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After several detours, Rob Roth has become a U.S. Marine. The Monongahela native, a member of Ringgold High School's Class of 2001, is pulling guard duty at Camp Lejeune, N.C., while awaiting assignment to the School of Infantry.

"It was something I wanted to do in high school," the private said, but originally he planned to enlist in the Air Force. After graduation, however, he took a job working on a ranch in Montrose, Colo., for a couple of years.

"It's a professional guiding school, teaching horsemanship and guiding hunters," he said.

Even after enlisting with the Marines last summer, he couldn't get started as first planned. Expecting to leave Aug. 30 for the Marine Recruit Training Depot at Parris Island, S.C., he injured his hand cutting firewood for the bonfire at his farewell celebration. He finally left for South Carolina at the end of October.

His parents, Fred and Kelly Roth, had noticed some changes in their son even before he left. They talked about it last August.

"Since he enlisted, he's gotten a lot more focused," his mother said.

"Yeah, he eats less and runs more," added his father, who had been in the Air Force in the early 1970s.

Roth held realistic expectations for recruit training. "I'm expecting to get my butt kicked, and to get a good handle on things. It'll be a personal test," he predicted.

He took that 12-week "personal test" with more than 500 other recruits in seven platoons. Their days started at 4 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m. Their weeks were punctuated with three, two-hour sessions of physical training while the recruits were accumulating a total of 200 hours of classroom instruction. Roth's platoon started out with 84 recruits, and 72 made it to graduation.

"I didn't get my butt kicked," Roth said recently, "but it was definitely a personal test and physically demanding. It changed my views on a lot of things, including my view on myself. It lets you know what you're made of, physically and mentally.

"It makes you appreciate the people who have gone through that (training) before you. Until you experience it for yourself, you have no idea," he said.

Roth had been recruited by Sgt. Joseph Nicholson, of the Century III Mall Recruiting Station in West Mifflin. The sergeant explained a couple of the recruits' rites of passage.

One is the gas chamber, where the recruits learn to be confident about the efficacy of their gas masks in an exercise with tear gas. "They go in for a few minutes with their masks on. Then they remove the mask and hold their breath for 10 seconds. After that, they have to clear the mask of gas, by blowing hard, then breathe through it again."

The recruits' final exercise before graduation is known as "The Crucible," a 54-hour marathon of endurance and teamwork.

"It's a test to see if they actually gained all the knowledge they were taught in basic training," explained Nicholson.

"The Crucible" is a marathon in more ways than one. The recruits march 40 miles. With only eight hours of sleep during the entire exercise, and only enough food for two or three regular meals, they have to meet several dozen "obstacles," practical problems that test their readiness for situations they may encounter in battle.

Roth's graduation day finally came on Jan. 21. His brother, Adam, who is away at college, Roth's parents and his sister, Jolie, drove down for the week. It began with Liberty Sunday, the first time the recruits had any contact with civilians since their induction. It was also the first time they had any contact with junk food in three months, and Kelly Roth said she watched the recruits all get as much of that as they could want.

She became a sort of substitute mom for the day. The recruits at Parris Island came from all over the country east of the Mississippi, and some families were unable to come until later in the week, or maybe not at all.

"They were so proud of their accomplishments, and we were the first civilians they'd seen, so they all wanted to talk at once," she said.

The following Thursday was Family Day, the highlight of which is the pinning ceremony, at which each recruit received the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor pin from the senior drill instructor to affix to his "cover," which civilians call a hat. With that, the recruit became a Marine.

Jolie Roth, a junior at Ringgold High School, was thrilled by the graduation ceremony the next day.

"It was the most incredible experience I've ever had. I'm not the crying kind, but I thought maybe I'd get teary," she said. All that changed when the new Marines marched onto the parade deck.

"We were in the bleachers, and they started marching in. The way the drill instructor gave his orders, he was, like, singing and it was beautiful. Everybody was perfectly in sync. Every arm, every leg. And when I saw Rob's platoon, I just couldn't hold it in."

Her mother was equally impressed.

"It was one of the best experiences I have had," she said. "And I'm glad to know our country is being defended by young people who were trained so well."

What's next for Pvt. Roth? Does he think about going overseas, to Afghanistan or Iraq?

"I signed up during time of war," he said. "So, if I get called, that's my job. It's what I signed up for."

Nicholson said that recruitment is down around the country, but not in this area. He tends to chalk it up to the individual recruiters.

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