What the Marine Corps Taught Me About Swearing...
Was That It Was More Than An Art Form
There’s Always a Method to the Madness.
I learned to swear much younger than is appropriate, but my excuse is that it was the 1970s and I played ice hockey. (My dad also taught me some of the saltier “chirps” I might hear in Canadian french for tournaments north of the border so that I was prepared… purely for defensive purposes, I promise.) Thus, I was pretty inured to swearing when I joined the Marine Corps. Nonetheless, I learned more than a clever turn of phrase or three from my fellow Marines - friends, colleagues, seniors and subordinates alike - along the way.
But that wasn’t the real lesson - at all…
The truth is that R. Lee Ermey wasn’t an actor playing a Marine drill instructor; he was a Marine drill instructor making a living in movies showing what he did: turning you non-hacking, civilian pukes into cold, steely-eyed killers on behalf of Uncle Sam’s Big Green Killing Machine (obligatory oo-rah!). His inimitable style in Full Metal Jacket earned him legions of fans, particularly among Marines who have “been there, done that” and learned all of their drill instructors’ favorite swearing sobriquets by graduating from Marine Corps Recruit Training - i.e. “boot camp.”
Sometimes it doesn’t even require an actual curse. My DI taught us that even ordinary, non-cuss words can be repurposed as swears.
[Smashcut to a squad bay at Officer Candidate School, summer 1990]
Our platoon of roughly 50 officer candidates is gathered around SSgt Etringer1 at the back of the squad bay, in the space just past the last of the two rows of metal bunks - our racks - but before the far wall where all of our M-16A2 service rifles are locked at the end of each day. Everyone is sitting on a foot locker or a camp stool and Etringer is giving us some knowledge - genuine scoop vice official propaganda - about how to prep our uniforms for our final inspection before graduation, which is just a few weeks away. At this point, most of the initial swearing, name-calling, and other abuse highlighted in movies like “Full Metal Jacket” has stopped. The weak have already been culled and everyone here has proven - to some extent - our desire to be Marines and our willingness to endure most any demand necessary to prove our worth. The dilettantes are gone; the hardcore remain.
As Etringer was speaking, another candidate from a different platoon announced himself at the front of our squadbay:
"Sergeant Instructor! Candidate Jones requests permission to come aboard-" "What do you want, Can-o'-dirt?" Etringer interrupted. "Si- Sergeant Instructor, this candidate was sent from Third Platoon's Sergeant Instructor Staff Sergeant Wallace to-" "Oh yeah? Can't you see I'm tryna pass some knowledge. Get lost and come back later, Candidate... you dink."
While “dink” was sometimes a slur used in Vietnam, this kid was lily white. That’s not how Etringer meant it, though. Somehow, he said the word with such disdain, with complete and utter contempt, that it left the poor young man speechless and somewhat stricken - and it caused all of us to crack up laughing in one of those “you had to be there” moments. This, in turn, caught Etringer off-guard and for a moment - one brief instant - we all saw it: Etringer couldn’t help it and started to laugh along with us. He was human, after all… then he caught himself and proceeded to thrash us.
“OH! WE’RE ALL HAVING A FUCKIN’ GOOD TIME SMOKIN’ AND JOKIN’, HUH?! I TRY TO GIVE YOU CANDIDATES SOME KNOWLEDGE AND YOU THINK WE’RE IN THE FUCKING COMEDY CLUB!?!”
GET ON LINE, NOW!
The ensuing thrashing was probably one of the worst ones we got the whole time, but for some reason, it wasn’t as bad because it was morally easier. While in the pushup position, where we spent interminable minutes that seemed to stretch into hours, I would catch the eyes of one of my suffering peers and there would be a knowing look that conveyed this:
Teleology - Purpose vs Cause
From the outside looking in, it’s easy to misunderstand what all of the yelling and screaming and swearing is about exactly - just what is the point of all of that? The Greek word telos means “end, purpose, or goal.” Teleology is the branch of philosophy that looks at phenomena from the perspective of purpose, rather than their physical cause. In sports these days it’s all the rage to bring technology and “science” to bear in order to see how a curveball’s spin rate helps determine how much break it has. Philosophically speaking, that kind of analysis is concerned with cause. Teleology might look instead at why a pitcher threw a curveball or slider on a 3 balls and 1 strike count.2 So why are Marines in initial training forced to speak of themselves in the third person? Why does R. Lee Ermey, and all Marine DI’s, for that matter, cuss so damn much?
[Smashcut to USS Kearsarge (LHD-3), Spring, 1995]
I’m standing at the position of attention in the small space on the ship that serves as our Maintenance Control - where we check aircraft out and back in - and the Aviation Maintenance Officer, a senior Major in our squadron - is screaming at me just a few inches from my space, spittle flying from his lips, a vein in the temple of his completely bald pate pulsing as he swears majestically, prolifically, stream-of-consciousness invective and ire rolling off of him and crashing into me in waves. Do you remember that scene early on in “Top Gun” where Goose and Maverick are getting their asses chewed by the air boss - the bald guy - and he’s telling them that one more stunt and they’re going to be “flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong?” Well, that was a cub scout singalong compared to what I was getting. It was so bad that in the background, I could see one-by-one the enlisted Marines who worked in Maintenance Control abandon the space to save me the humiliation of enduring this kind of ass-chewing in front of them.
