Sir,The Private Don't Know! Sixteen Weeks of Hell on Parris Island

Marine Corps boot camp has earned a place in American folklore as a place where young men go to endure a demanding rite of passage into the ranks of the nation€s elite fighting force. Sir, The Private Don€t Know! tells the real story as I experienced it.
Boot camp at Parris Island was both mundane and exciting. But at times it was outrageous and senseless in ways few would believe. This book goes beyond popular image into the sometimes brutal but often comical world of turning greenhorn recruits into newly minted Marines as it existed nearly 40 years ago.
I went through Marine boot camp during the mid-1970s, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War, a time when the cherished traditions and hallowed myths of Marine recruit training became warped and perverted, making what had always been a demanding experience even more harrowing. (It was also a time when the military€s image was at low ebb in this country. I was promptly labeled a loser by many of my high school friends when they learned of my choice to enlist.) I entered Marine basic training as a naive, timid adolescent who had dreamed of the military life, but fantasy quickly collided with reality on Parris Island. There were times when I doubted I would survive to the end, but I endured through sheer, stubborn determination and by drawing on a well of mental strength I hadn€t known I had.
Those 16 weeks on Parris Island changed me. It may sound trite, but the Marine Corps turned a boy into a man. Boot camp became the formative experience of my life, a wedge that separated all that came before from what followed.
This book is in a way a piece of history: The very abuses I describe led to congressional investigations and wholesale changes in the training regimen at the Marine recruit depots within months of my graduation, a process I describe in the epilogue. Marine boot camp today, while still a rigorous experience, only remotely resembles the training I underwent. Mine was a truly an end-of-an-era experience, a story never to be told again.