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Winter to the Corps The marines' mountain warfare training center is the ultimate test for some of the world's toughest troops: a make-it-or-leave regimen of backcountry ski combat, torturous night maneuvers, and deadly cold. Any volunteers? By Mark Jenkins
It's meant to be a joke, kind of, but the marines, 20 of them, are too cold to laugh. They're standing in a foot of snow in a clearing in central Alaska. It's 3 p.m.—already dusk, the sky and the snow an ice-pale blue, another endless arctic night descending. The temperature is minus 15, with a scalpel-like breeze, and the marines are doing everything they possibly can to stay warm: stamping their white skis, clapping their heavily mittened hands, turtling their balaclava'd heads into their hunched shoulders. The men aspire to become instructors at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. After months of classes and exercises at the center, about 20 miles north of Yosemite, they've been flown up to Alaska to find out if they have what it takes to teach at the toughest school in the Corps. Captain Culp, 35, a lean, tall Texan, could pass for a country singer. Now Captain Justin Anderson—29 years old, 215 pounds, with flat eyes and a redbrick corner of a nose, the reincarnation of a 19th-century Scottish boxer—steps forward. Anderson comes from a military family—one uncle took shrapnel to the head in Korea, one uncle was gut shot in Vietnam. Anderson would have joined the Marines right out of high school if his parents hadn't insisted he go to college. So he did, at the Citadel. "Marines! If you're cold it's your fault!" The clouds of Captain Anderson's breath swirl in front of his face. "Now fucking pay attention, this is how it's supposed to be done! Sergeant Tooby." Colour Sergeant Steven Tooby, 34, is a British Royal Marine with a scarlet face, who refuses to wear a hat no matter how damn cold it is. Instead Tooby wears an indomitable, elfish smirk. He can ski like a Swede, telemark like a Norwegian, curse like a sailor, and gladly informs any marine at any time how "'orribly foken bahd" he's fucking up. Tooby raises an arm and four skiers in white arctic camo come gliding into the clearing in single file. Even the M-16s strapped across their chests have been carefully wrapped in white tape. Suddenly the lead skier is firing—crack-crack-crack-crack-crack—and the ejected shells arc into the snow. The second skier has already veered right, dropped to one knee, swung his poles forward, planted them in an X, set his M-16 in the notch, and is firing. In seconds the team is fanned out and advancing; three skiers provide cover fire while one bounds forward, kneels, and starts shooting. The fighters hopscotch forward, swiftly skiing and shooting their way toward a line of green cardboard targets—silhouettes of enemy soldiers—at the far end of the clearing. It's a deadly display of precise choreography. This is a live-fire immediate-action drill; if any of these guys were to trip, slip, or miscalculate, they could instantly execute a fellow marine. They start retreating. Again, three skiers provide cover fire while one drops back, kneels, makes the ski-pole X, and begins firing while another marine is falling back. They retreat all the way back into the trees; silence returns to the snow-laden landscape. I'm standing to the side with 35-year-old Major Craig Kozeniesky—"Major K," the boss—and Captain Mike Andretta, 27, his second-in-command. I peer through my monocular at the cardboard soldiers. In their chests are ragged holes the size of silver dollars. Culp, Anderson, and Tooby stare dourly at the huddle of marines. The four who just performed are their finest instructors. They created them. Someday a few of the men gathered before them might be that good, and thus qualified to teach other marines how to fight in the mountain cold. "So!" Captain Anderson says, cocking his square head, "Sergeant Tooby and I don't care if your tits are frozen solid! Your job is to do what they just did."
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