The Marine Corps Builds Myths (and Breaks Men)
Musil, Robert K.
The Marine Corps Builds Myths (and Breaks Men) ROBERT K. MUSIL There is something depressingly familiar about recent disclosures of brutality and death in the United States Marine Corps—and about...
...And the next morning we tied a rope to his leg . . . and we dragged him through the village...
...I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916...
...MacArthur's intelligence staff had a file, No...
...The most famous Marine training disaster occurred in 1956...
...Few noticed a sober Library of Congress study, done for the House International Affairs Committee and entitled Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study, which concluded that invasion simply would not work: "U.S...
...While the landings and flag raisings have been played up, the atrocities have been played down...
...Staff Sergeant Matthew L. McKeon, while drunk, forced his platoon of recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina, into Ribbon Creek on a nighttime, nightmare march...
...The persistence of that brutality can be measured statistically...
...Ballistic missiles and thermonuclear bombs have diminished the strategists' preoccupation with conventional wars...
...But the underlying reality of death—the Marine Corps mission—cannot be washed away...
...The Marine Corps role in U.S...
...In 1959, the Corps issued new regulations forbidding DIs from hazing or even touching their recruits, except for training purposes...
...In 1854, the captain of the U.S.S...
...But members of Congress quickly forget the "proud tradition" of Vietnam recounted by Marine veterans...
...he had been punched by his DI...
...They introduced the airplane as a "pacification" device, hunting guerrillas from the air...
...Private McClure's death should have occasioned a close, unintimidated examination of these and other concerns...
...If bureaucratic infighting, interservice intrigue, and moral indignation have left the Corps intact, advances in technology may finally do it in...
...Amphibious forces are too slow...
...The Corps and its many defenders claim that substandard recruits and occasionally malicious DIs are responsible for the recurrent tragedies...
...They were acquitted, and The New York Times reported, "The verdict was boisterously acclaimed by other drill instructors...
...One recruit, David Abrahamson, a Jew, was forced to wear a yellow Star of David...
...Despite this continuing record of exposure and Marine promises of reform, official reports quoted by The New York Times still showed that by 1975, one out of four DIs at Parris Island was accused of maltreatment of recruits...
...While the Germans were blocked at Chateau-Thierry by the U.S...
...Instead, the Marine commandant, General Louis H. Wilson, stated, "Based on my visits throughout the Corps as well as oral and written reports given to me by my field commanders and the Inspector General, I assure you that motivation and esprit are at a high level...
...It was routine police duty, but Marine Lieutenant A.S...
...Marine Corps Forty years ago, when I was in China with the Marines, I saw how our Government was willing to sacrifice fine men's lives for the dollars of big business...
...Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press posed Marines for the famous photograph, "The Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima," that was used for the seventh War Bond drive, a U.S...
...Correspondent Floyd Gibbons reported the action in glowing terms, and though censorship usually barred the identity of units, his identification of the Marine brigade was passed...
...Representative Mario A. Biaggi, New York Democrat, wrote at the time, "Unfortunately, until now, the scope and depth of the brutality, racism, and injustice in the Marine Corps have not been fully reported to the American people...
...Whether prompted by sincere concern or latent racism, such worries moved Congress to require the Corps to increase its number of high school graduates, emphasizing "quality" in its recruits...
...But the deadly realities of warfare were, again, not memorialized...
...Similarly, reporters Dick Levitan and H. Paul Jeffers exposed Marine abuse in their 1971 book, See Parris and Die: Brutality in the U.S...
...What must be challenged is the Corps itself—all 196,000 Marines, the nearly $4 billion they cost, and the devastation they inflict on American ideals and young lives...
...parachute assault forces are too few to cover obligatory objectives quickly...
...Marines could be killed so that Socony could continue to do business in China...
...The obsolescence of Marine heliborne assault was dramatically revealed in the attack on Cambodia's Tang Island to recover the Mayaguez...
...We got out to the dump...
...There is an underlying consensus that the Marines have a proud record, are vital to defense, and need that rough, tough training that leads ineluc-tably to the fate that befell Private McClure...
...The Marine Corps Builds Myths (and Breaks Men) ROBERT K. MUSIL There is something depressingly familiar about recent disclosures of brutality and death in the United States Marine Corps—and about the promises of reform...
