“I Don’t Think I Would Have Recovered”

Theoretical Schema: Human Agency

We approached the research design of the study using a theory of human agency that is grounded in a new realist philosophy of natural and social science. ³ This requires explanation of human action to be at the level of the whole person in sociocultural context, precludes treating humans mechanistically, and precludes reductive approaches unless “they include connectability across theoretical schemes and derivability.” ⁴ One important implication of this schema is that explanations of human action must account for variability and choice. There is no point in searching for universal forces that generate stress or resilience at the level of sociocultural activity. This is in part because action at the level of the whole person (e.g., the choice to throw oneself on a hand grenade) cannot be reduced to parts of the person (e.g., genes or neurology) without an account of how schematic levels are connected and how an effect could be materially derived (e.g., gene expression producing social action). Genetics, neurology, prior history, social structures, and so on, are not irrelevant; rather, they are conditions and context for the enactment of human agency.

Stress and Resilience in the Literature

We offer the following table (Table 1) of common levels of analysis for resilience as a way to orient readers to the breadth of general literature on resilience.

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Table 1.

Common Analytical Categories of Resilience.

Common Levels of Analysis for Resilience
National	Ability to resist threat, to sustain function, or return to function after disaster. Concerned with systems, infrastructure, and national psychologya
Community	Ability to recover from or adapt to disaster, adversity, or change. Concerned with systems, infrastructure, and resources, but also social aspects of belonging. Alternatively conceived of as an interactive social processb
Family/Unit	Risk or protective processes that reinforce individual capacity to cope with adversity or recover from adversity. Additive to individual resilience, and more than the sum of the partsc
Person	Personal capacity to resist, to adapt to, or to recover from adversity as an interpersonal, social process,d or capacity or traits for resisting or recovering from trauma or disease as a biological or psychological quality or traite

Note: ^aD. Canetti, I. Waismel-Manor, N. Cohen, and C. Rapaport, “What Does National Resilience Mean in a Democracy? Evidence from the United States and Israel,” Armed Forces & Society 2013, accessed June 8, 2013, doi:10.1177/0095327X12466828; Reuven Gal, “Social Resilience in Times of Protracted Crises: An Israeli Case Study,” Armed Forces & Society 2013, accessed June 8, 2013, doi:10.1177/0095327X13477088; Sandra Walkate, Ross McGarry, and Gabe Mythen, “Searching for Resilience: A Conceptual Excavation,” Armed Forces & Society 2013, accessed June 8, 2013, doi:10.1177/0095327X12465419. ^bAnita Chandra, Building Community Resilience to Disasters: A Way Forward to Enhance National Health Security (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corp, 2011); F. H. Norris, S. P. Stevens, B. Pfefferbaum, K. F. Wynche, and R. L. Pfefferbaum,“Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness,” American Journal of Community Psychology 41, 1-2 (2008): 127-50, accessed June 8, 2013, doi: 10.1007/s10464-007-9156-6. ^cAmy Adler, Carl Andrew Castro, and Dennis McGurk, “Time-driven Battlemind Psychological Debriefing: A Group-level Early Intervention in Combat,” Military Medicine 174, 1 (2009): 21-28; Lisa Meredith, Cathy D. Sherbourne, and Sarah J. Gaillot, Promoting Psychological Resilience in the US Military (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corp, 2011). ^dBrenda Major, Caroline Richards, Lynne Cooper, Catherine Cozzarelli, and Josephine Zubek, “Personal Resilience, Cognitive Appraisals, and Coping: An Integrative Model of Adjustment to Abortion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, 3 (1998): 735. ^fJ. R. Davidson, V. M. Payne, K. M. Connor, E. B. Foa, B. O. Rothbaum, M. A. Hertzberg, and R. H. Weisler, “Trauma, Resilience and Saliostasis: Effects of Treatment in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder,” International Clinical Psychopharmacology 20, 1 (2005): 43; C. Olsson, L. Bond, J. Burns, D. Vella-Brodrick, and S. Sawyer. “Adolescent Resilience: A Concept Analysis,” Journal of Adolescence 26, 1 (2003): 1-11.

