In the tradition of A Long Gray Line and Friday Night Lights, Making the Corps chronicles the powerful forces that transform a group of raw recruits from wildly different backgrounds into a single unit of fiercely proud Marines.

Boot camp, says one Parris Island drill instructor, is a kind of war. The enemy: selfish, un-Marine-like values that Marine recruits bring with them. In Making the Corps, Thomas E. Ricks takes us to the front lines of that war. Following a single platoon of new arrivals from their arrival on Parris Island through their first full year as members of the Corps, Ricks guides us on an eye-level tour of America's most hallowed rite of passage. From the white supremacist from Alabama to the black Muslim from Washington, D.C., to the tough Irish-Catholic kid from Boston, every man faces tests of courage, confidence, discipline, and endurance — tests that strip away his past and stamp him forever as a United States Marine.

Written with driving force, full of richly drawn characters, and thick with insights into race, class, and the military's relationship with the larger culture, Making the Corps is a triumph, a journey through the heart of an American myth that will be a classic of its kind.

Semper Fi. The few, the proud. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Once a Marine, always a Marine. The United States Marine Corps, with its fiercely proud tradition of excellence in combat, its hallowed rituals, and its unbending code of honor, is part of the fabric of American myth. No other group in America leaves so deep and permanent a mark on its members. Today, though, the Marine Corps feels increasingly besieged, at war with a new kind of enemy the vast social and political forces that it feels threaten to destroy its values. Making the Corps visits the front lines of that war: boot camp, Parris Island, South Carolina, "where the difference begins." Here, old values are stripped away and new, Marine Corps values, forged. Acclaimed military journalist Thomas E. Ricks follows sixty-three raw recruits, the men of recruit platoon 3086, from their hometowns to Parris Island, through boot camp, and into their first year as Marines. As three fierce drill instructors fight a battle for the hearts and minds of this unforgettable group of young men, a larger picture emerges, brilliantly painted, of the growing gulf that divides the military from the rest of America.

Thomas Ricks is one of America's most esteemed military journalists. A Wall Street Journal Pentagon correspondent, he has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and awarded a Society of Professional Journalists Award for his writing on the Marines. He lectures widely to military officers and is a member of Harvard University's Senior Advisory Council on the Project on U.S. Civil-Military Relations. He lives outside of Washington D.C. with his wife and two children.