[DavidI]

What's special about a Marine?

Ask a Marine what's so special about the Marines and the answer
would be "Esprit de Corps", an unhelpful French phrase that means
exactly what it looks like - the spirit of the Corps, but what is that
spirit, and where does it come from?

The Marine Corps is the only branch of the U.S. Armed Forces that
recruits people specifically to fight.

The Army emphasizes personal development (an Army of One), the
Navy promises fun (let the journey begin), the Air Force offers security
(its a great way of life).

Missing from all the advertisements is the hard fact that a soldier's
lot is to suffer and perhaps to die for his people, and take lives at the
risk of his/her own. Even the thematic music of the services reflects
this evasion.

The Army's Caisson Song describes a pleasant country outing. Over
hill and dale, lacking only a picnic basket.

Anchors Aweigh, the Navy's celebration of the joys of sailing, could
have been penned by Jimmy Buffet.

The Air Force song is a lyric poem of blue skies and engine thrust. All
is joyful, invigorating, and safe.

There are no land mines in the dales nor snipers behind the hills, no
submarines or cruise missiles threaten the ocean jaunt, no bandits are
lurking in the wild blue yonder.

The Marines Hymn, by contrast, is all-combat. We fight our Country's
battles, First to fight for right and freedom, we have fought in every
clime and place where we could take a gun, in many a strife we have
fought for life and never lost our nerve.

The choice is made clear. You may join the Army to go to adventure
training, or join the Navy to go to Bangkok, or join the Air Force to go
to computer school. You join the Marine Corps to go to War!

But the mere act of signing the enlistment contract confers no status
in the Corps.

The Army recruit is told from his first minute in uniform that "your in
the Army now", soldier. The Navy and Air Force enlistees are sailors or
airmen as soon as they get off bus at the training center.

The new arrival at Marine Corps boot camp is called a recruit, or worse,
but never a MARINE. Not yet, maybe never. He or she must earn the
right to claim the title of UNITED STATES MARINE, and failure returns
you to civilian life without hesitation or ceremony.

Recruit Platoon 2210 at San Diego, California trained from October
through December of 1968. In Viet Nam the Marines were taking two
hundred casualties a week, and the major rainy season operation Meade
River, had not even begun. Yet Drill Instructors had no qualms about
winnowing out almost a quarter of their 112 recruits, graduating
eighty-one. Note that this was post - enlistment attrition; every one
of those who were dropped had been passed by the recruiters as fit for
service.

But they failed the test of Boot Camp, and not necessarily for physical
reasons; at least two were outstanding high school athletes for whom
the calisthenics and running were child's play. The cause of their
failure was not in the biceps nor the legs, but in the spirit. They had
lacked the will to endure the mental and emotional strain, so they would
not be Marines. Heavy commitments and high casualties not withstanding,
the Corps reserves the right to pick and choose.

History classes in boot camp? Stop a soldier on the street and ask him
to name a battle of World War One. Pick a sailor at random to describe
the epic fight of the Bon Homme Richard. Everyone has heard of McGuire
Air Force Base. So ask any airman who Major Thomes McGuire was, and
why he is so commemorated.

I am not carping, and there is no sneer in this criticism. All of the
services have glorious traditions, but no one teaches the young soldier,
sailor or airman what his uniform means and why he should be proud of it.
But ask a Marine about World War One, and you will hear of the wheat field
at Belleau Wood and the courage of the Fourth Marine Brigade, fifth and
sixth regiments.

Faced with an enemy of superior numbers entrenched in tangled forest
undergrowth, the Marines received an order to attack that even the
charitable cannot call ill - advised. It was insane. Artillery support
was absent and air support had not yet been invented, so the Brigade
charged German machine guns with only bayonets, grenades, and
indomitable fighting spirit. A bandy-legged little barrel of a gunnery
sergeant, Daniel J. Daly, rallied his company with a shout, "Come on you
sons a *****es, do you want to live forever"?

He took out three machine guns himself, and they would give him the Medal
of Honor except for a technicality, he already had two of them.

French liaison officers, hardened though they were by four years of trench
bound slaughter, were shocked as the Marines charged across the open
wheat field under a blazing sun directly into the teeth of enemy fire. Their
action was anachronistic on the twentieth-century battlefield; so much so that
they might as well have been swinging cutlasses. But the enemy was only
human; they could not stand up to this. So the Marines took Belleau Wood.
The Germans called them "Dogs from the Devil."

Every Marine knows this story and dozens more. We are taught them in
boot camp as a regular part of the curriculum. Every Marine will always
be taught them! You can learn to don a gas mask anytime, even on the
plane in route to the war zone, but before you can wear the Eagle Globe &
Anchor and claim the title "Marine", you must know about the Marines who
made that emblem and title meaningful. So long as you can march and
shoot and revere the legacy of the Corps, you can take your place in line.
And that line is unified spirit as in purpose.

A soldier wears branch of service insignia on his collar, metal shoulder
pins and cloth sleeve patches to identify his unit. Sailors wear a rating
badge that identifies what they do for the Navy.

Marines wear only the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, together with personal
ribbons and their CHERISHED marksmanship badges. There is nothing on
a Marine's uniform to indicate what he or she does, nor what unit the Marine
belongs to. You cannot tell by looking at a Marine whether you are seeing a
truck driver, a computer programmer, or a machine gunner. The Corps
explains this as a security measure to conceal the identity and location of
units, but the Marines' penchant for publicity makes that the least likely of
explanations. No, the Marine is amorphous, even anonymous, by conscious
design.

Every Marine is a rifleman first and foremost, a Marine first, last and
always!
You may serve a four-year enlistment or even a twenty plus year career
withoutseeing action, but if the word is given you'll charge across that
wheatfield! Whether a Marine has been schooled in automated supply,
automotive mechanics, or aviation electronics, is immaterial. Those things
are secondary - the Corps does them because it must. The modern
battlefield requires the technical appliances, and since the enemy has them,
so do we, but no Marine boasts mastery of them. Our pride is in our
marksmanship, our discipline, and our membership in a fraternity of courage
and sacrifice."For the honor of the fallen, for the glory of the dead", Edgar
Guest wrote of Belleau Wood,"the living line of courage kept the faith
and moved ahead."

They are all gone now, those Marines who made a French farmer's little
wheatfield into one of the most enduring of Marine Corps legends. Many
of them did not survive the day,and eight long decades have claimed the
rest. But their actions are immortal. The Corps remembers them and
honors what they did, and so they live forever.

Dan Daly's shouted challenge takes on its true meaning - if you lie in
the trenches you may survive for now, but someday you will die and no
one will care. If you charge the guns you may die in the next two
minutes, but you will be one of the immortals.

All Marines die; some in the red flash of battle, some in the white cold
of the nursing home. In the vigor of youth or the infirmity of age, all
will eventually die. But the Marine Corps lives on. Every Marine who
ever lived is living still - in the Marines who claim the title today. It is
that
sense of belonging to something that will outlive your own mortality, which
gives people a light to live by and a flame to mark their passing.