benning. He is standing with two other recruits, Brad Thompson and Leonard Dennis, at the edge of an obstacle course. Stillwell spends a lot of time looking at photographs of his friends and family. Thompson prays frequently and goes to services every Sunday, and a lot of agnostic recruits, some of whom have never been to church before, go, too. Dennis runs. “We love to sprint, sir,” he says. “They tell you to sprint, and you can just do it.” Sprinting is a tiny haven of autonomy: The way you move your limbs at a full sprint is uncontrollably unique.

Your sergeants have learned, through experience and in behavioral-psychology class at drill instructor school, that the more they standardize your behavior, the more quickly your identity will belong to the Army. “The minute you find a private doing his own thing,” says a drill sergeant named Randy Shorter, “be it tying a knot his own way, having his boots a certain way, shaving the way he shaved back home—-it’s basically an indication that he’s an individual.”

When you have barely begun to accustom yourself to surgical orderliness, dangerous disorder is introduced. Dummy IEDs begin to show up around the barracks. Fail to find an IED under your bed and your sergeants will tell you exactly who you have just killed and maimed, and how, and everyone in the platoon will suffer. Along march routes, roadside objects—a propane tank, a trash can, a storage shed—begin changing subtly. Failing to see the changes means suffering. Situational awareness, your sergeants tell you, is the best way to survive in combat. “Stay alert, stay alive!” you chant as you march.

A week or two in, you may become irrationally skittish. Random objects of unknown provenance may trouble you, first subconsciously and then overtly. Walking to church or the PX, you may instinctually shy away from spilled trash. “I would never just kick a soda can now, sir,” Stillwell says. “I’m always looking everywhere. Like tree lines and hills and valleys. Or ditches. Anywhere I could get into. That’s just the way my brain is working, sir.”

By the end of Total Control, recruits will be chronic noticers. They will be able to eyeball every measurement and angle involved in barracks housekeeping. When recruits encounter combat scenarios, they will find themselves especially receptive to parsing battlefield situations and storing relevant details. Before they ever aim their guns, they will already be biased against hesitation, because they will have come to perceive their world as dangerous.

In basic training, thoughtless reactions are required many times per hour. From the section of the Initial Entry Training Soldier’s Handbook on forms of address: “Salute only on command when in formation.” “If you are on detail, and an officer approaches, salute if you are in charge of the detail. Otherwise, continue to work. If you are spoken to, come to the position of attention.” “Never render a salute with a noticeable object in your mouth or right hand.” While you are in your barracks, your sergeants might step into and out of their office thirty times in ten minutes, in different combinations, to check your reactions.

You march everywhere you go, as many as twenty times a day, your movements tightly guided by voice. You must stare straight ahead, every finger curled firmly around your weapon, your arms swinging nine inches to the front and six to the rear, your stride thirty inches long.

Every night, before lights out, you may recite the Soldier’s Creed (I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade.... I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat), the Soldier’s Code (I am a protector of the greatest nation on Earth), the Code of Conduct (I am ... fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense), the company motto (Rock of Chicka-mauga!) and the seven Army Values (loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage). You may then sing the “Infantry Song” (You can hear it across the sea/It calls to every freedom-loving man/The cry of the U.S. Infantry/Follow me! Follow me! Follow me!) and the “Army Song” (Men in rags/Men who froze/Still that Army met its foes/And the Army went rolling along). By the end of basic training, you may have pronounced each of these sayings and songs more than 500 times.

Several weeks into basic, you begin to salute and recite and sing and march with no friction of consciousness between command and response—you unconsciously tighten a barely slack strap on your rucksack, you recoil at the sight of a misplaced locker-shelf deodorant stick. One recruit, Pvt. James Neikam, tells me that after eight weeks, his every response to commands and duties—straightening the barracks, marching information, saluting, handling his M-16—has become automatic. He hadn’t noticed it happening, but he imagines it will be with him for life. It is, he says, grinning, his “curse to bear.”

The Army wants recruits to believe in their own reconstruction as quickly as possible. Unconverted recruits are resistant recruits; resistance is inefficiency. Drill sergeants immediately inflict a lot of unrepentant pain on recruits, based on seemingly bizarre contrivances and conditions. In the beginning it may seem absurd that an entire fifty-person platoon should quiver through the pain of a hundred squat thrusts because one recruit has forgotten to put his shaving brush to the right of his razor on his locker shelf, or missed an inch and a half of jawline stubble, and more absurd that this kind of pain should be visited on a platoon ten or more times a day for violations of similarly arbitrary, dwarfish infractions. But drill sergeants make a point of informing privates that their suffering is not gratuitous. On your very first day in the barracks, your sergeants tell you that their role is to keep you from becoming a casualty. Whatever you might think, nothing you will be forced to do is without specific value.
Within three days of intake you are given much of the equipment you will take to war: your helmet, your ceramic-plated Kevlar vest, your M-16. Except during certain physical fitness exercises, you wear the gear from then on. Your M-16 never leaves your side. You eat with it, you sleep with it. You are assigned a clip of blanks, you chamber them, and from that moment on your gun is officially considered a fully loaded assault rifle. You clear the chamber every time you enter a room and reload every time you leave; you check your safety every time you sit down or stand up; you disassemble and clean your gun every day.

Weapons infractions provoke a gravity of response you had not imagined. Serious, repeated violations—discharging a blank in your platoon bay, entering it with your safety off—will probably result in criminal negligence charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Your gun will be taken from you; your platoon’s first sergeant will read you your rights. The company commander will convene a hearing, at which he will punish you or dismiss the charges based on the testimony of your sergeants and any witnesses among your platoonmates you choose to call.

In Neikam’s company, one recruit left a live-fire range with his safety off. He already had a weapons infraction on his record. He was ordered to go to a remote area in the pine woods nearby and dig a grave for the buddy he was forced to imagine he had killed. It was a typical grave—six feet long, three feet wide, six feet deep—and he was told to leave it open. He was then marched back to the barracks and ordered to write a letter to his buddy’s mother, in which he explained the incident, emphasizing his own negligence. He put the letter in an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, sealed it, handed it to his drill sergeant and went back into the woods to fill in the grave.
Love between recruits is one of the chief aims of basic training, because the desire to protect family is among the most potent counterforces to the human aversion to killing. Within hours after walking into Fort Benning’s intake center, you are doing and saying the same things as everybody else. By the end of Day One, everyone looks the same; soon everyone smells the same. You get the same type of razor burn because you all have to shave too quickly. Basic tries to mimic combat by ceaselessly generating inordinate fear and pain and exhaustion, and this environment homogenizes emotion. On your first morning, you may look around and realize that your platoon, collectively, mirrors you faithfully; by the third day, when your dominant emotions are felt simultaneously by everyone else, the likeness has come to include facial expressions and heart rate and held-back tears.

While this wide empathy develops, you are forced into individual intimacy. You are assigned a buddy—your bunkmate—and for the remainder of basic you never go anywhere or do anything without him. You eat together and march together; you may not approach an officer without him. He is the only person authorized to take care of your M-16 when you have to leave it. You are required to learn everything you can about him: his hometown, the name of his dog, his mother’s occupation. You will be asked basic biographical questions, if you have failed to learn that your buddy played football in high school, the platoon will suffer for it. You stand beside your buddy at the beginning of every exercise. If he is singled out for punishment, you take it with him. You never suffer except beside him: He will soon know the subtleties of your pain, and he can often ease it.

