CAPE MAY -- A slender man in a navy blue uniform paces the wide hallway under bright, fluorescent lights.

"Scream at the top of your lungs, over and over and over, what you did to bring yourself in this position," he yells into a megaphone as a dozen young men and women rest a thick double rope on their right shoulders, arms poised to lift on command.

"Do I make myself clear?" he roars.

The recruits tilt their heads back and scream in unison: "Yes, Petty Officer Placencia!"

A siren begins to blare, a whistle starts to blow in rhythm, and the Coast Guard recruits push the rope over their heads and onto their opposite shoulders -- back and forth, back and forth, until the corridor smells like the sweat dripping down their foreheads and glistening on their biceps.

Across the hallway, five seaman recruits hold mock M16 rifles in sniper position, pointing them just above the heads of their fellow trainees. All of the recruits call out the mistakes they're being punished for:

"Need to be louder!" one yells.

"Shave my neck!" says another as medical staff look on, watching for any movements that could be dangerous.

"Eyes on the boat!" screams a third.

This is the U.S. Coast Guard's only boot camp, producing 3,500 new guardsmen each year.

On a 352-acre peninsula along Cape May Harbor, Training Center Cape May is a self-contained universe, complete with a medical clinic, a marketplace, a non-denominational chapel and its own police force. This summer, NJ Advance Media was granted rare, behind-the-scenes access to the campus, which has produced every new enlisted Coast Guardsman for the past 36 years.

"We won't just let anybody onto the fleet," Petty Officer 2nd Class Reilly Burrus said as she watched her company one August morning. "We need to make sure that only the strong get through this."

The training center complements the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, a four-year college in New London, Connecticut, that produces the service's commissioned officers -- guardsmen of higher ranks than enlisted members.

At any point in the year, eight different companies of recruits are training in Cape May, each made of 95 to 115 trainees at various stages of the 53-day program. Roughly 80 percent will make it through and graduate to jobs on Coast Guard fleets that will pay them about $21,520 in annual base pay.

Seaman recruits fight a simulated fire at Coast Guard Training Center Cape May. Cape May, N.J., 8/17/2017. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

'The future of the U.S. Coast Guard'

At 7:25 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 17, 112 recruits sit silently at attention -- backs straight, eyes ahead and hands flat on their thighs.

Thirty-six hours earlier, they arrived on base from Philadelphia International Airport to be greeted by their company commanders, who screamed at them to run off the bus and into Sexton Hall, where new recruits stay.

Their first day was spent getting haircuts and learning grooming rules. Men got buzz cuts; women's hair was sheared so it reached no further than the top edge of their shirt collars. Earrings, hair coloring and tattoos on the neck or below the wrist are not allowed.

Next, the recruits go through blood tests, X-rays and mental health screenings, and get anti-viral vaccines, part of the $800,000 the training center spends on immunizations each year.

Over the rest of the program, the recruits take classes, undergo physical training, assimilate into military culture and learn nautical skills to perform the Coast Guard's primary functions: search and rescue, law enforcement and national defense.

In a training building that Thursday, a separate group of eight recruits in their fifth week stand in a row. The entryway is dark, and the recruits scramble to put on firefighting gear as quickly as possible. An instructor rushes them along.

"Put your boots on!" he calls out as he shines a flashlight on their feet. "It's an emergency!"

The recruits scramble into lines of four, their right hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them. They follow each other into a dark, cavernous room as smoke and noise -- screeching and unintelligible yelling -- overwhelm their senses.

Using hoses on the ground as guides, the recruits rush toward screens on the wall simulating fires and aim the water at them. As the instructor yells commands over the din, the recruits twist nozzles to change the width of the streams. Once they've extinguished the fake fires, they follow each other out of the room.

Recruits get 65 total hours of firefighting, seamanship and marksmanship training during their time at the training center. It's a part of the program's mission to first teach them the Coast Guard's ethos and then train them on how to serve, said Captain Owen Gibbons, the training center's commanding officer since June 2016.

"We spend time teaching recruits initially to be good recruits," said Gibbons, a sturdy man with close cut, salt-and-pepper hair who enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1985. "Then we develop their skill sets so that they develop some of the specific knowledge and abilities that they'll need on the job."

At the training center, each moment is difficult, and everything has a purpose.

Company commanders wake up recruits at 5:30 a.m. with whistles and yelling. They have 15 minutes to scramble out of bed, into their uniforms and outside their 65-bunk-to-a-room barracks. For the rest of the day, until lights out at 10 p.m., every moment is regimented. They move in formation, sit and stand at attention, and speak only when spoken to.

The recruits learn what's expected of them as Coast Guardsmen and practice managing intense stress in a controlled setting.

If they can handle it, they'll fulfill the gold letters above Sexton Hall that read, "Through these doors pass the future of the U.S. Coast Guard" and join 38,000 guardsmen serving on active duty.

