Dear Portfolio Reader,

As a veteran I treated English 101 like an ugly enemy that needed to be overcome and conquered. It had been a fair amount of time since high school and the need to write essays. I was so out of practice that I doubted I could still write eloquently. After a full semester I’m more confident in my abilities as a writer than ever, and not so averse to writing anymore. My biggest challenge throughout the course was learning to use revision in my writing. By letting a piece of writing “cool off” for  few days I found I could spot mistakes and places for improvement far easier with fresh eyes. I’ve included three pieces for you to read: a memoir, text-wrestling, and an ethnography.

My memoir piece entitled “Brass and Skittles” is a brief snapshot of my time in Africa as a United States Marine. In it I discuss two separate events that both stuck out to me, years after its occurrence. This was my favorite piece to write because it required no research, all the content I needed was in my memory. I tried hard to include rich/specific detail in this piece to really transport you to Africa and see what I saw. I also tried to use a bit of humor to keep the writing entertaining.

 The text-wrestling essay I’ve included was written as an appraisal of an article on World War I. This was probably my most challenging piece to write this semester. The difficulties stemmed from the sheer length of the article I given to read. The Article entitled “The Invention of the War Machine” examines technologies that were created as a result of WWI. This piece highlights my ability to analyze written work and respond to it in a meaningful way. Although a long article to read, I enjoyed the subject matter and even learned a few things I hadn’t known before. Look for the use of in-text citations and a work cited page in this essay.

 My last piece included for the portfolio is my ethnography paper entitled “Uncle Sam Wants You!”. My chosen subculture to write about was the recruiters for the United States Marine Corps. This paper was one of my favorite this semester. I was able to combine 1^st hand account observations with my own experiences from being recruited. This is another piece I tried to use specific detail to really lay out the scene of the recruiting station from the moment you walk in the door. I really enjoyed being able to write about something that most people don’t have an inside account of.

I hope that through reading these three essays you are able to see that I have met the standards of the English composition curriculum. I feel more confident in my ability to write in detail and to clearly portray my thoughts on paper. As a Political Science major the ability to write effectively will  be paramount in almost any career direction I choose. The structure and revision skills gained through this semester should serve me well not only in a future career path, but in the remainder of my college studies as well.

Thank You For Reading,

Robert Murray

Brass and Skittles

I watched Stanley Kubrick’s Full-Metal Jacket at far too young an age. R Lee Ermey’s twenty-minute expletive laden rant was enough to get me to sign the papers. I enlisted in the Marine Corps right after high school and found myself on the yellow foot prints of Paris island, South Carolina. Three months grueling training and I became a Marine. The experience merits a story in its own right, but what stays with me more clearly years later, is what I saw in Africa while deployed.

I deployed in 2011 on what’s called a MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit, pronounced “M-You”) to assist the people of Libya as they over threw Muammar Gaddafi. As a Marine, this means a lot of sitting in a muggy well-deck of a Navy ship, waiting to be pointed in a direction and told what to destroy. What was scheduled to be a 6-month deployment, turned into a year long one, bouncing from one Mediterranean country and port to the next all in support of the no-fly zone the US imposed.

Marines on board a ship don’t have much to do, other than worry about the Navy not hitting a mine. This is no Carnival cruise with our own lavish state rooms however. We all lived in what’s called the berthing. Narrow rooms with coffin racks stacked 3 high, and low hanging pipes jutting in and out of everywhere. There isn’t even enough room for two men to walk abreast. Privacy is soon a distant memory. Air circulation was poor, so smells lingered. Not exactly 5-star accommodations. Needless to say, when your trapped in an environment like that for months on end you lose a bit of your sanity. About halfway through our deployment we got a little respite from the stuffy bowels of the ship. We learned from command that the Marines would be doing a training exercise in Djibouti Africa for a month.

Djibouti? Never heard of it. Is it on dry land? Check. Is it off of this ship? Check. What are we waiting for?

We ended up flying off the ship on helicopters to reach the training area. My first impression looking out of the helicopter was basically a shoulder shrug. It’s a desert country sparsely populated. But not desert like you would think of the Sahara; more mountainous and rockier desert. The temperatures during the day ranged from 95 to 110 degrees, while at night “plummeted” into the 70’s. No sprawling cities or 1st world infrastructure. Our base camp was literally concertina wire spread around a football sized area in the middle of a clearing. No man-made structures for miles. We spent the day setting up our camp, checking our gear, and going over the plan of attack for the following morning. We slept in sleeping bags on the ground under the stars.

One thing was very apparent when we woke up; we had guests. All along the outside of our C-wire was indigenous people hanging about. Men, women, and children all apparently waiting for us. All of them were dark skinned, and looked extremely impoverished. Their clothes all looked like thin patch work quilts sewn together haphazardly. Some of the men drank a sort of homebrewed whiskey, despite the sweltering heat. The men and women were trying to barter for food, while the kids ran around playing hoop rolling. What we soon found out is that the whole community based its entire existence off collecting the brass casings left behind from various training exercises and reselling the metal.