During a fireman’s-carry exercise at the end of his first week, Stillwell’s battle buddy lifted Stillwell onto his shoulder and began to walk. He soon staggered to a near-standstill; Stillwell outweighed him by a hundred pounds. If he had failed, he would have had to start all over again. Startling himself, Stillwell yelled, “Would you let me die here bleeding on the battlefield?! You wouldn’t do this for me if I was dying?!” He felt his buddy straighten, and kept yelling things like that until they crossed the line.
The morning inspection requirements are, intentionally, so numerous and exacting as to be impossible for individual soldiers to comply with in the allotted time. As soldiers realize this, agonizingly, their sergeants urge them to think collectively, to think about efficiency by specialization. Platoons usually turn themselves into small units of specialists: Two groups will specialize in bedmaking, several in laundry-bag and rucksack orientation, several in knots (shoelaces, drawstrings). Sergeants are always surprised by the novelty of their platoon’s inventions: One platoon appointed someone to watch the clock nonstop and regularly cry out the time.

The Army has spent a lot of time thinking about how to turn individual recruits into irreducibly cohesive teams. The Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences employs 117 psychologists—more than almost any other single institution in the world. The institute has research facilities at Fort Benning and seven other bases; it steadily issues papers with titles like “Situational Awareness for the Individual Soldier” and “An Overview of Automaticity and Implications for Training the Thinking Process.” Its research is used to design exercises that generate stress and precipitate common fears—of heights, water, enclosed spaces. Recruits work in groups. When one recruit seizes up, his teammates are forced to adapt their encouragement to his temperament, and they turn to his battle buddy for advice. When groups are composed of battle buddy couples, there are no loners, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies can be dealt with openly, and the group tends toward consensus.

By the end of basic, after scores of these kinds of exercises, most of which are frightening and painful, your battle buddy will feel like an actual brother—not chosen or adored or even necessarily liked, but mingled with yourself somehow, owed some debt of allegiance. Recruits self-consciously admit this. (“It honestly actually does feel like that,” a private named Antonio Garcia tells me, shifting his gaze for a second.) In that relationship you will most meaningfully feel your relationship to your platoon and company.

You belong, in the culture of the Army, to your company. Your company identifies you: It has a motto, a creed, a seal, a history. You enter and train and graduate with it. You recite its motto every time you salute a superior; you run with its flag; your cadences praise it to the violent disparagement of other companies. Your sergeants teach you what your company did in prior wars, from the Revolutionary War to Operation Desert Storm. You learn the names of its heroes. Your sergeants let you know that your company has claimed you, even if you have not yet claimed it. It is your new ancestry.

Before you ever shoot at a target, your sergeants have made you very familiar with the many ways you can die in combat. They have conjured scenario after scenario: You and many of your fellow recruits have already been hypothetically killed by IEDs or accidental discharges or tripwires or mortar rounds. You have crawled under live machine-gun fire at night. You have heard many firsthand stories of human failures that caused deaths in battle. You have learned that in war you will kill people by your action and your inaction both—you choose who dies. When you become a soldier, you do not acquire a moral license to kill; you accept a moral obligation to kill.
You have also played hyper-realistic video games in which you have solved dozens of combat-zone dilemmas: “Trouble by the Marketplace,” “An Unusually Quiet Day,” “Terrorist Café,” “The Children Need to Play,” “Infested Hiding Place.” If you happen to train at Fort Polk, in Louisiana, you play these games in a large, dim room, at stations built to resemble foxholes: several feet below floor level, draped in camo netting, surrounded by sandbags. “The idea,” explains one Army computer programmer, “is to get them in the mood.” Infantry soldiers learn that the U.S. Army is not interested in incapacitating shots. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot to kill!” is one of your road-march cadences.

By the time marksmanship training begins, your M-16 has become another limb. You have taken it apart and cleaned it and reassembled it and loaded it and cleared it hundreds of times. You have faith in its life-preserving power. “I think that’s mostly why we sleep with our rubber duckies, sleep right beside them,” Pvt. Adam Cave says. “That’s your life right there. Like right now, when I don’t have it, I feel naked.” Privates experience an acute discomfort during even brief absences of their M-16s. Several sergeants tell me that on overnight field exercises privates need to be touching their guns to fall asleep. They often sleep on their backs or sides with their rifles clasped to their chests.

