The more signs of a victim an individual bears, the more likely he is to attract disaster.
—Girard 1986:26
“Pain is good. Extreme pain is extremely good.” —Anonymous MCRD, USMC, 1991
This chapter is about how an organization, the U.S. Marine Corps, by the use of “minor violence” in the form of controlled abuse perpetrated on the bodies and the psyches of civilian men and women, transforms these men and women into the kinds of Marines who ultimately form different conceptions of pain than they had as civilians.
Psychological and physical pain become transformed from something worthy of complaint and concern to something that is at best ignored, at worst worthy of contempt. Thus, it is the case that in becoming “broken,” a civilian has not made the crucial transformation to Marine precisely because he has failed to change his conception of pain. Moreover, in boot camp it is becoming “fully broken” rather than “half-broken” (i.e., broken just enough to be built back up) that spells failure in the Marine Corps.This paper further documents the extent to which this initial redefinition of the meaning of pain, both psychological and physical, carries over into the culture of the regular infantry regiments. For it is the case that Marine Corps boot camp is predicated on an “infantry assumption” more than any other Military Occupational Specialty the Marines offer. Recruits spend thirteen weeks in boot camp, with an additional four weeks in Infantry Training Regiment, and are thereafter defined as Basic Marine Riflemen (hence the crossed rifles on all Marine Corps chevrons from lance corporal on up). Thus, the question becomes: If Marine Corps boot camp, for a ritually laden thirteen-week period, inculcates a particular view of pain and suffering into neophyte Marines, how does that culture carry over into infantry regiments? It will be seen that pain and suffering will continue to be something to be ignored, and if not likewise ignored by the Marine, he, not the pain, will be held in contempt. It is that unfortunate state of affairs that will spell the difference between being broken and not being broken. It will be shown that there seems to be a distinction made between incapacitating injury and merely painful injury in defining a Marine as “broken.”