...Waldo Lyon, a former Corps psychologist at Parris Island, has concluded, in a scholThe Marines' Mission I was a gangster for Wall Street: I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914...
...But the official response is always to put the blame on the individual Marine...
...In a twenty-seven-month period between 1964 and 1966, 120 Drill Instructors were relieved of duty at Parris Island alone—seventy-three for abusing recruits...
...They were included in the American Expeditionary Force, and scored another publicity triumph...
...Lufkin, Texas, was beaten senseless with pugil sticks by his fellow Marines at the San Diego Recruit Depot as his drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Harold Bronson, urged them on, shouting "Kill, Kill, Kill...
...He was sentenced to nine months in jail and a bad conduct discharge...
...Novelist Stephen Crane, then a war correspondent, wrote of a Marine hero: "I watched his face, and it was as grave and serene as a man writing in his own library...
...America's most likely adversaries are large, self-contained continental powers, China and the Soviet Union...
...The Marine flair for publicity flourished again in World War II...
...As defense analysts Martin Binkin and Jeffrey Record put it in a 1976 Brookings Institution report, Where Does the Marine Corps Go From Here?, "the USMC remains a force structured mainly for amphibious warfare despite the declining incidence of this peculiar type of combat in the post-war era and the military and political constraints that may be anticipated...
...He was calling for a doctor...
...When two DIs were tried for recruit abuse in 1965, Major General James M. Masters, then commander at Parris Island, revealed that charges of maltreatment had been brought against fifty-six DIs between January 1 and October 31 of that year...
...Private Warren John died after he was forced to return to training along with thirty-eight other recruits who had not yet recovered from rhabdomyolosis, a muscle-weakening disease...
...Representative Toby Moffett, Connecticut Democrat, testified about the recent Parris Island death of his constituent, Larry Warren, but felt constrained to add, "The Corps has a proud tradition...
...So all the fucking slopes could see it...
...The Marines helped crush the Boxer Rebellion, helped sever Panama from Colombia, and occupied Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua...
...Over the years, brutality in the Corps has been so well documented that Dr...
...As Phillip Knightley wrote in his book on war propaganda, The First Casualty, "a trade sprang up among Australians in New Guinea in providing Japanese ears, usually preserved in spirits, for American troops...
...Our goal is to strengthen the Marine Corps and its traditions, not to weaken its foundations...
...The long, documented Marine record should have indicated that racism, brutal training, isolated and meaningless duty at sea and in foreign countries, had much to do with these statistics...
...Sociologist Charles Levy in his study of sixty working-class Marines from Boston, Spoils of War, quotes one veteran's typical account: "While he was lying there we all circled around him...
...The percentage of blacks declined...
...In the same fiscal year, 23.6 per cent of those separated from the service—nearly one Marine in four—received an other-than-honorable discharge...
...Such assumptions about the "proud tradition of the Corps" are bound to preserve it in essentially its present form...
...The Congressional and military investigations have ended, however, and public apathy has again set in...
...and I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903...
...Someone should have suspected that more was involved than a lack of high school diplomas...
...Among them, they noted, were "some recruits whose apparent natural deaths were associated with systematic exposure to violence and maltreatment...
...Belleau Wood remains carved in stone in monuments across America, but other Marine exploits of the early part of their century seem forgotten...
...Today, any serious effort at radical transformation of the Corps, if not its total elimination, faces formidable odds...
...During the war itself, the Marines began to enjoy the exaggerated publicity that has fed the myth...
...The critics fell silent...
...What must be faced, if the pattern of brutality and imperial intervention is to be broken, are the implications of maintaining what General Wilson calls America's only capability for "forcible entry...
...We chopped the rope and left him in the dump...
...GeneralDavidM...
...Representative Les Aspin, Wisconsin Democrat, reported this summer that since 1974, 441 of 2,200 Marine DIs had been punished for abusing recruits...
...And the end of the draft brought a new problem to the fore: The proportion of blacks in the military rose dramatically, and some academics and liberals ambiguously speculated that such a force was both unfit and unfair...
...Even as Congressional hearings on Marine training abuses were under way in May, Private Paul B. Sprock was admitted to the naval hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, with a perforated intestine...
