62 pages • 2 hours read
Buzz WilliamsSpare Parts
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
At Parris Island, Williams stands on the yellow footprints, the same as his brother had fourteen years before. His drill instructor, Sgt. Talley, asks Recruit Hart why he joined the Marines, but Hart’s answer—to be tough—is unacceptable to the instructor, so he “digs” them, or exercises them to the point of exhaustion. The idea is to break down the recruits, to destroy their sense of security and self-confidence, to erase their individual identities so they might begin to work as a team. Williams sees the rage building in the other recruits, and thinks how the ideas of honor, courage and commitment to a greater good are recruiting clichés used to get naive young kids to join the Corps.
As the drill instructor continues to punish them with physical exercise, he also continues to ask recruits why they joined the Marine Corps. In the midst of such suffering, Williams has already forgotten he joined to honor his brother’s memory. Instead, he thinks of a rote answer from the movie Full Metal Jacket. After Drill Instructor Talley asks Williams why he joined, and Williams says that any answer he gives will be wrong, Talley strikes him hard in the chest, and before they are finally allowed to go to bed, the senior drill instructor tells them to always remember they joined the Marine Corps in order to learn to kill.
Chapter 2 Summary
Although Williams scores the highest in his platoon at the rifle range, his nemesis, Morrison, is named platoon guide when Carey gets fired. Morrison, who has taken a disliking to Williams, gives Williams extra duties. Their animosity expands to the pugil-stick ring and the obstacle course, where Williams bests Morrison each time.
Because of his high score at the rifle range, Williams is allowed a phone call. The call unnerves him, however, as hearing Gina’s voice for the first time in ten weeks reminds him of his life before the Corps and takes him out of his training mode. He is forced to end the phone call when a strange drill instructor tells him Gina is sleeping with his best friend.
The next day, Williams is sent on laundry duty, where he meets a man named Charlie, a retired Marine who tells him all the physical and emotional discomforts he has experienced are not because the drill instructors are evil. Everything done to them, Charlie says, is to train them to kill. Before Williams can show his new-found commitment, he is fast-forwarded to a different platoon, so he can graduate in time to return to college. He learns that Marine Reservists are only “spare parts,” and don’t belong to any squad or platoon.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The first two chapters cover Williams’s training at boot camp. He describes the physical and mental hardships, but what he is really describing is how the recruits are being transformed: “You are here to learn to kill,” the senior drill instructor tells them at the end of the first day (59). All their training uses anger to facilitate killing. They are struck by the drill instructors, forced to drink water until they vomit, and then told to clean up the vomit with their bodies. They scrub toilets and are exercised past the point of exhaustion. They are treated as less-than-human. On the rifle range, they are trained to specialize in the “one-shot, one-kill” doctrine, a reminder there’s no need to waste bullets when killing. The drill instructors are not even allowed on the rifle range because of the fear a recruit might shoot one of them in anger: “The Marine Corps understood that our hearts and minds were hardened, and it was possible that a recruit with a bullet might very well kill a drill instructor if given the chance” (30). After Williams scores the highest in his unit, he is given special treatment, a reminder of the value of being able to kill with a rifle.
The drill instructors also use the antagonism recruits feel toward one another to stoke anger. When Morrison and Williams feud, Talley pits them against each other. He promotes Morrison to squad leader over Williams, which allows Morrison to assign extra duties to Williams, keeping him tired, hungry, and angry.
This anger extends to the recruits’ families as well. When Williams is allowed a phone call, a drill instructor tells him that his girlfriend is sleeping with his best friend, and Williams thinks that the reason recruits aren’t allowed phone calls home is because the drill instructors know that home and family and girlfriends can remind recruits of who they were before they became Marines.
In later chapters, Williams worries over training in a different way when he states, several times, that they aren’t receiving the proper kind of training, so in these first chapters the subtext is that molding Marines into killers by using anger as a shaping tool also teaches them to hate. Williams grows to hate Recruit Morrison and, later, Lance Corporal Nagel. Anger stokes the racism Williams feels toward Corporals Chen and Poole and the Arab bus driver, and it teaches Marines to see the enemy as only worthy of being killed. Williams’s conversation with Charlie explains this, when Charlie says that everything they learn in training is to prepare them for war, meaning that Marines, as the senior drill instructor points out, are made to kill.