Within this broad range of categories for resilience, there is little agreement on exactly what resilience is. The term is used in multiple, distinct ways, including “bouncing back” from shock or disruption, synonymously with flexibility under stress, the ability to manage risk, and the positive capacity to perform well holistically. ⁵ A shared assumption however is that resilience involves potential threats and then better or worse outcomes. Regarding outcomes, framing resilience in evolutionary terms may be powerful for many scientific questions, but its application to our species can be obscuring. For example, defining “better or worse outcomes” in terms of individual survival or species reproduction cannot account for Marines choosing to sacrifice themselves for values other than survival. Thus in exploring resilience, we must also discuss what constitute potential threats (stressors), and better or worse outcomes (e.g., personal growth, wisdom, vs. post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD], and suicide) in terms of Marine or military values, not in terms of sheer survival or reproduction.

Much of the literature on resilience at the level of persons uses the evolutionary frame noted previously, often explaining resilience in terms of the parts of human organisms: An entity or subsystem of an entity responds automatically to a stressor, and resilience conceptualized as a protective factor against pathology or behaviors that jeopardize the organism. Given our theoretical position and need to explain variable, complex human action, stress response theory, two-factor learning theory, cognitive and information processing models of trauma, and limbic hypersensitivity models have little relevance in explaining resilience at the level of the whole person. ⁶ Nash and Baker (2007) give an excellent overview of reductionist models and why such models are unlikely to carry the day in fully explaining stress and resilience. ⁷ While there is descriptive value in neurobiological exploration of stress, for example, how a malfunctioning hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPAA) challenges exercising personal agency, there is no causal connection to a Marine deciding to take his own life: the brain’s material capacity cannot be conflated with the person’s linguistically based, sociocultural capabilities. Thus, a Marine’s capacity to decide she has failed her comrades requires the perceptual capacities enabled by the brain, but the decision is conceptual and comprehensible solely through language, social conventions, and values. ⁸

Instead, our work is grounded in a holistic research tradition that treats resilience as a culturally based way of being that is inseparable from personal and group intentions, values, and purposes: discursive, social interactions that lead to better or worse outcomes in the face of stressors as they are defined by participants themselves, for example, Ungar’s mixed methods global study of youth resilience across cultures, Bonanno et al.’s clinical psychology study of resilience among adults involved in the 9/11 disaster, and Huey, Fthenos, and Hryniewicz’s empirical study of the agency and capacity for resilience of homeless women who have been the victims of sexual assault. ⁹ Saliently in this literature, the level of analysis is the whole person, not parts or subsystems; the quality and meaning of behavior is not forced into a evolutionarily defined binary of “better or worse”; an etiology of pathology model is rejected even as the possibility of clinical outcomes is acknowledged; analysis accounts for sociocultural context; and by acknowledging human agency and personal/group resources, variability (and the possibility of growth and coping—or not) is accounted for.

Our terminology for describing qualities and characteristics of resilient Marines—hardiness, meaning-making, coping, social support, and flexibility—associated with what might be termed “better” outcomes for Marines—are consonant with psychometric literature on personal resilience. ¹⁰ But we use them to index the agentic, discursive practices of Marines in social interaction, not neuro/psychological functions or traits.

Methods and Data Selection

We employed a mixed methods approach using semistructured interviews and focus groups to construct personal and community understandings of resilience. Our methods included appraisal analysis to identify values, semantico-pragmatic analysis to identify participant understanding of agent/patient relationships within Marine culture; computational linguistic analysis of documents; and observation and participant observation to detect rich points for analysis and construct new interpretive frames for action. ¹³ Such mixed methods are rigorous and trustworthy to the degree they meet criteria for credibility in data collection, transferability through thickness of description, dependability in data selection and sampling, and confirmability in findings and data management (corresponding to quantitative criteria for internal validity, external validity, reliability, and objectivity). ¹⁴ Qualitative research methods like interviews do not produce anecdotes, but rather relevant data for the object of inquiry: people. In developing an explanatory theory of resilience at the level of the person, quantitative measurements of parts (e.g., blood cortisol levels or functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]) can be at best of secondary importance.