Before you get to the range, you will also have spent a lot of time studying the ninety-six-page weapons section of your Initial Entry Training Soldier’s Handbook. Advances in weapons technology always make killing easier on the psyche, and as an infantryman you will have access to eleven different weapons systems. The weapons are very clever and destructive almost beyond comprehension. The warhead of the AT-4, a shoulder-fired anti-tank rocket, can pierce a wall of steel more than a foot thick. The AT-4 can do this from a mile away. With the lightweight grenade launcher you put on your M-16, you can shoot seven grenades, each explosive enough to destroy a car from two blocks away, in a single minute. The very portable .50-caliber machine gun does not act like a machine gun at all. Its maximum range is 22,220 feet—more than four miles. You can use it on light-armored vehicles and airplanes. A single, inexperienced modern infantry soldier, with full combat support, has as much death at his fingertips as a 300-man company did in World War II.

The IET shares the true-magic abilities of these weapons while halting your gaze at the end of their maximum range—they never seem to be addressing themselves to human beings. The weapons chapter is just like the user’s manual for a home entertainment system. There are many more illustrations of disassembled weapons, their parts numbered, than of whole weapons. Many are complex enough to merit their own units of instruction. The Army Research Institute has determined how much information recruits can absorb in a given amount of time, so your mind will generally be filled to capacity with technical information. Death will be the final, undistinguished stage of a long operational sequence.

Every time I ask recruits if they have imagined how their weapons might destroy people, they say no, flatly; then they look uncomfortable for a moment. They all have the same reaction to the question as a private named Seth DiGiacomo, who pauses blankly and then says, “Yeah. Yeah, I guess not. Not really.” You do not read IET Chapter 6 and imagine that a .50-caliber, systematically raking a four-story cinder-block apartment building from across the street—a building, say, believed to contain insurgents with artillery but in fact containing a mix of civilians and insurgents with light arms—will not only pulp every human body in the building, from front to rear walls, but will also compromise the building’s structural integrity. You do not imagine that a series of stray .50-caliber bullets, hitting a boy and his mother, will cause them to disappear.

The evening before you fire your weapon, you get your first marksmanship briefing, and you move slightly beyond the sanitary pages of the IET. You learn that the primary kill shot is a torso shot. An M-16 round is extremely fast and accurate but also relatively light. It is designed not to go through a person: It reacts to soft tissue by churning in ricochets inside the body. An accurate torso shot will destroy all the organs in the chest cavity. An accurate head shot is also obviously a kill shot. Below the torso, the only true kill shot is to the femoral artery.

This is an anatomy class: The organs under discussion are platonic, belonging to no one, and the information comes euphemistically. Once you learn about damaging the chest cavity, it is thereafter referred to as “center of mass.” In basic training, these kinds of linguistic distinctions are taken seriously. On the shooting range, recruits never have to label their targets humans or people or guys or soldiers, or even them. They shoot at positions or marks or hostile fire or enemy combatants. They are not killing, not necessarily even shooting: They are attriting, suppressing, returning, engaging. “You’re not thinking about consequences,” one recruit says. “If you perceive a threat, you have the right to engage the target.” That was the verbatim phrase used by his instructor.

You begin shooting in full battle gear—helmet, rucksack, body armor—from entrenched positions at firing ranges in the woods. In the prone position your gun rests on sandbags. Your sergeants say things like, “Right now you’re in the middle of Baghdad, Private! This is what you’re gonna encounter—insurgents engaging you! Put yourself in that mind frame!” Most recruits are very nervous the first time they shoot: They sweat, their hands tremble, they can’t concentrate. “My first shooting exercise was very real,” Neikam says. “Your adrenaline is running and you are imagining a real person.” The first time Cave shot, he felt like he had to shoot to kill, to protect himself, to protect his buddies.

