QUANTICO, Va. -- "Get off my bus!" yelled a tall burly man in a dark green ranger's hat as a nondescript bus parked in a expansive dark parking lot in the middle of the Virginia woods. Still numb from the four-hour bus ride from Penn, the students on board looked startled by this outburst of emotion. "When I give you the command to move, male candidates will form a formation directly there, female candidates will form a formation directly there," yelled a Marine in tight camouflage combat fatigues. "You will move off the bus like your hair is on fire," bellowed the first marine. "Do you understand?" "Aye aye sir," the passengers replied in unison. Every cadet can expect this treatment when they join the Marines. However, the people participating were not Marines-in-training, but Wharton MBA students more used to classrooms than military bases. For two days last weekend, these MBA students lived and breathed the life of officer candidates during a 10-week Officer Candidates School at Quantico, an expansive base in northern Virginia, home to the U.S. Marines and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Organized by the Wharton Leadership Ventures program and the Wharton Veterans Club, the trip was designed to teach future business leaders about leadership by bringing students into settings where they could learn it first-hand. "Lots of people have said that the drill instructor thing was amazing... and wished they had more of it," said Management Professor Michael Useem, director of Wharton's Center For Leadership and Change Management. Wharton chose Marine OCS as its venue for participants to learn leadership because of the importance Marines place on leadership -- leadership ability makes up half of a candidate's score when they graduate from OCS. By talking with Marines in informal settings, the students gleaned universal lessons of teamwork that can be taken away and applied to companies. The core of the program, however, was two extremely physical group-oriented courses aimed at bolstering the students' physical and mental capabilities, with each group led by a veteran Marine to provide guidance and feedback to the group. "The motto of the Marines is 'Mission, Marines, Me,'" said Capt. Hernan Barrero, a stocky Marine with cropped hair. "Your main task is completing the mission, then looking after the welfare of your other Marines, and, finally, yourself," he added. The Combat Course, a collection of over a dozen obstacles -- involving barbed wire, mud and wading through chest high water -- aimed to test a candidate's sheer physical ability. After a demonstration by fully-uniformed Marines in war paint, it was the students' turn, albeit minus M-16 rifles. One participant grunted from the physical exertion as he tried to get over an imposing 20-foot tall wall. After numerous failed attempts to scale the wall, he climbed down, bowed his head, and discouragingly said, "I give up." Included in the Combat Course was the infamous Quigley, a course involving swimming under submerged logs, inhabited by snakes during the summer and frozen during the winter, requiring sledgehammers to break the ice. Grimacing faces trying to climb a daunting rope or squirming through the mud trying to avoid the razor wire just inches from their bodies was an all-too-common picture. "It's especially tough for people with no upper-body strength," Wharton MBA student Laura Flynn said, rubbing her sore shoulders. "I could imagine some of the struggles women go through early on in training." A course that unilaterally caused trouble was the "Commando Crawl," a 15-foot deep, 50-foot long crevasse crossed using a single piece of rope. Starting with their left arm on the rope, the students were supposed to swing their left leg over the rope, using their momentum from the right leg to position themselves, moving forward with pushes of their rear leg. The sheer strength and balance required was evident in the number of students falling off, safe onto the mats below, which the Marines claimed they borrowed from the Army; the Marines said they do not use them in training. A treat for the students -- wet and muddy from head to toe -- after completing the Combat Course was a Marine-style meal. Still dressed in camouflage combat belts, helmets and boots, everyone received Meals Ready to Eat, enough packaged food to satisfy a Marine's appetite. With some water, the cold pork chops and hot dogs self-heated to form a five-course meal ready to be eaten on the go, complete with Tabasco sauce, cheese spread and a wet-nap. Though not exactly five-star, the hearty food seemed to boost morale, helping students to regain their energy to continue on to the famed Leadership Reaction Course, two dozen time-honored obstacles meant to instill both leadership and teamwork. "After a while, we realized the strengths of each member of our group and challenges started becoming easier," Wharton Executive MBA student Roger Crandall said. "While physically hard, these obstacles could have been done if we worked together," he said. An obstacle that the groups had to face was getting across a simulated fast-flowing river using only an empty oil drum, plywood and a rope. "Boom!" yelled Barrero as one member touched a simulated mine. "Out two minutes." "Sorry," said the disappointed student, realizing that his inadvertent slip meant letting down the other group members, and in battle, his fellow Marines. Though few groups completed all of the obstacles, the LRC was meant to teach the importance of leadership and teamwork. "Feedback unequivocally on the LRC was they learned more in their two hours there than a lot of coursework on leadership and teamwork," Useem said. "I've seen groups that didn't finish get perfect scores and also groups who finished but failed because everyone tried to do everything themselves," Barrero, a seven-year veteran, said. The goal of the trip, besides teaching how to make a bed military style, was to expose students to dealing with split-second stressful decisions. "We don't give you the stress," Commanding Officer of OCS Colonel George Flynn said. "We give you a little chaos and you make the stress." "It's about how you deal with the stress that you are faced with," he said.
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