Our research sites were the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot, Parris Island (MCRDPI), South Carolina; and Officer Candidate School (OCS), Quantico, Virginia. We included one advanced training site, the Martial Arts Center of Excellence (MACE), Quantico, Virginia, opportunistically. The instructor cadre at these schools is composed mostly of enlisted Marines. Trainees at MCRDPI are contractually Marines but civilian in value orientation, while trainees at OCS are civilians applying to be officers in the Corps. Trainees at the MACE are mostly enlisted Marines with several years of experience in the Corps.

We conducted individual interviews with twenty-six instructors from all three schools—including Drill Instructors (DIs) and staff officers, and focus groups interviews with twelve DIs-in-training at MCRDPI, and twelve recruits at MCRDPI, and eleven civilian officer candidates at OCS. (One officer participated opportunistically after hearing about the project.) ¹⁵ Interviews averaged 1 and 1.5 hours and were conducted from May to October 2012. We attempted to interview participants twice, using a comparative approach to prompt more in-depth conversation, and so bring Marines’ conceptions into better focus (e.g., interviewing recruits at MCRD at the beginning and end of their thirteen-week training). ¹⁶ While we possessed a question set, the Marines and trainees usually needed only an initial open-ended question like, “What is stressful for you?” to open up a wide-ranging conversation. Such naturalistic data collection springs from our research approach. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, and we kept ethnographic field notes. ¹⁷ We sought precision of meaning in our analysis, and checked our interpretations with participants, for example, “Last time we talked, you told us stress was X. Through other interviews, we heard it was Y, what do you make of those two different answers?” Participants variably revised, refined, or defended their answers, accepted multiple possible answers, or said they didn’t know. Ultimately, our measure of success in this project is whether Marines recognize themselves and their ways of life in our interpretations.

The Personal and Social Dynamics of Resilience

One Marine respondent was an artillery lieutenant during the war in Iraq, his unit serving an “in-lieu-of ” mission as provisional infantry. ¹⁸ While leading a convoy, he decided to travel in the first vehicle rather than in his usual spot, the second vehicle. An Improvised Explosive Device (IED) hit the second vehicle, wounding the Marines, including one critically. The blast left the lieutenant and his driver concussed, and the driver blacked out, crashing their Humvee. The lieutenant was unable to respond coherently for a few minutes.

On recovering, the lieutenant began to execute immediate actions learned during training, for example, assessing causalities, calling for medical evacuation (medevac), setting up a security perimeter, and calling in the Quick Response Force (QRF). QRFs are composed of infantry Marines, trained, equipped, and poised to respond to any developing situation. Our respondent described them as “steely-eyed Marines.”

Some years later, the lieutenant discovered that the QRF commander wrote a book about his experiences in Iraq that included an account of the convoy hitting the IED. This is how the lieutenant explained his stress:

But so when I found out that this [incident] was written about in a book I went and read it. And I was very concerned that he was going to say [I] was just…scatterbrained and dorked up…and he didn’t write that at all…He just wrote, you know, the artillery lieutenant responsible for the convoy was like, clearly elevated and aggravated. But focused on you know like, security and evac-ing his Marines who were losing a lot of blood and needed to be evac-ed, or something short like that. So I realized at that point it was important for me to have that. That took out some of the shame. I think until I read that and to the point where I was reading that scenario, I was overwhelmed with a sense of fear and anxiety and I think if he had put something else in print that—something that was more of an indictment on how I reacted or responded, I don’t think I would have recovered from it.