...Historically, Marines have been sea-going soldiers associated with the building of empire and the subjugation of foreign lands—Greek marines or epibatae...
...The recruit's day has been cut from sixteen to ten hours with one day off a week...
...Such was the tradition that preceded the Marines as they waded ashore at Red Beach Two at Danang, Vietnam, in March 1965...
...Hollins, landed Marines at Greytown, Nicaragua, and demanded an apology for the overnight arrest of the American minister...
...Within two years, three other drill instructors (DIs) were accused of maltreating their recruits and shaking them down for money...
...The essential question, after the latest cycle of abuse, disclosure, and reform, after the experience of Vietnam, is whether it is not time to put an end at last to the whole bloody tradition...
...By the end of June, the acquittal of McClure's DI was barely newsworthy...
...The Marines were unable to withdraw until two U.S...
...Navy destroyers and attack aircraft laid down heavy fire...
...Cyane, Commander G.N...
...Mere revulsion against brutality misses the point: The Marine Corps, in time of peace or in time of war, is predicated on brutality...
...The New York Times reported that five of the eleven helicopters used were quickly destroyed or disabled, and evacuation was delayed as 150 Cambodian defenders held off additional helicopters...
...The critics of the Corps are hesitant to probe deeply into an institution firmly entrenched in American mythology...
...It was sort of like a little lesson...
...Nicholson ran up the U.S...
...postage stamp, 3.5 million posters, and 175,000 car cards, and that served as the inspiration for the hundred-ton bronze Marine memorial near Arlington Cemetery...
...The Marines had their golden age during the island-hopping days of battle against the Japanese...
...384, which dealt with Allied war crimes, and which included cases of American and Australian cannibalism...
...the Royal British Marines, and, in modern times, the Japanese and, of course, the Americans...
...It is the classic pattern...
...I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in...
...Motivation platoons and "exceptional stress" have been eliminated...
...After entering Mexico City along with Army troops in 1847, they were ordered to clear the Palacio Nacional of thieves and vagabonds...
...The Corps, like other branches of the military, has also been beset by morale and discipline problems, drug abuse, and the bumbling that attends any bureaucratic enterprise...
...General Smedley Butler, former commandant, U.S...
...a new brig was built, but mistreatment of inmates continued...
...Commissioned officers must be present in all phases of training...
...The Corps has not always enjoyed immunity from serious public criticism...
...Private Harry Hiscock was threatened with death by his DI, and then shot through the hand...
...A glance at Marine personnel statistics for fiscal 1975 would have pointed to the likelihood of widespread abuse and mistreatment...
...After going AWOL twice, McClure was placed in the Special Training Branch or "motivation platoon," where the fatal beatings were ordered by his DI...
...And like later on the slopes come up and buried him...
...they reject the suggestion that the fundamental problem is the institutionalized violence inherent in the Corps itself...
...Shoup former commandant, U. S. Marine Corps arly paper to the American Orthopsychiatry Association, that the Marine Corps could serve as a laboratory for the study of institutionalized violence...
...An incredible 104 out of every 1,000 Marines deserted, while 317 of every 1,000 went AWOL...
...Six young men died under their packs in those brackish waters...
...he finally served three months and was discharged for medical reasons...
...Once again, the Marine Corps has responded quickly to the revelations...
...In the Fiji Islands, Leathernecks burned and destroyed the major towns of Sualib and Arro in 1840...
...Robert Jay Lifton has suggested that if we are to avoid "psychic numbing" and a repetition of atrocities, we must, as a nation, face the realities of Vietnam and deal constructively with our guilt...
...In the bureaucratic infighting that followed the war, the Corps not only survived but was actually written into the National Security Act in 1947, which created a minimum Marine strength of three divisions and elevated the commandant to membership in the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...Thus, there was no mention of training abuse in the 518-page Defense Manpower Commission Report issued during the height of the Marine controversy this spring, though the commissioners had visited San Diego just before McClure was killed...
...Army, the Marines ran into them at a wooded park called Belleau Wood...
...Later investigation revealed another depressingly familiar story: Although McClure was mentally retarded, had a record of arrests, and had been rejected by every recruiter in Lufkin, Sergeant Harold D. Faulkner signed him up in Austin, Texas, on November 12, 1975...
...We long to return to what passes for peace, so the grim horror must be washed away...
