Spare Parts

“There we stood for the first time on Parris Island, four columns of fifteen bodies, perfectly aligned and covered. While most were shivering from fear or anxiety, I was in ecstasy. I was finally standing tall on the yellow footprints, as my brother had fourteen years before. The emotional rush lifted my spirits and cushioned my ego from the verbal assault being dealt by the receiving drill instructors. The rush was intoxicating. I was no longer just reading about recruit training. I was living it.” 

For years, Williams has wanted to join the Marine Corps, and now that he is there, he is excited. He is also naive. Within hours, he will begin to experience the anger that will mark so much of his training, but here, he is allowing his brother’s memory to give him strength. 

“I would learn that pity is a foreign emotion to drill instructors.” 

Williams will find that training is often carried out in one way simply because that’s the way it has always been carried out. He will learn that the Marine Corps does not always take care of its Marines. He will further learn that the lack of pity is part of the job, but that doesn’t make his hatred of them lessen, nor lessen his desire to make training, and the Corps, more efficient. 

“The reality is that we build warriors. Make no mistake here, recruits. You are here to learn to kill. Embrace the way you feel right now. Savor the taste of hatred you have for Drill Instructor Sgt. Talley. Remember it. Anger and hatred are necessary tools of the trade. And our trade is killing.” 

Williams returns to the theme of anger used as motivation for Marines numerous times. He argues and fights with Morrison at boot camp, Nagel and Poole during the build-up to the war, Krause after the war, and even himself, when the second Gulf War begins. He never quite gets over this idea of anger driving them, and never quite gets far enough away from the Corps to lose the anger. As a Reservist, he mentions several times how his drill weekends kept him from fully integrating into either civilian life or the Marine Corps, because of the anger it took to be a Marine, and how long it took him to forget that anger after each drill. 

“Everything your drill instructors do for you and to you has a purpose. More than that, every minute of the day is calculated and planned on a training schedule. Drill instructors follow very specific objectives, and are held accountable by the series commander for everything they do—everything.” 

Williams receives this information from Charlie, a retired Marine who works in the laundry facility. He is trying to enlighten Williams as to the purpose of training. At first, Williams is enlightened. But he never gets to put his enlightenment to use, as he is immediately transferred to a different unit, so he can finish training. This means Williams never completely comes out of the cave, to use Charlie’s metaphor. What he remembers from training is the anger. When he goes to reserve drills, time is wasted. And when he goes to war, it seems very few objectives are met. 

“‘I want you two to shake hands,’ he said, physically positioning our hands together in a handshake fashion. ‘You two never know when you might see other again. Someday, Morrison, if we are fortunate enough to have another war, the Marine machine might break down and Uncle Sam will have to send out for spare parts!’” 

Williams has just graduated boot camp after being fast-forwarded, and Drill Instructor Talley has one last chance to attack him. He makes fun of Williams’s reserve status, and he once again pits him against Morrison, drawing on the anger and antagonism between them. Williams thought that the drill instructor’s pity was part of his job, but here he is just being petty, showing that even the best Marines draw too often on the anger they learned in training. The quote further shows how full-time Marines look down on reservists, even though they are supposed to be brothers. 

“It was the same maternal gesture, an innocent flick of the light switch that had awakened me for most days of my life, which sent me into a fit of rage. Her dumbstruck stare was making me angrier by the second. After a very uneasy silence, she cautiously backed out of the doorway to leave me alone. And there I stood, alone in my room, looking for myself in the mirror.” 

Williams has just returned home from boot camp and doesn’t know who he is. The constant stress of training—the anger and anxiety—is affecting him, causing him to be someone he is not. After training, even his mother looking at him can make him angry. This is, besides the stress of actual training, the first sign he will have difficulty reintegrating to the civilian world, and the first sign of the stress and anxiety that will accompany him his whole life in the Corps. 

“Light green was the Marine way of saying ‘white.’ This was the Marine Corps’s way of promoting racial acceptance. According to the theory, all Marines were considered equal, and thus all Marines were green, albeit different shades of green. White Marines were ‘light green’ and black Marines were ‘dark green.’ The theory sounded better than it worked.” 

Williams introduces a recurring theme here not simply of racism, but of how difficult it is to coexist in such an environment as the Marine Corps. Under constant stress, using anger as motivation, Marines sometimes let their racial prejudices guide them. The Corps knows this, and so they attempt to deter such feelings by reminding Marines they are all the same color, and that they are brothers. Williams says it sounds better than it works because the racial tensions are still there. This quote also sets up the confrontation with the Arab bus driver, and the feeling many Marines have about Arabs in general. In that case, however, they feel it is acceptable to hold onto their prejudices against Arabs, since Arabs (in their view) started the war and forced the Marines to come fight. 

“I learned that I had an internal compass that pointed me in the direction of morality. I recognized the conflict created when my actions led me in a different direction from the one to which my moral compass pointed. I understood how that conflict eroded my self-respect and sanity.” 

Above all, Williams wants to believe he has done, and is doing, the right thing. Later, he will question the war and why it is being fought. He will question the commands of leadership, and he will question his own reasons for doing what he does. He will question his own prejudices and pride, and each time he does, he will attempt to follow his moral compass, even though he might not always do so.  