Neither his expectations for self-performance nor his worry about public judgment have to do with the kinds of mechanical stress triggers advanced by the Marine Corps COSC program (e.g., life threat or seeing grievously wounded comrade). The lieutenant’s stress is constituted in reflective and reflexive self-talk. He actively and intelligently assesses his performance against standards he learned socially as a Marine lieutenant. Because stress is linguistic and social, essentially a cultural practice on the part of the Marine, it can occur at any time. The publication of the book is not the cause of his worry/stress. Rather, it is an opportunity to be stressed, given his lack of knowledge of the content prior to reading it, as well as his preexisting shame at some real or imagined failure on the battlefield. His stress therefore is a choice, a way of being concerned about his status in a local moral order. His stress is expressed discursively, through his reports of enacting “being worried.” Both stressors are value based, value oriented, and social in both form and content. Ultimately, they are about meaning.

The lieutenant’s stress was not alleviated by biophysical interventions, but by the QRF commander’s judgment that the convoy leader “did what he should have done.” The lieutenant decided that his shame for what he previously considered subpar performance was mostly untenable given the judgment of a peer authority. In an important way, he alleviated his own stress by reorienting his assessment of himself, although his acceptance of the QRF commander’s judgment is only partial. However, he still harbors doubts about the quality of his performance. To answer why, we need to examine Marine cultural values.

Striving for/Expecting/Achieving Ideal Performance

We trace the lingering doubts of the lieutenant to a serious tension between idealism and realism within the Marine Corps. The lieutenant’s account of his shame did not include any substantive recognition of the concussive effects of the IED. He thought he ought to have been fully capable and thus fully responsible for his performance even after being in an explosion. He disregards the reality that human beings are susceptible, albeit variably, to blast waves. A realistic conception of the brain means that being caught in a blast wave ought to include an expectation like “performance could be compromised for a while.” Contrary to this realistic expectation, the lieutenant employed an idealistic expectation: getting hit by a blast wave is not a legitimate factor in assessing battlefield performance.

Where does this kind of idealism come from? One obvious answer is from the cultural practice of telling stories about Marine performance on the battlefield. To take an example from the public domain, consider USMC Sergeant James “Eddie” Wright, who was in an ambush in Iraq in 2004, had both hands blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade, a compound leg fracture, and arterial bleeding in his leg from shrapnel. ¹⁹ Wright did not go into either biological shock (a rapid rise in heart rate and rapid decrease in blood pressure) or psychological shock (writhing on the ground, freezing in place, and screaming). Instead, he instructed his Marines to tourniquet his wounds and then successfully led them in a fight to extract themselves from the ambush kill zone.

Such stories are regularly told officially and unofficially within the Marine Corps, as well as among former Marines. All Marines are encouraged to strive for, if not achieve, such ideal performance, where neither the limits of biology nor the horror of terrible wounds compromises performance. We think such stories serve as moral parables for Marines about what they will be expected to do on the battlefield as good Marines, carrying the implicit message that anything that can possibly compromise performance is in reality subject to the intent of the properly motivated and properly trained Marine. The lieutenant’s commitment to this idealistic message abridged his interest in distinguishing between the kind of injury that a person can choose to act in spite of (e.g., hands being blown off), and one that temporarily robs a person of certain agentic capabilities (e.g., concussed by a blast wave). Instead of assessing his performance realistically, he did so idealistically.

A realistic viewpoint leads us to disagree with the lieutenant’s self-assessment: his failure to act immediately was legitimately a function of biology, not a lack of commitment on his part. However, the lieutenant’s self-assessment makes sense socioculturally as a personal investment in being “a good combat leader.” Marines are susceptible to being stressed as they seek to enact cultural values that locate them in a moral universe as “a good ________.” These values are to be understood as ways of talking and acting to which he has committed. The lieutenant’s only partial acceptance of the judgment of the QRF commander indicates his ongoing commitment to an idealized standard for performance, and his choice to apply it retrospectively to himself.