This is not an unusual practice. Gun ranges the world over collect empty brass casings and sell them. But its more of an afterthought, something you do at the end of the month for spare change like coinstar. What these people were doing was far different. Picture your average military style firing line. A straight line with marked positions every 3 or 4 feet with spots for marksman to fire from. The brass usually just collects in piles a few feet away where it is ejected, and picked up later. Now let’s picture it Djibouti style. Same straight line with positions, except we have kids as young as 10 jockeying for position to catch the brass as it flies out of your rifle. And when I say jockeying, I mean fighting tooth and nail to get the brass first. Brass ejected from firearms is also extremely hot, not something I’d want to catch as it was fired. Not only is this unorthodox, its downright dangerous to have people screwing around on a live fire range.

I remember thinking afterwards how bizarre it was for someone to treat what I associated as trash, as a treasure worth fighting over. Those tiny bits of metal that probably make him two cents a pound could be turned into bread on his family’s table at night. Each pull of the trigger contributing in a small way to his well-being. Strange how something typically associated with ending life can also be seen to sustain it. It makes you reevaluate your own circumstances. Is my life difficult as a Marine? Sure. Do I have to fight for a meal at the end of the day?

A few days later I saw something else I’ve never been able to really quantify. We were all sitting around eating our dinner sitting on top of our packs. Dinner was a plastic bag meal-ready-to-eat. If memory serves me it was a particularly disgusting number entitled: “Dehydrated Pork Patty”. After taking a sip of my “Powdered Drink Mix, Fruit”, I heard some Marines laughing raucously. Me and a couple members of my platoon walked over to see what was happening. Some guys were throwing candy to the kids over the barrier. But this wasn’t your Band of Brothers moment when a paratrooper hands a boy a bar of chocolate after liberating France. This was being done for sadistic amusement.

The Kids were beating each other over individual skittles. Not a whole bag, just the couple skittles the guys were throwing over the C-wire. The boys threw wild inaccurate punches. They scratched and clawed at fists closed around the skittles. While I don’t condone what was being done, I can’t be too hard on my colleagues. Everyone copes with the mental-misery that is the Corps in different ways. The kids fighting each other was appalling, but it wasn’t over yet.

The adult individuals who had been a good distance away seemed to finally realize the Americans were throwing food over the wire. And that’s when I saw the strangest thing of my life. An obviously pregnant woman sprinting towards the group of kids screaming her head off. At first, I thought it was because she didn’t want the kids taking food from us, but then I realized it was because she wanted the food for herself. When she reached the group, she kicked a small boy full in the chest like a spartan and took the one skittle he had been about to eat. Most of the people around me laughed, but still more of us found it disturbing.

Sometimes I wonder which is worse? Feeding the natives like they are at a petting zoo for entertainment? Or and adult, using violence to take food from a child.

I’m not sure why I remember the event so clearly nearly 5 years later. Sometimes I think it was the savage pleasure derived from some of the people throwing the food that sticks with me. It is hard to be empathetic at a time in your life so bereft of happiness like time in the Marine Corps often was. Years after I was honorably discharged, I start to think more about how difficult those people’s lives were. I think it serves as a reminder to me that circumstances are different the world over. The comfortable lives most people live in the United States are far removed from a no-where country like Djibouti. I saw firsthand what real desperation and poverty looks like.

World War I is often ironically called “the war to end all wars”. Ironic of course, because though a desperately tragic war, it certainly did not end all wars, and in many ways actually set the stage for the second World War. World War I lasted from 1914-1918, and involved over twenty nations and killed millions. The war had many contributing factors, but was started by the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand, lighting the powder keg in the Baltics. As stated by H.W Crocker: “What started World War 1 began with one death. It ended with 17 million more dead.” While the war was decidedly abysmal in terms of human casualties, it created many opportunities for technological advancement.

In “The Invention of the War Machine”, Mark and Anthony Mills discuss why World War I has been called the “war of the engineers”, and why that can be somewhat misleading. The authors lay out a series of technological advances attributed to World War I, and break them into five categories: weapons technologies, medical innovations, and non-weapons technologies, industrial research, scientific involvement. As each invention or technology is examined, the authors give us the corresponding civilian technology that had been invented before the start of the war. In addition to the preexisting technology, the later inventions that spawned out of the war are also parsed. The main theme of the essay is not to demonstrate when inventions were created, but to illustrate how several different industries/fields came together as one, to ultimately rise to the challenge of World War 1 and the corresponding civilian advancements.