...Thus, those who often cry "Send in the Marines" are not only out of touch with political reality, but also with military and technological developments...
...flag atop the palace, the Halls of Montezuma, and the myth was launched...
...During World War I, the Marines again demanded to get in on the action...
...An autopsy revealed that Private Larry Warren, who died on a forced march at Parris Island, was suffering from meningitis...
...Ironically, the atom bomb which ended that struggle has started the long, slow death of the Corps...
...When the Marines returned from Cuba in September 1898, President McKinley marched them through Washington for a Presidential review...
...After the imposition of the Arab oil embargo, for example, there was some public discussion of the possibility of mounting an invasion of the oil fields...
...when the Nicaraguans refused, Hollins bombarded and burned Greytown...
...By 1899, Congress, which had been considering abolishing the Marine Corps, established a permanent Corps and doubled the number of Marines...
...We were like animals," said Private Robert C. Evans, one of the Marines ordered to beat McClure...
...Even the purported critics of the Corps are captives of its myth...
...milites classiarii, the marines of the Roman Empire...
...Other instances of brutality came to light after the McClure tragedy...
...Current criticism of brutal incidents does not cut deep enough...
...Jeffers and Levitan also reported that between January 1968 and September 1969, seventeen Marines died at Parris Island of various causes...
...Joseph's College in Philadelphia and is treasurer of CCCO/An Agency for Military and Draft Counseling...
...During that period, he added, thirty-four recruits had died as a result of training...
...The cycle is clear: abuse, disclosure, reform, and continued abuse...
...Such pugnacity is a Marine tradition, embodied in the motto "First to Fight...
...There was outrage over conditions in the Marine brig at Camp Pendleton, California, in 1969...
...Marines...
...Similarly, the official Marine Corps Report on Manpower Quality and Force Structure, delivered to the Senate just two weeks after McClure's beating, made no reference to abuse...
...The public was outraged, justice was promised, and McKeon's behavior was explained away as an aberration...
...One generation and one war later, Private Lynn E. McClure of Robert K. Musil, a former associate at the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, teaches at St...
...He gave him the coup de grace And he said, 'Anybody else want him?' So everybody started shooting him...
...Both sides are satisfied with treating the symptoms, while the purposes and policies of the Corps remain unchallenged...
...He was finally driven insane, convinced that he was in a Nazi death camp...
...I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Bros, in 19091912...
...It is as if the Marine Corps has not played by the rules, presenting us with death just as we were beginning to recover from the shock of Vietnam...
...Representative Lucien Nedzi, Michigan Democrat, opened the recent hearings on Marine training and recruitment with these words:' 'The Marine Corps is a military organization with a proud history and a remarkable record of accomplishments...
...The Leathernecks beat down strong challenges in 1801, in 1829, at the turn of the century, and after World War II...
...Even before the Mexican War began, the Marines were so itchy that Commodore Catesby Jones landed Marines and seized the Presidio of Monterrey in 1842 simply on the basis of war rumors...
...So this gunnery sergeant with a scar, he was really an animal type, real fucking perfect Marine...
...Americans knocked gold teeth from Japanese dead...
...An area of his skull the size of a man's palm had been bashed in to the depth of one inch...
...Such official evasion is essential if the Corps is to preserve the myth built out of carefully selected flag plantings and individual acts of bravery...
...Thirty-eight DIs were permanently removed from duty, fourteen courtmartialed and seventy-eight given nonjudicial punishment...
...The Marine record of documented war crimes in Vietnam hardly needs retelling, but as in Haiti and Santo Domingo it seems to have been blotted out by national amnesia...
...The days of Iwo Jima are gone...
...McClure died of his injuries on March 13, 1976...
...It is an elite force, well trained and well disciplined, and always in the front line of the nation's defense...
...They told of the beating deaths of Privates Steve Melson, Tommy Bartolomeo, and Jose Concepcion...
...After Vietnam, the Marine Corps is not only morally repugnant, it is obsolete...
...In the War of 1898, when Marines under Admiral Dewey seized the Spanish Navy Yard at Cavite in the Philippines and Guantanamo in Cuba, the Marine myth was solidly entrenched...
...history has been primarily aggressive and expansionist...
Vol. 40 • October 1976 • No. 10