“Those were not things with which most of us could identify or even comprehend. It sounded horrific to me, but it was all a world away. I had read about these things in books, watched them on the movie screens, and seen them on the evening news. I dismissed the concern as graduation rhetoric that was crafted to motivate the troops. I believed officers would tell us such things to validate all the time and effort we put into training.”

Later, Williams will repeat a similar sentiment when talking about the civilians back in the States: that they will most likely never know about, and certainly will not understand, the things that happen in war. They don’t have to worry about tanks rolling down Main Street. Williams says he’s thankful they will never experience this, which is a two-fold statement: one, that he and his fellow Marines are keeping it from happening in America, and, two, that he has grown beyond the naive young kid he was when he heard the commander tell them what was happening in Kuwait. Now he has seen it, and he wants to keep it from happening anywhere else.

“Things would be different for me after August 2, as it was for the ravaged people of Kuwait.” 

Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, besides the atrocities Williams sees and the stress he would suffer, changed the world. The Coalition Forces won, but Hussein stayed in power, so the United States would send troops back in 2003 to finish the job Williams and his fellow Marines were sent to do. Just when Williams thinks his nightmares are over, the Second Gulf War starts, and he is drawn back in to his anxiety again, in the same way the United States was drawn back in to Iraq. 

“You will likely be exposed to biological and chemical agents in the desert. If you pay attention and apply yourselves, I guarantee you’ll survive. If you don’t […] based on the clusterfuck I just saw, I guarantee you won’t.” 

The overriding fear of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, along with SCUD missile attacks, was the threat of Saddam Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons. In the 1980s, Hussein used nerve gas on Kurds in his country, and the leadership worried he would deliver it via SCUD missile to American troops. 

“It seemed as if we lacked the very things the Marine Corps told us we needed. Our survival would depend upon our ability to drink water, clean our rifles, navigate the terrain, see the enemy, and avoid being seen. Yet we lacked the gear and equipment to perform these tasks effectively, if at all. The commandant’s speech was a wake-up call to all of us. It sounded the alarm that time was running out.” 

Williams has been worried about gear since before flying to Saudi Arabia, but until landing, he has been focused on the LAVs, and how he will train without them. Here, Williams points out he’s in an entirely different world. Without the proper gear, even small things like walking to the latrine at night can become hazardous, as he says several Marines got lost in the dark desert nights. He can’t even drink water—of paramount importance in the desert heat—without special gear. He’s totally reliant on gear, and reliant on leadership to supply it. 

“Draper was as politically uncouth as they came, but we all shared his resentment of the official ban on all things American. During our Culture and Customs brief we had learned the dos and don’ts while serving in Saudi. The CO explained that we were expected to conform to the cultural norms when in public. Porn was a don’t. Alcohol—another don’t. So was rock music. And Christian symbols were a major don’t. Few of us were familiar enough with Middle-East politics to understand why.”

This quote exemplifies the clash of cultures that occurred during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Due to differing religious and cultural norms, the American military was asked to respect the Saudi government’s request for bans on such things as music and pornography. But many of the men serving in Williams’s unit saw the issue differently. They felt the Arabs should be respecting their cultural norms because the Marines came as liberators, and were protecting Arabs. Williams and his cohort are not educated enough to realize there are many different cultures and ethnicities in the Middle East.

“The next time the Arab looked into the mirror he saw the barrel of a 9mm pistol pointed at his head. His eyes widened at the image in the mirror—black steel in a madman’s fist.” 

The Arab bus driver is a Saudi. The Marines have just landed in Saudi Arabia. But Gunny Brandt makes no distinction between Arabs. This Arab, in Brandt’s eyes, disrespected the American flag, which is enough for Brandt to pull a gun on him, even though he is there to help them by transporting them to base. The message from Brandt is clear: America is more important than your life. 

“The lines were already blurring: the lines that separated training from fighting […] practicing from playing […] killing from being killed.” 

Until this point, Williams has only trained, and often poorly at that. He has no idea what war will be like and is only beginning to understand what it will mean, to him, to the Marines he serves with, to the people back home, and to the world. This quote also shows how quickly violence can erupt, and that Marines should constantly be prepared for it, whether in training or actual combat. 

“Each of us wore a tan wrap draped over our heads, ears, and necks, much like the Saudi headdress, with our bandannas around our faces like the cowboys in old Western movies, pulled over our noses and tied behind our heads. Both the wraps and bandannas were held in place by oversized tinted goggles. Our apparel had nothing to do with fashion or style, as it often had during training back in the States. It now had everything to do with survival. Without the wraps our ears would cake with sand and our necks would blister. Without the bandanna it was impossible to breathe. Without the goggles it was impossible to see. We were living testimonials to the message scrawled on the wall back at Staff Sgt. Bader’s issue point, WITHOUT SUPPLY YOU WILL DIE.” 