A company commander instructs a seaman recruit outside the barracks at Coast Guard Training Center Cape May. Cape May, N.J., 8/17/2017. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Survival of the fittest

Across the galley, where recruits go for three meals a day, company commanders loom in trainees' faces, demanding they recite information about the chain of command or berating them for breaking a rule -- moving too fast or too slow, keeping items in the wrong pockets or failing to address their commanders correctly.

One recruit exits the food line with his tray of blue Gatorade and orange juice, and his commander yells at him to name the battalion officer. As the recruit starts to answer, the commander yells back: "Too late! I'm tired of waiting!" Another commander screams that the recruit has five seconds to get to his seat and he scurries to a table, where the rest of his company is eating silently amid the chaos.

Not everyone handles the manufactured stress well.

Through the Recruit Aptitude and Motivation Program, 15 of the weakest recruits from the five companies furthest in their training spend all of their non-class time undergoing physical training as motivation to work harder. These recruits wear red vests and are separated from their companies until their commanders deem them ready to return, usually a few days later.

"It breaks you down," said recruit Chris Schubert, 20, of Tampa, Florida, who was trying to get rid of his red vest. "But when you get back to your company, you'll be physically and mentally stronger than a lot of people because you went through this program."

If a recruit still can't keep up, his commander can hold him back one or more weeks for extra training. The eight-week program can quickly become nine weeks, 10 weeks or longer.

Even with remedial work, nearly one in five recruits leaves the training center without graduating. Recruits drop out because they have a medical issue, experience a family emergency or fail to meet the service's knowledge or physical fitness standards, Gibbons said. Sometimes, he said, they leave because they're overwhelmed by the responsibility of a job in the Coast Guard.

The training program is essentially an eight-week job interview, said Chief Brandon Wheeley, the lead company commander of X-Ray Company 194.

"We never get calls on good days. We don't get calls in good weather," he said. "If there's anyone that should be able to get on their way and drive that ship up a tick's behind in a hailstorm, backwards, the Coast Guard should."

Some of the 84 members of Tango Company 194 stand at attention during graduation at Coast Guard Training Center Cape May. Cape May, N.J., 8/17/2017. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

'The enormity of what they've done'

Outside the gymnasium on Friday, Aug. 18, 84 members of Tango Company 194 march past their families and into the room where they will finish their transition from civilians to men and women of the U.S. Coast Guard.

"I'm a steamroller, baby. Just rolling down the line," they chant. "So you'd better get out of my way now, before I roll right over you."

The Coast Guard first came to Cape May in 1924, when it ran air facilities in support of the U.S. Customs Service. The Navy took over the base during World War II and gave the land back to the Coast Guard in 1946.

Two years later, the Coast Guard transformed the base into a boot camp, the East Coast version of its training center in Alameda, California. The service centralized its training program in Cape May in 1981 and has since graduated about 110,000 recruits, each of whom specializes in seamanship or firefighting.

The marching recruits enter the gym in five columns as a band plays and their supporters cheer. After several speeches, the recruits step up one by one to receive their certificates as their names and assignments are read. They will deploy only days after they graduate.

The training center's commanding officer had told families earlier in the day that their job was to help their new guardsmen "understand the enormity of what they've done."

Wendi Rutigliano-Olsen, of Miami Beach, Florida, needed no reminding.

She said her son, Jake Scheiner, had arrived at the training center thinking he was prepared, but quickly started questioning his ability to finish. By the end of the program, though, he was confident, motivated and inspired, Rutigliano-Olsen said.

"That's going to always be there in his mind now," she said. "When he comes to something, whatever the hurdle is, he just has to stick through it and work through it, and he could do it."

Haley Prendergast, 21, was headed to Corpus Christi, Texas, for her first assignment after boot camp.

"It's probably the best thing I've ever done in my life, probably the hardest and also the worst," said Prendergast, of Greybull, Wyoming. "But at the end of the day, it's probably the best thing."

When her name is called, she steps forward and salutes her husband, a Coast Guardsman, who hands her her certificate. Her face initially stoic, she grins as she shakes his hand before he pulls her in for a hug. The crowd cheers as Prendergast steps away and the rest of the service's newest guardsmen accept their certificates.

Later, the group stands at attention.

A commander disbands the company and a flood of people rush the floor from the bleachers to reunite with their loved ones for the first time in eight or more weeks.

Mothers, eyes glassy, hug their sons. Four new guardsmen with their arms around each other face their moms, each with her own camera phone. A young woman wraps her arm around her boyfriend, a new graduate, and rubs his back.

Within days, the Coast Guard's newest members will spread across the nation: Owensboro, Kentucky. Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Yankeetown, Florida. South Padre, Texas. And onward.

Their weeks in Cape May were only the prelude to the four years, six years or longer they will serve as active-duty members of the nation's oldest continuous maritime law enforcement agency.

"Cape May, simply as a destination, is part of the Coast Guard's DNA," Gibbons said. "It is the place where we are born into this Coast Guard family."

Marisa Iati may be reached at miati@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Marisa_Iati or on Facebook here. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips