The Ceremony of Drill: Art and Ritual, Performed With Snap

WASHINGTON —  How glorious: all the fine young men marching across the lawns of Washington--Ft. Myer, the Ellipse, the Iwo Jima Memorial, the Marine Barracks and so on. It is summer now, and time for the evening parades and twilight tattoos.

How sad, too: Close-order drill is a ritual from a lost era, like fox hunting. It is a souvenir of both the 18th-Century dream of a clockwork universe and the ancient Greek dream of a world in which wars would be decided by courage and discipline.

“It’s like they’re robots,” an eighth-grader named Arnaud Voermans said recently, as he watched the sentries at the Tomb of the Unknowns do their ponderous strut through a light rain.

“It’s like they’re walking on air,” said Jennifer Willett, a classmate at Brigantine North School in New Jersey. They were here on a class trip. They had just laid a wreath in front of the tomb. Now they watched the sentry march 21 paces back and forth, a floating robot, a mechanical ghost who executed each step on the side of his foot, not the heel, then rolled the foot in, each foot touching a single imaginary line, as if he were not only walking a tightrope but trying to do it without waking anybody up.

This is the gait of ceremonial drill, a gait practiced by both the Army and the Marines--the Marines call it “slide and glide.” The idea is to keep the head from bobbing, to get men and rifles moving together with an evenness that looks lethally self-conscious. It’s part of the infinitely detailed aesthetics of American drill, delicate and implacable at the same time, a balancing of rigidity and ease.

In Washington, drill is part of the city’s life, like the theater in New York. Troops have always gone through “the usual maneuvers in a masterly manner,” in the words of a newspaper describing the Marines parading past Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1801. The ritual at the Tomb of the Unknowns will end only when America ends. Dress-blues platoons slide through the winter twilights of inaugural parades like Kodachrome ghosts with their red ears and white gloves, the same white gloves that fold flags over coffins at Arlington National Cemetery, in the manner of the disembodied hands that appear in cartoons to paint a picture across the screen, although at Arlington Cemetery the picture is a flag that gets smaller and smaller until it is nothing but a fat triangle of blue stars being handed to a widow.

Heels crack--Army heels, at least, with the metal clickers on them. The Marines don’t do that. They bang rifle butts, however. When done well, a platoon of rifle butts at once, this movement makes a crisp crashing noise. When done very well, on the concrete troop walk at 8th and I streets, it makes a sort of wet pop, like the sound of a bone breaking.

The command for this is “order arms.”

HHhhO . . . Oooorrderrr . . . Then comes an utterance that is theoretically the word “arms.” Actually, it is a hoarse bark that is driven upward by the officer’s diaphragm with such pneumatic force that you expect to see a wisp of vapor trailing from his mouth like the mist from a pop-top soda can.

The butts come down. The Friday night audience at the Marine Barracks goes, “Ahh.”

Drill teaches discipline but it no longer moves troops across battlefields. It is a technology that has become art by virtue of its uselessness. It is a sacrament for remembering heroes and burying our dead. It is performed all over America: by Girl Scouts in berets doing the endless, earnest shuffle of dress right, dress; by color guards marching out at the start of banquets, bridge dedications and playoff games to do that slow, wheeling high-step reminiscent of pistons working inside some old ship’s engine room; by ROTC types in chromed helmet liners and sunglasses, and by old American Legion guys who fire a ragged salute on Memorial Day while little kids crawl around their feet, grabbing the ejected brass shells.

In Washington, the Navy, the Air Force and the Coast Guard have their color guards and drill teams, but the serious drill is done by the Army and the Marines.

They hold each other in contempt.

“If you want to know about drill, there’s two places you ask,” says Marine Gunnery Sgt. D.L. Hall. “The Marines of 8th and I, and Black & Decker.”

Says Army Sgt. 1st Class James P. Savage, at Ft. Myer: “I can show you Marines when we have joint-service ceremonies, you got to beat it into them with a baseball bat. The Army is the senior service, much as the Marines don’t like to hear it. In the Military District of Washington, the Army will be the overseer of ceremonies.”

“In the winter, they wear earmuffs,” says a Marine sergeant.

“The Marines have done a good job of advertising themselves,” says Army Maj. Tom Askins.

The Army and Marines work with the same commands and basic movements. Their art is founded on the ideal of perfection, an 18th-Century aesthetic that got buried in the great landfill of 19th-Century romanticism and 20th-Century modernism, whose Promethean struggle and alienated individualism are not encouraged by drill instructors.

Army Staff Sgt. James White gets a biblical lilt in his voice as he stands in a parking lot addressing a platoon of young soldiers who are learning to drill the Ft. Myer way: “Everything needs to be precise. When it’s precise, then we create precision. Who has to make a correction and who does not have to make a correction? Who has accomplished the mission? Who got it right the first time? I want to hear one pop, all together.”

You see and hear perfection when drill has a quality that gets described with words like “tight” or “locked on” or “crispy” or “snap.” The 14th revised edition of the Guidebook for Marines defines “snap” as: “In commands or signals, the quality that inspires immediate response. In drill, the immediate and smart execution of movement.”

Snap is to drill as swing is to jazz, an unmeasurable but conspicuous precision that gives you a rush you have to feel to understand. It can happen toward the end of basic training, when your platoon is out drilling for the millionth time and suddenly it comes together, it feels like the moment when your airplane lifts off the ground, a smoothness, a sense of possibility and infinite vista, oddly enough, given the fact that all you can see is the head of the man in front of you, the stubbled phrenology of the military world view. Nothing can stop you, and you can’t do anything wrong. Power and virtue, together at last, rifles cracking from shoulder to shoulder. The men in front of you wheel into a column left, the platoon curling 90 degrees with the deft tidiness of a Slinky going downstairs. You know that when you hit the pivot point you’ll turn with the same bite. It has a satisfaction that verges on the smug.

