A tribe requires young men to undergo a rite of passage, a time in the wilderness overseen by the elders. This rite for Marines is Officer Candidate School or boot camp. The elders are drill instructors and they are feared, and at their hand is the next generation shaped. A tribe requires veneration of elders. These elders wear their status on their collars and their history on their chests. A tribe requires its warriors to cut their hair all the same distinctive way. A tribe allows you to mark yourself once you have been accepted. Those markings on biceps and triceps and chests are burned in with needles and ink and celebrate the tribe above self. A tribe requires blood oath. A tribe venerates its past in song and story. Marines sing of the Halls of Montezuma and stand straight and celebrate those who fell. A tribe has a defined path to rule, overseen by the chieftains. These Marine chieftains are generals and Sergeants Major and their word is handed from on high by oral and written tradition, and it is followed without hesitation, and that path to rule is beset by strife and fear and blood. A tribe has its own language, impossible by design for the uninitiated to understand. Only members of the tribe may speak that language. It is stripped down from normal speech into a patois of slang, insult, shorthand and icon, and refers constantly to rites and shared past an outsider has not experienced and never could. A tribe celebrates the drawing of blood and the defense of its warriors, and there is no individual veneration without his trial benefitting the group. A tribe is swift in excommunication of those who cannot compete. A tribe exists to continue itself and that which it finds true, exports violence, and rewards death. A tribe does not care about the individual warrior. The tribe protects itself. The warriors will die without hesitation for one another, and for the tribe. Those who do so are the basis of the songs and stories and the sacred texts. March 2003: Six hours before I heard my first shot fired in anger and saw my first dead body I awoke in the dark crystal of desert night, looking straight up from my hole on the Kuwait-Iraq border. Bombers were flying north, hundreds of them, too high for me to hear them and heading for Baghdad, and when they got right above me their rotating red lights winked off and they went black and silent when they crossed into war.