Given our interpretation, this example suggests the necessity of including the concept of steadfastness in research on stress and resilience among military members. We define steadfastness as the dynamic, embodied pursuit of values despite alternatives. Like stress and resilience, steadfastness is variable and situationally dependent: in the above-mentioned example, the lieutenant’s disregard for the QRF commander’s positive judgment is a steadfast pursuit of an ideal value. Given their culture, pursuit of ideals is an ineliminable aspect of stress and resilience for Marines. ²⁰

Resilience After the Fact

Stress effects are not triggered in Marines by particular incidents (e.g., combat life threat or seeing dead bodies). Rather, Marines construct and actively manage what counts as a stressor by interpreting the meaning of their actions. One infantry officer told us:

I mean you always look back and you’re like did I need to do that, or you know, I made decisions that have resulted in Marines dying…but you go back and you look, and you’ve got to think OK, I can Monday morning quarterback it all I want, but in that time and place, did I make a valid decision? You know what? Yeah. If I had known a little bit more, maybe I wouldn’t have. But that’s what I knew at the time. And that’s what I went off. And sometimes you look again, and you’re like that was dumb. I will not do that again.

First, he chooses not to hold himself to an idealistic standard. His self-talk about his performance includes a value orientation toward realism: given context and circumstances, were his decisions reasonable? Second, if his self-assessment is that he did indeed fail to meet a reasonable standard, he commits to learning from the mistake. His strategy for resilience is sophisticated, adroitly navigating seemingly incompatible goals. One moral risk for Marines is to commit so strongly to the ideal that they forgo realistic self-assessments, not allowing for human fallibility or limitations. The opposite danger is to accept failure and undermine commitment to performance improvement. Our impression is that Marines are more likely to err on the side of overcommitment, but neither appears to be a good way of being resilient. This officer’s strategy for resilience simultaneously allows him to forgive himself while staying committed to being a good Marine.

Stressors Are Social and Cultural Constructs: Quitting and Achievement

We heard from new Marines at MCRDPI that a host of interrelated concepts changed for them, including what counted as a stressor. The example focuses on quitting:

Participant 5 (P5) MCRDPI: Private First Class __________. If you want to be a Marine you don’t quit…Is in civilian world the standards are a lot lower. It depends on what you do. But for pretty much the standards are a lot lower. And in the Marines the standards are high. And you have always (inaudible) one to your left or one to your right. And it’s a lot easier to keep going forward when you can look to your left or look to your right and know hey they got my back. So I’m going to keep pushing through because I still see them. They’re doing the same thing I’m doing. And in the civilian world you can be doing the buddy system like we do as Marines and recruits. And one of your buddies can just give up on you in the civilian world. But in the Marines we’re so tied together that (inaudible) give up on each other.

For these Marines, civilians allow themselves to quit. Marines do not quit because they value being responsible to and for each other and the mission. Quitting became a stressor for these new Marines in a way it never was for them as civilians, changing from an act focused on indulging the self to an act focused on dishonoring the other. They developed new ways of being, including strategies on how not to quit—how to be resilient—when values were challenged ranging from dragging an exhausted fellow Marine through a drill to not engaging in self-talk that included quitting. As concepts and sociocultural values change what counts as a stressor, Marines learn novel options both for being stressed and being resilient.

An explanation of this new reality is found in recognizing that the recruits chose to agree with their DIs that being resilient—not quitting—was what good Marines do. That agreement was grounded in their personal interest in pursuing “good Marine” as a (larger) way of being. Their goal in learning to manage the stress of exhaustion or the stress of losing focus on completing a drill was the practice of embodying their value orientation: steadfast commitment to being a Marine in the service of other Marines and their mission.

While Marines might agree on the importance of cultural values, their assessments of what counts as a legitimate performance of the value can differ individually and contextually. One example was in the different meanings of “achievement” among some Marines. Some Marines were elated to have dropped 10 seconds off a 3-mile Physical Fitness Training (PFT) run after spending weeks in training, while others were disgusted with a 10-second decrease in their PFT run time. Some Marines expected their hard work to have more of a payoff while others chose to concentrate on how the better time moved them into the top third of their unit’s collective performance.

