This book has been chosen because some of you are thinking of becoming officers. Fick's story begins at OCS. Second, he has to deal with killing and anxieties about it, another subject that came up on the forums. I'll be posting excerpts from One Bullet Away. After I'm done with this, if anyone wants the book, I'll gladly donate it (with its pink highlights) to the first person who PM's me. (Sorry, the book has found a new home!)

From Amazon.com
The global war on terrorism has spawned some excellent combat narratives—mostly by journalists. Warriors, like Marine Corps officer Fick, bring a different and essential perspective to the story. A classics major at Dartmouth, Fick joined the Marines in 1998 because he "wanted to go on a great adventure... to do something so hard that no one could ever talk **** to me." Thus begins his odyssey through the grueling regimen of Marine training and wartime deployments—an odyssey that he recounts in vivid detail in this candid and fast-paced memoir. Fick was first deployed to Afghanistan, where he saw little combat, but his Operation [Iraqi] Freedom unit, the elite 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, helped spearhead the invasion of Iraq and "battled through every town on Highway 7" from Nasiriyah to al Kut. Like the best combat memoirs, Fick's focuses on the men doing the fighting and avoids hyperbole and sensationalism. He does not shrink from the truth—however personal or unpleasant. "I was aware enough," he admits after a firefight, "to be concerned that I was starting to enjoy it."

Lucie

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Lucie Piché-Cantin,

Here are some excerpts of the book. Can you find the similarities with what you are doing or what you are about to do?

On is desire of joining the Marines
“I wanted something more transformative. Something that might kill me – or leave me better, stronger, more capable. I wanted to become a warrior.”

From his father upon learning the news of his son joining the Marines
“The Marines will teach you everything I love you too much to teach you.”

About the OCS Introductory speech to candidates
“ We seek to identify in each candidate those qualities of intellect, human understanding, and moral character that enable a person to inspire and to control a group of people successfully: leaders (…) A candidate’s presence under pressure is a key indicator of leadership potential.”

About the daily grind
“I was learning that in the Marines, the only easy day was yesterday. Success the day before meant nothing, and tomorrow might never happen. I woke up each morning at Quantico wondering whether I’d still be there that night.”

Five of the Marines Corps’s leadership principles
-You must be technically and tactically proficient.
-Make sound and timely decision.
-Set the example.
-Know your men and look out for their welfare.
-Train your men as a team.

About having what it takes to go on...
“The one thing keeping me going was being part of a group, knowing each mistake made my comrades a little weaker. Group punishment, shunned in most of American society, was a staple at OCS. Platoons fight as groups. They live or die as groups. So we were disciplined as a group. The epiphany struck one morining (…) as I locked my body in the leaning rest _ the “up” pushup position. Sergeant Olds put the whole platoon in that posture while he berated a candidate at the far end of the squad bay for having scuffs on his boots. The message wasn’t in Olds’s words; it was recognizing that this wasn’t about how much we could take, but about how much we could give.”

About the Buddy system
“Marines do everything in pairs. We fight in pairs. We patrol in pairs. (...) A Marine alone is easy to kill. A Marine with a buddy is hard as hell to kill. Don’t let me catch you alone again!”

More to come tomorrow...

On Warfare Dynamism
"When confronting an opposing will, we fight people who are also fighting us. They will learn as we learn. Their tactics will evolve as ours do. The key consideration in any tactical move is to turn the map around. Look at your own situation from the enemy's perspective, What are your vulnerabilities? Where will he hit you, and what can you do to defeat him?"

On Killology or the study oh healthy people's reaction to killing
He identified 5 things an infantry leader can do to help maintain the psychiatric effectiveness of his men in combat:
1, minimize fatigue by sleeping whenever possible;
2. build confidence as a team;
3. encourage communication;
4. use spare time to practice emergency medical training;
5. do after-action critiques to address the shock of combat and killing.

About RECON, the toughest unit in the MC
On 175,000 active-duty Marines, fewer than 3,000 serve in reconnaissance unit. Recon lacks the cachet of the Navy SEALs and the Army Special Forces because a bureaucratic decision in the late 1980s kept recon out of the U.S. Special Operations Command. The Corps's leadership vowed that there would be no "special" Marines and chose autonomy over the command's money and missions.

More to come tomorrow...

On the Combat Water Safety Swimmer Course
Our instructors told us during the predawn brief that the course was designed to nurture comfort in the water through exposure to extreme discomfort. "We'll find your soft spot and make it hard." They promised to push our limits so far that exceeding them would probably kill us. "You will be, for all intents and purposes, downproofed."

"Hardness," I was learning, was the supreme virtue among recon Marines. The greatest compliment one could pay to another was to say he was hard. Hardness wasn't toughness, not was it courage, although both were part of it. Hardness was the ability to face an overwhelming situation with aplomb, smile calmly at it, and then triumph through sheer professional pride."

On the SERE training
"In six days, I ate one carrot, a few handfuls of wild barley, and a little bit of rabbit. Much of SERE's fearsome reputation was based on this starvation, and it slowly degraded our decision making, putting us in a more vulnerable state of mind. (...)"

"The rule of captivity is to bend, not break. Be the willow, not the oak. Getting killed means you failed the test."

These quotes were just to give you a taste of the book. The author goes on with some of his missions in Irak. I found the book extremely interesting, and easy to read even for someone like me that has almost no military knowledge.

I just read this book and greatly enjoyed it. Aside from the fact that it's great material, Fick is a great writer. I definitely recommend this book.