Marksmanship training itself is a tight interweave of perceived realness and comforting vagueness. Silhouette targets are stylized and featureless—you don’t start out looking into anybody’s eyes. At first the silhouettes are just sta tionary outlines on paper, but soon they are popping up from the ground as metal cutouts, and then moving laterally, and then forward and backward. Sometimes they stay down when hit, as if you have killed your mark; sometimes they go down and pop back up immediately, as if your enemy has dodged your bullet; sometimes they go down for a while and come up again, as if your enemy has paused to reload, or been killed and replaced. Multiple targets will move toward you and away from you in tandem, like squads advancing and retreating. Moving and stationary silhouettes can pop up simultaneously: Your reflexes must know that positioned enemies have a fix on you and running enemies do not. By your tenth week of basic training, you will have shot at the human form with lethal intent more than 2,000 times. Every real and simulated bullet coming out of your gun is reflexive fire—the Army will no longer allow conscious thought to interpose between stimulus and response.

Every drill sergeant I talk to at Benning tells me that after the recruits have shot a few times and gotten past their initial nervousness, the exercises become like video games to them. They remain focused—in the moment and take failure hard—they never stop weighing the consequences of incompetence—but something changes as they get more skilled and the scenarios begin to look more and more like war. Thev have more fun. Their spacing on the range shrinks; by the end of marksmanship training they are lying side by side, firing live bullets at lifelike targets darting tactically in three dimensions, ejected copper jackets hitting them in the face, cordite smoke in their noses. “It starts to feel real realistic then,” Garcia says. “I like it.” Garcia says this without any trace of cruelty whatsoever. He looks a little abashed. He tells me he doesn’t think he was really imagining shooting other human beings. But of course he was.

Once the shooting begins, and for the remainder of basic, recruits are conditioned simply, like Pavlov’s dogs. They act; they succeed or fail; they get immediate, strong positive or negative feedback. The Army produces superlative killers because it has mastered the art of mimicking combat. The Center for Army Lessons Learned, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, scrutinizes every infantry engagement, down to three-second firefights, and continually asks veterans which parts of their training worked under fire. If infantrymen say their urban-ops scenarios had none of the complexity they saw in the field, the center’s engineers will introduce disguised enemy combatants into training exercises, set tripwires, build four-story stairwells, put trapdoors in roofs.

The largest of Fort Benning’s mock cities, or MOUT (“military operations in urban terrain”) sites, is called McKenna. It has four streets, each several blocks long, fronted by a big spired church, some modest peaked-roof residences and four-story apartment buildings with businesses on the bottom floors. The stores have convincing mom-and-pop signs - KEN’S HEATING AND COOLING ELECTRIC, ATTORNEY AT LAW—and at the central intersection are a real post-office box, a real stop sign, a real fire hydrant, a real phone booth. McKenna is believably war-scarred, with small blast craters and bullet-addled walls. Down the street, a real municipal bus lists in a streetside drainage ditch: shot-up, inoperable. Office spaces with shattered windows seem to have been hastily abandoned and stormed—there are overturned filing cabinets, smashed Coke machines and potless coffee makers. Pine woods surround McKenna, so when it is idle it sits in forest silence, haunted by all the simulated violent deaths that have occurred there.

In combat exercises you shoot blanks. Every time you shoot a blank, small lasers attached to your muzzle shoot beams to the effective range of your M-16. Laser sensors on your gear tell you when you die. The explosive force of a blank round is the same as a live round. The muzzle flash is the same; the cordite smoke is the same. Debris is ejected a short distance beyond the barrel; in combination with the barrel flame, it can hurt people seriously at very close range. Firing blanks not only feels exactly like firing live rounds, it is dangerous in itself.

At McKenna you inflict civilian casualties while storming buildings to rescue POWs. Your fellow recruits play the injured and the dead. The bodies leave brushlike streaks of blood as you drag them to shelters, and you take more casualties doing this because you are too panicked to remember to establish a screen of suppressive fire before moving the wounded. You tend to rows of casualties laid out in broken buildings, which means improvising triage centers for comrades and civilians as the firefight evolves. You tell a wounded buddy to hold on as you drag him out of the street and administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Searching a house while on patrol, you discover an armed Arab man in a bare cinder-block room and shoot him pointblank. While he falls to his knees, bleeding in his white robe, crawling briefly before toppling to the floor, you remove and secure his weapon. By the end of the exercise, you have held dying people in your arms and cleared rooms of threats while stepping around dead bodies.