Stress and Resilience Are Irreducibly Social

This kind of self-assessment relative to performance is a social conversation, marked by intelligent, discursive strategies. One strategy Marines employ is to talk to themselves reflexively: from the standpoint of some other person, for example, a former parent or sports coach, or an idealized community other. One trainee at the MACE was much smaller than most of his comrades. We observed him unsuccessfully struggle in a martial arts drill requiring power. When asked afterward how he was doing, he replied, “This is a tough one for me, you know I’m a lot…like smaller, you know, and I can’t get my hip in the right place…but I’m gonna get it.” “How?” we asked. “Keep going, keep pushing til I get it…I just listen to my sensei.” “What do you mean?” we asked. “My sensei, you know I took Karate when I was in high school, he taught me about not giving up, so I just listen to him.” This Marine made both a choice about whom he would listen to and an interpretation of what his sensei would have him do in the mid of his present difficulties. This resilience strategy includes a value judgment: picking the “right” virtual other for a conversation.

In another example, an instructor at OCS told us, “I hate being embarrassed. I hate it. I hate getting called out, and being [in] the skyline, and being that guy that everybody says, look at that joker, that clown, whatever. You know, I just hate it.” To be “called out” is to be publicly judged as having done something wrong or having failed to do something required. For Marines, who train like they fight and fight like they train, failing in training can be taken as prelude to failing on the battlefield, thus calling into question a Marine’s commitment to the community’s values. The strategy for this Marine is to imagine a future he wants to avoid: being the subject of his community’s negative value judgment.

In both cases, these Marines were conversing with themselves—constructing meanings about what they should and should not do, and why—in order to pursue their values. In both cases, a social other is present, reflexively. Both locate a moral “ought” in the voice of the virtual other whose imagined judgment they decide to honor. Neither Marine accepted failing in the public performance of his duties, despite having failed, though both had different strategies for what they would do in the future to make good on their commitment to not fail again. Refusal to accept failure is itself a Marine value orientation.

These Marines’ grammatical constructions locate the source of their actions—failed or not—with themselves. In putting responsibility for performance on themselves, they call forth and use cultural conventions about “how to be,” psychologically, in order to cast their intention to achieving a future performance as genuine: “determination” in the case of the Marine struggling to achieve a martial arts move, and “disgust” in the case of the Marine who hates to be embarrassed. “Listening to my sensei” and “hating to be embarrassed” coupled with the proper enactment of a culturally sanctioned emotional presentation generates a public promissory note for future performance. Such notes are then used self-referentially by Marines to refocus/focus, concentrate, and execute when the time comes. Ultimately, these Marines are staking out target moral positions for themselves—performance goals—that become reasons for remaining steadfast in the face of the ever-present threat of performance failure in the future.

Importantly, we found the practices of the experienced Marines at the MACE and OCS to be quite similar not only to those of the new Marines at MCRDPI but also to the convoy leader in Iraq. In all cases, the judgment of the community is a critical consideration in being both stressed and resilient—whether or not that judgment is real or imagined, realistic or idealistic, and brutal or kind. The source of stress, resilience, and steadfastness for Marines is the same: their concern for their place in the local moral order.

Resilient? According to Whom? Family versus Marine Corps

Though the Marine Corps focuses institutionally on combat and operations, it is unrealistic to think that the only or the worst stressors for Marines are those emerging in these two contexts. A female instructor at OCS—a single mother—told us her current assignment was the most stressful time in her life because of the tension between family and work demands. She willingly accepted a posting to OCS as an instructor specifically because she had been away from her children for much of the past two years. Her Master Sergeant (“he” in the quote mentioned subsequently) assured her that OCS would give her the work/life balance her family urgently needed:

He was just like, ‘No, everything’s filled, but I can send you to OCS. You get plenty of time off there and blah, blah, blah.’ So I’m like OK, you know, and I called up here, talked to the first couple of people. ‘Yeah, you get all this time off.’ I get here and it’s, OK, I got to send my kids away again [laughter]. So it’s rough, but, you know, I’m always going to do my job, but not so much bitter about it, but I know my kids are suffering, so now is…it…before in my career, earlier on in my career, young, you know, go, go, go, it was OK, but now it’s to the point where it’s like I’m at the back end, and when the Marine Corps is done what is my family going to think?