Williams spends much of the memoir worrying over gear. He also worries that the Corps is not taking care of them and providing them with all the gear they need. The gear listed in the quote is gear the soldiers bought for themselves from a private company outside Camp Lejeune—without it, they might have died, unable to breathe, blind, ears clogged with sand. The quote at the end is ironic—though Williams has learned the value of gear, the Marine Corps hasn’t provided it. 

“I know now that organization and order are not prerequisites for battle. We had experienced the same combat chaos that U.S. Marines have experienced for two hundred years, spanning dozens of generations, battles, and landscapes. It is something all Marines have to experience personally before they can function fully within that environment. We were fortunate to have had the time and space to gain that experience in the absence of casualties. Our active duty counterparts were not so lucky.” 

In the first few days of the war, the Marines and other military personnel experienced deaths through friendly fire and other mishaps. Williams has been worrying about his training, but sees that during combat, even the best-trained troops, without real combat experience, will make mistakes that can lead to death. Though he has been worrying constantly about the lack of training, he also realizes he is lucky to have been given time to acclimate to combat without more serious injuries and deaths.

“Beyond the edge of the berm there were minefields and booby traps, trenches and bunkers, mortars and artillery, rifles and machine guns, grenades and flamethrowers, tanks and armored vehicles, and God knows what else […] I felt as I had been abducted by the monster of war. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t ready. I was going right into the fiery hell beyond that berm.”

Williams’s journey from campus to combat has led him here. He is often unprepared. He often feels untrained, or not trained well enough. Here, he realizes he will never be fully prepared. He lists all the dangers as a way of coping with the anxiety, in much the same way he lays out his gear the night before drill weekend. He wants to be prepared for all eventualities, but there, beyond the berm, is a land that can literally erupt under his feet. Bombs can fall from the sky, and bullets can come careening out of the desert with no warning. Much of the book is about a journey, and here is the most perilous journey Williams faces: into the unknown, into combat, into a place for which he cannot prepare. 

“For some time that night I lay awake thinking […] second-guessing […] crying

and praying. Back at the ditch the recovery vehicle’s winches whined as

Red Two righted, and the chopper blades thumped as they flew Doc and

Nagel out. The ground vibrated soothingly as bombs exploded far away,

and shook violently as rounds impacted closer to the berm. They didn’t

matter. Nothing mattered to me at that point—unless, of course, one should

fall in between my dunes. But even that, as long as it was quick and

painless, wouldn’t have mattered. At times I would have even welcomed it.” 

All of Williams’s fears have come true. His lack of training, lack of gear, and poor leadership by Nagel have caused him to roll the LAV. At this point, Williams doesn’t know that Marines all over the desert have been rolling their LAVs. He is lost in self-pity, blaming himself for the failure, for the injuries of Doc and Nagel, and for letting down the Corps. It’s important that Williams blames himself, not the Corps, for his failure. He has complained constantly about the lack of training yet when he fails, he blames himself, not others. He takes responsibility, like he feels a Marine should. 

“The smog from the burning oil wells blanketed the sky, hanging just below black rain clouds, making even the night sight ineffective during midday. That left me driving with my head popped just above the safety of the armor,

straining my eyes to avoid the hazards of the battlefield and keep us on the path into Kuwait City.” 

This quote shows several aspects of war. The first is that Saddam Hussein sabotaged oil wells instead of letting US troops capture them, which turned the landscape into a burning hell. Secondly, even though Williams has just rolled the LAV, he is forced to drive it unsafely, with his head popped out, because his gear doesn’t work. Finally, metaphorically, Williams can’t see where he is going. He is driving blind, into the unknown. 

“The people of Kuwait had endured much more than I could ever imagine.

Seven months of torture, rape, and murder. Did anyone back in the States

really understand?” 

When Williams sees the murder and rape rooms in Kuwait City, he has several realizations. One is that people back home don’t have to worry about things such as this. Another is that he is protecting them from things like this. He also realizes that he would never have understood until he saw it. And finally, he is giving himself a glimpse of his own future, when the war is over, and he goes back to the States. People he knows won’t be able to understand, because they haven’t seen it. 

“At school the lines between my identity as a teacher and Marine were blurred. After two years running the boot camp program as an alternative physical education class for the students with conduct disorders, it had evolved into a Young Marines program—the official youth program of the United States Marines Corps.”

Since joining the Marines, Williams has had trouble separating his civilian and Marine identities. He has trouble reintegrating after drill weekends, and especially after Desert Storm, and he has trouble finding the energy to go to drill after a month of civilian life. But here, Williams has finally managed to integrate the two. He has brought the Marine Corps into his civilian job, and he is giving back to the Marine Corps what he believes the Corps gave to him: discipline, education, and, most importantly, a sense of belonging for troubled kids, which Williams himself was after his brother died.

“Dr. Miller encouraged me to talk about feeling unprepared, incompetent, and powerless during the war—the themes he believed were fueling my nightmares.” 

Feelings of unpreparedness, incompetence, and powerlessness run throughout the book. Williams often feels unprepared because of lack of training. He feels incompetent when he fails. And he often feels powerless—during boot camp, during reserve drills, and during combat. It’s only after Williams learns about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that he is able to analyze his anxieties, his nightmares, and his stress, and find strategies to cope with them.