I genuinely wanted to cry. He was threatening to pull my test papers and potentially my wings - and it was no idle threat. He had both the authority and the right to do it.
I had gone up to do a test on an aircraft that needed a ground turn to ensure that the hydraulic pumps that had been installed were working properly. By regulation - and for good reason - after a ground turn, we would shut down, and then a mech pulls a sample of the fluid and brings it into Control where they take a look to ensure there are no metal particles in it and then the aircraft is certified safe for flight. Except that the deck had been clobbered and one of my CH-46E colleagues came up on the radio that he was running low on fuel - like really low - and the deck was filled. There were no available spots for him to land. I could tell by the tone and the way he phrased it that he was sucking fumes and every other aircraft was just getting started up.
I, on the other hand, had just finished my requisite 15 minutes of turning and, while sitting there, I had done my flight control checks, so I was pretty confident that the aircraft was good and the new pumps were fine. In the heat of the moment, I called the air boss and told him I could get out of the way so that my low-on-fuel colleague could land and gas up. I broke a rule - badly - and I had hoped that in the mass confusion on the deck that the AMO either wouldn’t find out or would understand. Boy, was that wrong.
As I stood there under the barrage of his profanity trying to maintain my military bearing, I reverted back to OCS, to my drill instructor’s tirades, to being able to stoically endure even when my emotions were threatening to run away from me.
Lee Ermey’s most famous role may have been in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 classic, but his first role as a drill instructor was in the less heralded but, in my opinion, better film, “The Boys in Company C.”3 Trigger warning: it’s a bit of a tearjerker, but a great film, following a group of young man from enlisting in the Marine Corps to their time in the Vietnam War. The photo above is from a scene where Ermey pulls one of the main characters aside (Stan Shaw deftly plays the streetwise former, drug dealer Tyrone Washington) while still at boot camp and Ermey gives him a bit of a peek behind the curtain. Tyrone emerges as a leader in boot camp and Ermey at one point tells him that the screaming and mind games have a purpose, that it isn’t just hazing and torment for its own sake or the glee of the seemingly sadistic DIs. Instead, Ermey confides as a combat veteran that what the Marine Corps is doing is trying to prepare these recruits for the insanity of War, of being able to keep one’s head when the world has gone to complete shit all around them.
Marcus Aurelius & Walter Chaplinsky Have Entered the Chat
Even after you learn what the real purpose of all that swearing and screaming is, it’s still not really internalized until you have that moment where you realize that what you’ve been given is an invaluable skill, a genuinely useful way of engaging with a sometimes crazy world if you learn how to harvest and use it. In all of those inspections and thrashings and ass-chewings, you learn to completely separate the information in a stream of words from the surrounding emotional content. It doesn’t matter how many times the DI calls you a dipshit or an asshole, you just let that wash over you while you wait for the necessary data that you need from the DI in order to be able to carry out the orders.
Marine Corps boot camp and Officer Candidate School imprint on your soul some of the most important lessons of the Stoic philosophers:
“The key to control is not in controlling external events, but in controlling your own mind.” - Epictetus
“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” – Marcus Aurelius
But why swearing as the modality, you might ask? The swearing, or cursing, is just one part of the whole tapestry at boot camp or OCS, but I’ve chosen to focus on that one aspect because it relies upon an instinct that even the Supreme Court recognized in one of its many (justly, IMO) criticized decisions, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942). Walter Chaplinsky was convicted for his use of “fighting words” while protesting outside of City Hall in Rochester, NH. Chaplinsky called the leaders of the town “damned fascists” and the arresting officer a “god damned racketeer” and the Supreme Court upheld the law and his conviction. First Amendment, you say? The entire rationale behind the decision to criminalize Chaplinsky’s speech was that such language could be punished “…within the domain of state power” because Chaplinsky used “in a public place… words likely to cause a breach of the peace.” Chaplinsky has never been explicitly overruled and remains “good law” technically, but not really. You can find legions of decisions where courts have overturned convictions of people for violating “public abuse” or other such statutes prohibiting profanity or “fighting words” on First Amendment grounds.
Seen in this light, the Marine Corps’ use of profanity is an ingenious way of seeking to provoke people by using “fighting words” in order to teach them the emotional self-control to be non-reactive to such provocations. I have heard many people talk about how they would kick the DI’s ass if he said X or Y to them, or they would never put up with that, and I always smile and laugh because it misses the whole point. After all, if you can’t control yourself when someone throws some swear words at you, how can you expect to survive - to make life and death decisions - when the enemy is hurling artillery, grenades, or bullets your way?
Fuck you very much for coming to my TED Talk.
I heard from a friend who served with him that he later made First Sergeant, but I refer to him by his rank when I knew him.
“Greg Maddux to the courtesy phone, please. Mr. Maddux to the courtesy phone.”
Technically, Ermey’s first role was in “Apocalypse Now” as an OH-6 pilot, but that film didn’t come out until 1979. “The Boys in Company C” was released in ‘78.
.. most excellent & bodacious .. ‘smashcut is visual.. ain’t heard it deployed for decades ! 🦎🏴☠️🎬
Yut.