Snap comes from attention to detail: the thumbtacks holding the cloth tight on a dress cap; the corsets that the Army wears--for back support, they say, but it’s hard to imagine they haven’t noticed the look that they create; the safety pins at the waists of trousers to get the bottoms just touching the shoes, but never breaking; the blacking on the bottoms of shoes; white gloves in a perfect row down a rank standing at parade rest; the men on burial details lifting weights six hours a day and drilling with empty caskets so that the full ones float from church to hearse to grave with the rectilinear ease of a cursor moving across a computer screen. At Eighth and I, the Marines rehearse the evening parade twice each Friday morning, with critiquers scoring the execution of each command, then reviewing the second rehearsal on videotape.

Members of ceremonial drill units usually stand within an inch of six feet tall. Even those differences are hidden by lining men up by height, front to back and right to left. If a man lowers his head too far when looking down to fix bayonets, he is taught not to correct himself even a fraction of inch, lest there be a visible shift in the crescent of light reflecting from the visor of his dress cap. Better to be wrong and look right than the reverse.

One civilian in 10,000 can see the differences between Marine and Army drill, but they are profound and philosophical, like the differences between the Spartans and the Athenians.

The Marines favor a severely classical drill, a style that impresses you with its modesty, not its difficulties. It values clarity and directness (with occasional bits of bombast like the spotlighted bugler playing taps on the Barracks parapet). It is Apollonian to the point of being forbidding, of Blake’s “fearful symmetry.” To the Army, it may well look mechanical to the point of arrogance.

Army ceremonial drill has more texture to it. Rifle butts ease to the ground. There’s a tendency to add a subliminal curve here, a hint of a pause there, until the simplest of gestures, such as a salute by the corporal of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns, acquires a mysterious gravity. In facing movements, heels may flare out a little more than necessary--a mannerist touch that comes from the same instinct that leads boys to customize cars. The slide and glide of the Tomb sentries can have a catlike delicacy. To Marine purists, it may look a little cute.

Several years ago, the Army decided that flag details were folding flags too quickly at the ends of funerals.

“We used to do it in 60 seconds. It was too showboaty,” says Staff Sgt. Kenneth Moomey. “We shoot for 90 seconds on the flag fold. We’re averaging 88 seconds.”

Drill is both art and ritual--art in its working out of meaningful forms, ritual in the way that it is intended to change not just the people who do it but the people who see it. (Gen. George Patton said in 1945: “Ceremonies are important as a means of impressing our enemies, our allies and our own troops.”) Drill also fits into a category that anthropologist John M. Roberts calls “judged display,” like figure skating, the Miss America pageant, or jams and jellies at the state fair. On the other hand, we don’t think of judged displays as having larger, metaphorical meaning, the way drill does.

It doesn’t matter that we can’t quite define drill. Its meaning is so clear in our minds that we never question it. Anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists don’t study it. (Imagine the dissertations that would fill libraries if close-order drill were done by the Eskimos or 19th-Century slum dwellers or the insane.) We take it for granted, maybe because it has been part of Western thinking at least since the ancient Greeks.

“The Greeks believed they were morally superior because of the way they fought,” says Victor Hanson, author of a new book called “The Western Way of War-Infantry Battle in Classical Greece.” Drill was a practical matter of teaching troops to fight in the tight formations called phalanxes, which drove over their enemies by sheer pushing power and discipline. “The way they did drill was more complicated than it is now, but they did it in cadence, like us, with flute players setting the time, and a large variety of commands--raise spears, relax spears, that kind of thing.”

Despite the persistent legend that wily American sharpshooters defeated the British in their drilled formations, George Washington recognized early on that the war could not be won by farmers hiding behind trees. He asked Baron von Steuben to take Frederick the Great’s drill and make it suitable for his volunteers. Von Steuben believed that each country’s drill should reflect the “natural genius” of its people, hence the American style with its ordinary gestures and common-man simplicity, as opposed to the German goose step, or the huge and hearty arm swing of the British. When American drill is good it looks effortless.

Western soldiers continued to fight in drilled formations until about the time of the American Civil War, when rifling increased the range and accuracy of military muskets so radically that troops were slaughtered if they did not take cover. The mass use of the machine gun in World War I was the final blow to most stand-up maneuvering by troops under fire, although British generals thought it suitable for the Battle of the Somme, in which 14,000 troops, advancing at a walk, were killed in the first 10 minutes of the battle.

Still, we do it. Drill has remained as the cheapest item on the basic-training curriculum, and as a means of teaching discipline and leadership.

“The importance of close-order drill could not be overestimated,” writes Col. David Hackworth, the most-decorated hero of Vietnam, in his autobiography, “About Face.” He recalls: “I was so proud to be a cog in that finely tuned machine. I loved the discipline: the relentless repetition--basic drills reinforced again and again--that conditioned a soldier to react to orders not only on the parade field but on the battlefield as well.”

It is an art of obedience, not responsibility. You do what you’re told, and only what you’re told. A million recruits have heard the preparatory command “forward” and have stepped off expecting “march,” only to find themselves walking across a parade field in a silence that will be broken by a sergeant shouting, “Do not anticipate the command.”