One day during my visit to Benning, a battalion commander named Lt. Col. Francis Burns drives me through a checkpoint at a mock forward operating base. The combat-zone camp looks real—it has a concertina-wire perimeter and signs in Arabic and a guard tower and insubstantial barracks. Colonels are outranked only by generals, and Burns, like all colonels, has a bone-deep, garrulous self-confidence that seems to part the air in advance of his presence. At the gate, frightened soldiers with M-16s check our IDs. This is the platoon’s first checkpoint exercise, and the anxiety of the recruits electrifies the exercise.

Inside the base, as we approach an inspection point surrounded by blast walls of sandbags four rows deep, two more soldiers wave us toward a traffic-divider maze, an arrangement the Army devised to keep suicide bombers from accelerating. We stop behind a pickup that has already entered the maze.

“Why did you put this vehicle here, Private?” a sergeant yells.

“He was waved forward, Drill Sergeant,” the private says.

“Are you trying to double the explosive power of these vehicles, Private?” the sergeant asks. “No, Drill Sergeant.”

“Because that’s what you just did. You just killed everyone you see around you, Private. Always, always, always segregate vehicles!”

At the inspection area we are asked to step out of the vehicle and keep our hands in sight. Suddenly surrounded by armed soldiers, we are quickly moved behind a segment of blast wall, so that if we blow ourselves up the impact will not kill everyone. We empty our pockets; we are spread-eagled and frisked, two soldiers for each of us: one searching us, the other watching us. Sergeants yell the whole time: The soldiers keep letting us get too close together, or within arm’s reach of their weapons, or they take their eyes off us, or they inadvertently nudge us past the blast wall’s edge during their searches. Other soldiers are looking beneath the hood of our pickup and scanning its underside and opening every one of its compartments.

Pressing down hard on the whole exercise is the common understanding that if someone is willing to destroy himself to blow you up, he can always blow you up. You just want to keep the numbers down. When the private frisking us fails to discover that Burns has hidden the pickup’s remote-control door opener in the waistband of his pants, the colonel grabs the remote and presses ALARM. The sound bleats off the trees. The platoon’s first sergeant points at the soldiers in the vicinity of the truck, one by one. “Dead!” he says. “Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!”

After blowing up the checkpoint, Burns takes me to see an attack-counterattack exercise. In thin pine woods, the members of two ten-man squads crouch together. They are discussing how to take out an M-60 machine gun—the most powerful automatic weapon after the .50-caliber—that is emplaced on a high mound just beyond the range of their rifles. Everyone is in full battle gear. Their sergeants, who have both served in Iraq, lead them forward.

As soon as they move, the M-60 opens up with marvelous volume and a torchlike, nearly continuous muzzle flash. Soldiers drop, laserstruck. The men sprint and dive and sprint and dive, firing from on their stomachs—or forgetting to fire, or failing to fire because they aren’t sure where the rest of the squad is. Sometimes they dive heedlessly„ behind little bushes or leaf piles that offer no security. A few die for it. There are only two rifles on the mound, in addition to the machine gun, but the squads are having trouble establishing fire superiority. One squad eventually manages to lay down cover fire while the other kills the enemy gunners. In the mound bunker, a soldier searches the dead bodies. Privates learn how to play dead very well: These recruits have scattered their belongings and gone fully limp, reproducing a corpse’s unnatural splay of limbs. To search them, the soldier gets behind them, first kicking them in the balls to make sure they are dead, then lying on top of them to conduct the search: If the corpses are booby-trapped, the soldier’s body will absorb some of the blast.