Though she remains committed, she implies that the Corps is not living up to its end of a bargain, somehow not recognizing her years of good service. Given this, she wonders whether her prioritization of the Corps over family will have degraded her relationship with her family and so indict her as a bad mother in the eyes of her family. Her resilience as a Marine contrasts strongly with her profound sense of failure as a mother. She told us:

I feel like I fail at work when I’m at home doing what I need to do at home, or if I have something that I have to leave work for, I feel like I’m failing work, but then when I’m at work and my kids need something I’m failing…There’s no balance. There’s no balance to it, and anybody that says that they can balance it, like, “Oh, I’m a good mother, and I’m a good Marine…” You’re going to fail at one trying to do the other, and it’s hard. It’s very, very hard because I try to do the best that I can for the Marine Corps, and I want to give the Marine Corps my best and progress, but at the same time I’ve missed out on so many things in my kids’ life.

One ambiguity is in the meaning and possible negative consequences of prioritizing the Corps over family—she knows her family may judge her negatively for her choices. Another ambiguity is about the Corps’ respect for her as a good Marine based on her placement into a single-mother-unfriendly assignment. Yet another is about her identity: the tension between the public perspective of her command, who see her as a top performer they can count on, and her private perspective as a mother who cannot be counted on.

The ambiguity of her situation may emerge from framing the value conflict as an either/or choice, a kind of idealism implied in the Corps’ cultural conventions and her misjudgment/judgment of what those conventions require or mean. In situations like these, does the Corps imply that the only choice is, in the end, the Corps? Clearly she has decided that the conflict can be resolved only by flexing in her private and family life, not in her public and professional life. Since our project did not include family, we cannot offer an interpretation of whether this Marine’s concerns about family are well founded or what this Marine’s choices mean to her children or their grandmother.

Marines Dynamically Enacting Resilience

So far we have emphasized how sociality, intelligence, language use, values, and concepts cannot be eliminated from any conception of resilience among Marines. We now turn to examples of how a special group of Marines, DIs, dynamically enact resilience together. Being a DI is highly prestigious, almost sacred duty: DIs “make” new Marines. Their success means a strong Corps, while their failure means a weak Corps. DIs usually operate in teams of three, organized into a hierarchy based on experience in training and in graduating recruit platoons, from least to most experienced: the “Third Hat,” the “Heavy Hat,” and the “Senior Hat.” ²¹ The Third Hat’s job is to demand better and more performance as he runs recruits from event to event during basic training. He challenges recruits to extend their perceived performance limits while embodying the performance standard through steadfast zeal and effort. The Heavy Hat is responsible for the good order and discipline of the platoon as well as logistics. The Senior Hat has overall responsibility for the performance of the platoon as well as the other hats.

In a community where sacrifice—of body parts, of life, of family—is a standard practice that far outweighs any thought of mere survival, it is no surprise that we heard stories about Third Hats pushing themselves too hard in pursuit of exemplary performance. We learned that the creation of a Third Hat who is resilient, who “stays in the game” over a thirteen-week training iteration, is a shared social achievement.

One Senior Hat offered some tactics he uses in order to “rest [his] Third Hats,” including sending them to the Post Exchange (PX, or convenience story) for energy drinks for the DI team, tasking them with ensuring articles of laundry were properly counted, and assigning them to oversee handling a batch of mail when recruits were otherwise occupied (e.g., listening to a lecture in the classroom). While ostensibly “work” to the Third Hat, the ease of performing these tasks marks them as “rest” to the senior team members.

The Senior Hat’s intervention is necessary for Third Hats to perform at near superhuman levels. Good Third Hats are focused on their recruits and the mission, not themselves. Moreover, they do not have a concept of the larger context of being a DI, despite their years of experience in the Corps. The danger is that they will learn too late, that it is not humanly possible to perform at the level they think they need to perform over the course of months. One Senior Hat noted that Third Hats usually do not “catch on” until later in their first training cycle that a temporary assignment to the laundry is a way to support their ability to keep going over the course of a 16+ hour training day—for months on end.

