Download or read book The Few and the Proud: Marine Corps Drill Instructors in Their Own Words written by Larry Smith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-05-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller: From the sands of Iwo Jima to the deserts of Iraq, the riveting, real-life stories of training young marines. Beginning with interviews with the last surviving drill instructors of World War II, this powerful oral history offers the voices of veterans from every major war of the last sixty years, concluding with accounts of what it takes to train marines for Iraq today. The Few and the Proud contains revelatory details about the vicious training techniques used to prepare marines for the great battles against Japan in the Pacific; the Ribbon Creek training disaster of the 1950s; and legendary stories by the likes of Iwo Jima veteran "Iron" Mike Mervosh and R. Lee Ermey, the infamous drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket. With death-defying accounts relayed from the MCRD in San Diego and the legendary Parris Island, The Few and the Proud is both a personal history of the 230-year-old U.S. Marine Corps and a repository of heroism, leadership, and determination in the toughest division of the United States military.