The squads leave the mound and keep advancing, and there occurs one of those moments of unaccountable verisimilitude that basic training now produces regularly in its final weeks. The squads have not been told the exercise will include a counterattack. They are supposed to perfunctorily secure the area around the mound. Suddenly an M-60 opens up from the trees in front of them, killing several soldiers. Nearly a platoon’s worth of men materialize out of the trees, all firing and advancing steadily. In seconds gun smoke hangs everywhere; it divides the sunlight into rotating beams.

The squads disintegrate in retreat. Two mortar rounds land behind them, disorienting the soldiers with both sound and light. For a good minute after the counterattack begins—a geological interval in firefight time—the soldiers watch in confusion as their comrades drop around them, forget to throw their smoke grenades, dive behind transparent vegetation and accidentally shoot one another by swinging their muzzles incoherently. Everyone is screaming. It is hard to see how there is anything artificial, to those recruits, in the felt menace of that moment.

After thirteen weeks of training, followed by seven days of field exercises, the members of the 2nd Batallion, 58th Company, are finally coming out of the woods. They march onto a base road, dressed for battle, carrying sixty-pound rucksacks. They have been hiking now for fifteen miles. They are not far from delirium. It is dusk. Lining the road for a mile and a half on either side are a thousand new recruits wearing flashlights around their necks, clapping and yelling. As the soldiers of the 2/58 waver forward, the blue chem lights on their helmets seem to move independently.

They now know where they are; they can feel the march ending; they can let themselves think of their beds. But their sergeants, leading them, veer up a steep path to a pine glade on the plateau of Honor Hill. Two bonfires burn at the glade’s far end. The brigade commander and battalion’s commanders stand along the edge of the glade. Between them stand tall torches with crosspieces that bear the names of major American battles. Behind the torches hangs a large American flag. A wrought-iron arch reads WELCOME TO THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE INFANTRY. On either side of the arch, white pedestals support enormous silver bowls exhaling heavy white smoke. From somewhere in the woods, speakers play Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” at great volume: “Let the bodies hit the floor!/Skin against skin, blood and bone!/You’re all by yourself but you're not alone!”

The sergeants bring the men into formation and lead them through the arch in narrow columns, telling them to dip their mess cups in the grog the silver bowls contain. They assemble in a half-circle, facing the torches. The volume of the music is lowered. They pray, thanking the Lord for having allowed them to make it to this point in their lives. The music—Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” resumes. The members of the company, standing at attention, chant and sing every song and creed and motto they have memorized, yelling “Hooah!” after each one. The battle names on the pillars are read aloud; the soldiers yell “Hooah!” after each one. The speakers blare Metallica’s “Hero of the Day.”

“Two hundred and twenty-five years of history says you will fight fiercely and bravely!” the company commander yells. “Hooah!” the men yell back.
“We walk, we kill, we are the boots on the ground!” the first sergeant yells. “Hooah!”
“People all over the world sleep peacefully tonight because rough men like you stand here ready to fight!” the sergeant shouts. “Hooah!”

The company sergeants propose toasts; grog cups are raised: “To our fallen comrades!” (Hooah!) “To our loved ones around the world!” (Hooah!) “To the infantry!” (Hooah!) The company’s platoons cry out their names: “Reapers!” “Wolverines!” “Death Row!”

As the score from Band of Brothers plays, the company rock is brought out. A sergeant states that the rock represents the “Rock of Chickamauga”—the name given to a Civil War commander who slowed a counterattack by refusing to retreat, sacrificing himself and many of his men to save thousands of retreating soldiers. That Civil War captain commanded this company.

The themes of Rocky and Chariots of Fire play. The company members have painted the rock with the company seal and platoon names and other symbols of their own design. During training, they carried it to every exercise. There is a moment of silence as a private lays the company rock to rest in the ceremonial rock garden. They are now soldiers: They will wear insignia on their shoulders and blue infantry cords on their chests. The invisible speakers play Blue Oyster Cult’s "(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” The soldiers of the 2/58 reassemble and march back through the arch, down Honor Hill, along the road leading to barracks that are no longer fit for them.

Jeff Tietz, a regular contributor, wrote “Corporate Raya’s Land Stand” in RS 980.