Weapons such as the German U-boats, Tanks, and chemical warfare are discussed. For example, submarine technology was not invented in World War I. Mills tells us “…the submarine was not a German invention and even predated the war by a half-century…”. The first mechanically powered submarine was launched in France in 1863; even in 1775 David Bushnell had created a viable submarine. When the Germans used this tool of war so effectively it caused the allied nations to adapt and develop new technology. The Author gives the example of the hydrophone (originally developed for civilian use) being combined with the invention of the depth charge to root out German U-boats. This is the sort of “military-industrial-complex” the author is referring to when he uses President Eisenhower’s later words.

While the “war machine” did create new powerful means of destruction, it therefore also created the need for new methods of life saving equipment. Mills gives the example of Marie Curie driving vehicles equipped with the first mobile X-ray machines. He also touches such innovations as: rapid medical transport, blood transfusions, and even the development of penicillin. “…tremors, hypersensitivity, confusion, lassitude, a thousand-yard stare- became known as “shell shock””. Soldiers returning from WWI with such conditions were not treated with effective remedies. However, the problem was then focused on and better treatments were developed.

With the advancements on the battlefield and in the triage centers it is only natural that several of the technologies spawned from the war benefited civilian society as well. “Other examples include the zipper (promptly adopted by producers of aviator suits and sleeping bags), secure optical communications (the heliograph), daylight savings time (to save energy), the tea bag, the first widespread and institutional distribution of condoms, and the wristwatch”. Many of these technologies existed before the war, but were not put into wide scale use until or because of the war. Specific techs like aircraft to ground communication were improved, which opened the door for obvious improvements in the commercial sector. Had the war not happened, some of the aforementioned techs may have taken decades to come to fruition.

While Mills tells us about each of the specific fields improved because of the war, perhaps one of the more long lasting things to come of the war was the industrial research process. The president of the American Chemical Society Arthur Little once stated in a speech “Modern progress can no longer depend upon accidental discoveries. Each advance in industrial science must be studied, organized and fought like a military campaign.” What Little was trying to assert was that the World needed to change its industrial practices to keep up with changing technologies spawning from the war. During the war “x” would happen and “y” would be developed to combat “x”. Instead of this reactionary stance, Little wants to illustrate the importance of established corporate research.

While having the plans for industrial research in place is essential, it can’t move forward without scientist doing the actual research. Prior to the first World War it was unlikely for a president to request assistance from the nations scientists. An astronomer George Hale played a major role in getting scientists into the public sphere. As a member of the National Academy, Hale was an advocate for scientists serving as the foreign secretary. During this time period scientific journals were on the rise and Hale saw the use they could play in getting the American people to trust scientists. During the War Hale was appointed as a chairperson of a scientific counsel. Its aim was to bring together scientific research and industrial process to further the national security and economy.

Mills article has shed light on a quite a few interesting points about the technologies associated with World War I. I tend to agree with the author that the war in general accelerated the process for which these technologies were made available. I think the prospect of death and destruction can be a stark motivator for quick innovation. As Mills said the hydrophone had been around for several years. But would it have been advanced so quickly if it hadn’t been for the sinking of the Lusitania? I think eventually the tech would have progressed, but the war definitely moved things along.

My biggest take away from the article was the importance of the industrial research. Not only were these processes critical to the war effort then, but have been a staple ever since in our society. Companies are constantly developing new technology to stay “current”. This sort of natural competition is good for our economy and for new emerging technologies. It guarantees that we don’t have to wait for a catalyst like war to be constantly at the cutting edge of technology. I think Mills  has drawn interesting and fact-based conclusions from their historical research . It would certainly seem as though the innovations from the industrial military complex helped not only the war effort, but civilian advancements as well. The process of introducing industrial research to military problems seems to have worked to great effect for the not only the war effort, but also civilian life for generations to come.

Works Cited

1. Crocker, H. W. The Yanks Are Coming!: a Military History of the United States in World War I. Regnery Publ., 2014.

2. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Turtle.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 6 Mar. 2018, www.britannica.com/topic/Turtle-submarine.

3. Mills, Anthony, and Marc Mills. “The Invention of the War Machine.” The New Atlantis, 2014, www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-invention-of-the-war-machine.

Uncle Sam Wants You

            The moment I step into the Armed Service Recruiting station in Plymouth MA I’m assaulted by propaganda. “Army Strong”, “Born Ready”, “The Few, The Proud”, and many other posters adorn the vestibule as you enter. There aren’t any pictures of the cooks holding crossed spoons in front of the stars and stripes.  I see posters depicting the United States’ tip of the spear: Seals, Recon, Airborne, Pararescue. These posters (even after I already served in the military) conjure up a real sense of duty, honor, and glory. You can’t look at a picture of a Navy Seal in blacked-out scuba gear and not think: “That’s me, where do I sign?”.