In striving to be absolutely committed—ideally steadfast—Third Hats may not know to take breaks, and certainly do not know what kinds of breaks are possible or effective. Even if they did, however, Third Hats do not have the authority to assign themselves such breaks. This does not mean that Third Hats are passive. They have to choose to hydrate, eat, and rest appropriately—perhaps by calling on discursive resources like “hating to be embarrassed”—and so on. Thus, the ability of new Third Hats to be resilient requires dynamic interaction with another Marine. ²² Their resilience cannot be reduced to individual “traits” of the individual Marines involved. It certainly requires personal social and cognitive abilities, but these do not produce the social meaning mechanistically. Rather, resilience exists in shared social space, as an ongoing social performance between the Marines involved.

Other resilience practices go beyond asking family members to care for children. We heard from multiple DIs about the importance of sharing a twenty-minute lunch with a spouse in the family car in the parking lot. In one respondent’s words, this was a way to “clear his head” and “re-energize for the afternoon.” Spousal interaction constituted a change from “Marines, recruits, officers, subordinates, office, desk,” to “wife, husband, lover, family, car, children.” This self-directed change of context entails a change in values from those associated with “work” to those associated with “home.” In turn, the change in value orientation permitted him to not focus on work stressors. Through changing his context, he changed his value orientation and so his psychology (self-talk). Such strategies, however, are highly personal and so variable. When asked about this strategy, a female DI looked down for a moment, smiled, and said, “I’m not married. Who’s going to bring me a sandwich?”

We heard similar context-switching strategies from two DIs at OCS. Both DIs lived off base, and commuted. One DI would only change into his uniform when he arrived at work, and removed it before driving home. Another DI wore his uniform to and from work but never brought his campaign cover into his house. ²³ Practices around uniforms are embodied, versus vocalized, ways of changing a context. As such, they hint at the variety of modalities in which Marines practice being stressed, resilient, and steadfast. The point here is that context is not necessarily “given.” Rather, Marines can recognize and agentically manage context.

Stress, Resilience, and Steadfastness in the US DOD

The tension we have outlined between our theory and mechanistic reductive ones is visible in current US DOD approaches in the Marine Corps and the US Army. The COSC model is etiological, pathology-focused, mechanistic, and highly reductive, for example, explaining PTSD at the level of a brain system:

Causes and Effects

The exact causes of PTSD are not known. When a traumatic event occurs, the brain gets revved up and is flooded with stress hormones. In PTSD sufferers, the brain’s metabolism has been altered by the rush of hormones, and memories of the event are stored in a different way. ²⁴

In contrast, the US Army’s approach to resilience, Comprehensive Soldier & Family Fitness (CSF2), presents a better attempt at being holistic, and acknowledges the reality of human agency. It recognizes choice and variability and is focused on providing soldiers with training, so that they can create resilience strategies for themselves and those around them using concepts and skills. ²⁸ However, by using mechanistic language to describe stress (“activating events”) and outcomes (“consequences”), it remains tied to an implausible paradigm. But its goal of helping soldiers acquire meaning-making skills in order to resolve values crises is highly consistent with what we find Marines doing.

There are serious criticisms of CSF2: constitutional concerns that “spiritual fitness” promotes religion, ethical concerns that CSF2 is a research project and not training; policy concerns over the lack of confirmatory research prior to investing hundreds of millions of dollars; and ideological opposition to working with the US military. ²⁹ We would add a concern that the positive psychology approach woven into the CSF2 effort carries the potential of excising a whole category of military resilience strategies found in historical and contemporary literature, where combatants’ resilience on a battlefield has more to do with a kind of fatalism rather than with optimism. While we acknowledge the qualitatively better potential and actual achievements of CSF2, the theory basis remains problematic.

From our perspective, the Army’s approach is far beyond COSC in respecting the agency and ability to learn of service members. The Army would do well, however, to do the same thing that we recommend for the Marine Corps: get rid of mechanistic language that springs from a theoretical misunderstanding of the nature of human beings. There is no such thing as an “activating event”—soldiers, like Marines, learn culturally what to be stressed about. In this sense, CSF2 is internally contradictory.