Pickup day shows
candidates the stress

By Christian Lowe / Times staff writer

“Make no mistake about it, you will fear my staff.”

With those words, all hell broke loose.

Maj. Vincent Ciuccoli’s warning couldn’t have possibly prepared the new officer candidates for what they were about to endure. The commander of Charlie Company had worked with his staff to coordinate every step of the controlled mayhem that is “pickup.”

And while the would-be officers had done whatever research they could to get a glimpse of what this day would bring, there’s no way to truly know until you’ve actually gone through it.

The instructors want it to be a surprise. And for the men and women of Officer Candidates Course Class 186, it was.

At Ciuccoli’s orders, the sergeant instructors – the Officer Candidates School equivalent of the enlisted Marine’s drill instructor – descend upon the candidates like hungry wolves, barking orders in staccato bursts, howling at the candidates to exit the stiflingly hot classroom at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.

The screech of metal chairs scraping against the room’s aged concrete floor competes with the eye-popping shouts of the instructors and the bewildered candidates shuffle to the door.

“Get outside! Get outside now!”

More than 250 candidates squeeze through the small, single door, each fighting not to be the last one out – you definitely don’t want to be caught dawdling. Get into a sergeant instructor’s sights on this day, and you’re doomed.

‘Don’t eyeball me!’

Pickup is intended to be a test of a candidate’s ability to handle the high stress of leading Marines.

In the madness of that first day, instructors aim to show the class how tough it can be to think while your senses are overloaded. Try making your bed (a “rack” in Marine-speak) in 10 seconds or less, as the sweat pours off your forehead and you try to make the most of the briefest of explanations of how it’s supposed to look.

No one ever gets it right. No one ever has enough time.

“Simple tasks become almost impossible,” Victor Sosa, a 28-year-old candidate from Omaha, Neb., recalled. “Just opening up an ALICE pack and getting out a notebook with a gunnery sergeant screaming in your ear and sweat beading down your face takes two to three times longer than if you stopped and calmly took it out with no pressure on you.”

As the candidates “fast walk” to the parade deck just outside their barracks, the sergeant instructors – all former enlisted drill instructors – are already beginning to get hoarse. One sounds like a frog, another can only blurt out a sort of high-pitched whine.

But the candidates can sure hear them loud and clear: It’s “contraband check” time.

Each candidate is ordered into the squad bay to gather up every piece of gear they brought with them or were issued when they arrived.

Cell phones, watches and other personal items are catalogued and stored. Web belts, canteens, ponchos and sea bags are accounted for. In the confusion, some candidates drop items or forget them. You can see the terror in their eyes when a flashlight that’s supposed to be there isn’t.

In an instant, the sergeant instructors are on the wayward newbies.

“What do you mean you don’t have your moonbeam?! Where is your moonbeam?!” the hats shout in each ear.

“They’re playing in stereo,” whispers one of the officers watching the chaos.

After contraband check, it’s back into the squad bay, a sea of hot, steamy bodies fumbling through their paces amid the squeak of boots on linoleum floors.

It’s in the squad bay where the real fun begins.

“Don’t eyeball me! Do I look good to you!?” shouts Gunnery Sgt. Ruben Velez, 38, of Buffalo, N.Y., chief instructor for Charlie Company’s 4th Platoon.

“Oh, so it’s ‘Semper-I’ right?! It’s all about me!” another instructor growls.

The trauma continues well into the night.

Fortunately, the stress gradually eases as the candidates get deeper into their education on life as a Marine officer.

For Sosa, it wasn’t until the third week that the the constant yelling didn’t frazzle him.

“Just something as simple as getting dressed in the morning used to take us a long time,” Sosa recalled. “When I first got here, it took us 10 minutes to get dressed, and usually I was running outside with one boot on, one boot off and dressing as I’m running outside to the parade deck.

“And just one day you realize ...,” he said, “the gunnery sergeant’s still counting down, but you are already dressed, and you’re waiting for him to be done counting down.

“That was a really good feeling when I was done, and I looked around and there were other candidates still struggling a little bit.”