The office is set up as a long hallway with offices on the left and right. The Army has the largest office running along the left side of the wall. To the right, the Air Force and Navy have equal sized offices. Tucked into the back in two tiny offices are the Marines. The majority of the offices have glass panes on the outside so you can see inside. As you enter the hallway you can see the recruiters heads from all offices immediately turn and look at you appraisingly. Its sort of like being a gazelle on the plains of Africa, having predators staring at you. As you walk down the hallway you are being judged.  “Is this a Navy sort of kid? Nope, he still walking. Maybe he’s interested in the chair force? Nope. Don’t tell me he’s a jarhead.”

As a younger man (a kid really) still in high school I used to love walking down this hallway and defiantly walking right past the other branches offices until I reached the hatchway to the Marines office. I know the other Marine hopefuls loved it as well. We almost felt honor bound to stare them down as we walked past. As if there was something fundamentally wrong with anyone who didn’t join the Marine Corps. There’s a lot of good natured ribbing between the services. It was common for the poolee’s (recruit hopefuls not yet 18) to have physical competitions, like a pullup challenge in the office. The comradery gained amongst service members often times starts right here in an office like this. Its also where the inter-branch rivalries begin.

When I step into the Marines office I quickly notice that almost no space is left on the wall that hasn’t been USMC’d to oblivion. There are plastic M16 replicas on the wall, inspirational quotes from generals, and everywhere the Marine Corps colors of red, green, and gold. It is difficult to spend time in this office for even a moment and not become taken away with thoughts of glory and leadership(by design of course). One wall is reserved for pictures of former recruits that have gone on to become Marines. Its almost like a mugshot wall of fame.

There are 4 recruiters in the Marine office. Two fulltime recruiters, and two Marines on recruiters assistance. Recruiters assistance is reserved for Marines just getting back from boot camp. It’s when you’re the most physically fit, most squared away, and most likely to encourage your friends to join. All the Marines in the office wear Dress Blue deltas. This is the signature blue trousers with red stripes with a beige shirt. Upon the shirt are chevrons on the sleeves denoting rank, and ribbons on the breast. All the recruiters have neat high and tight haircuts and the freshest shave possible. They are the embodiment of what Marines are supposed to look like, and play their part well.

The days are fairly monotonous. As soon as they arrive in the morning, they begin making and receiving phone calls. Anytime a recruiter answers a phone they don’t say “hello”, they practically bark “MARINES” as a greeting. The phone calls they place are to individuals that have requested information, or they just make cold calls and see what they catch. The Marines are tough to recruit for. It’s the longest boot camp training, the worst living conditions, the worst assignments. Recruiters don’t talk about that though.

There’s a very specific process they follow for a potential recruit who walks through the door. It’s called the benefit tags. They are eleven little placards with phrases on them, all positive things. For example: Travel and adventure, Financial Security, Education, and pride of belonging to name a few. The recruiter lays out these tags and asks the young man/woman “ which of these do you want to gain?”. Typically they ask you to pick 3 tags, and then based on what you pick they will explain how the Marine Corps can provide that. If you select Travel and Adventure for instance the recruiter might say “Look no further, the Marine Corps will send you to beautiful and exotic locations around the globe”. They might not mention that beautiful and exotic could mean somewhere like Baghdad or Somalia. Everything is spun in the most positive light possible.

Its on full display when seventeen year old Jeremy walks through the door. As per usual the potential recruit is timid and the conversation is mostly driven and steered by the recruiter. Its almost like watching a very formal and polished used car salesman. Every objection is addressed and countered, as if the Marine Corps can solve all your problems. Jeremey says “ I want to join but I don’t want to miss out on a college degree”. “No problem” says the Recruiter. “ The Marine Corps provides tuition assistance to active duty members and the GI Bill after your discharge”.

Again, what isn’t mentioned is that although they do offer the tuition assistance, you need command approval which is rarely granted in combat or mission critical jobs. Its funny because they even have posters in the office that say “We don’t promise you a rose garden”. And that’s true, they don’t. But they do try to portray it as this pinnacle of a fighting force with all kinds of tangible benefits and no drawbacks.

Before I had ever walked into a recruiting station I knew I wanted to enlist in the Marine Corps. When I walked out after the first time, it was like I was the Blues Brothers on a mission from god. They are amazing at not only convincing you to make this life altering decision, but also garnering strong fervor about signing up. You become almost dogmatic in your mission to become a Marine. I plastered bumper stickers all over my car. I carried my keys on a Marine Corps lanyard. I studied for the ASVAB( the Military’s SAT test). The recruiters job isn’t so much to outright lie to people, but rather to spin in the most positive light their brand. They are some of the best sales people in the country. Not many people can convince you to potentially sign your own death warrant. But like all Marines, they know their craft well and always adapt and overcome.