Nunquam Fideles
In my young years, I wore a uniform.
Since the moment I saw a recruiting ad on television, I knew the Marine Corps was different. While the other branches of the armed forces promised to help one fulfill one’s potential, or to see the world, or to “aim high,” only the Marines issued a jut-jawed challenge: “Maybe you can be one of us - the few, the proud, the Marines.”
In the weeks leading up to my departure for boot camp, I absorbed everything about the Corps I could. Histories, memoirs, novels, movies…they were all krill that I scooped as I swam through the published and filmed culture of the Corps. The “Devil Dogs,” as the WWI German soldiers called the U.S. Marines, were a tribe of their own. They had their own myths, heroes, rites, relics, hymns. They were a pure military religion, and I was an eager seeker.
All the way to my meeting with the legendary Drill Instructors, I lifted silent prayers to Mars, the god of war, clutching in my teenaged hands the hope that becoming a Marine would truly be a life-changing experience, that it really would be like the books and movies presented it. That it would be hard.
A few short days after losing my hair, my civilian identity, and my sense of equilibrium, I mused to myself that I would be grateful if the Corps was gentler than I’d found it. The experience was proving equal to (and even beyond) the anticipation of the experience, one of the few times in my life such a thing ever occurred.
After boot camp, I joined the Fleet Marine Force, the “real” Marine Corps, where I lived the lean life of a Cold War warrior. During those years, I was not particularly racially aware, though I did carry in my heart the dormant things my family had taught me about the realities of race. But I watched the lives and interactions of the Marines around me. In those days, mestizos and orientals and other races were a very tiny fraction of the Corps’ enlisted manpower. Whites were definitely the majority, with Negroes making up perhaps thirty percent of the USMC total. In the officer corps, the numbers were probably around 95% White, three percent “other,” and two percent Negro. The appearance of a Negro commissioned officer in our midst was always cause for much nudging and whispered conversation. I am not being snide when I say that such an event was akin to some exotic animal having been dressed up in a uniform and taught to speak English. We were fascinated.
On a workaday basis, I found most Negro Marines (or “dark green Marines,” as we called them) to be pretty much like their civilian counterparts. Some of the older salts were professionals, having found a place in the world where steady income might be earned and a measure of respect might be won. The younger, non-“lifer” types were exactly like those Negroes with whom I’d dealt in the civilian world. They were generally lazy, surly, childish, intemperate. Their working hours were spent in conversation about their favorite vices, and their leisure time was spent pursuing those vices. When one of them managed to pin an extra chevron to his sleeve, he strutted for weeks, sometimes literally thumping his own chest. And frequently, within a few months, the extra chevron would be taken away by a commanding officer, the Negro having demolished a bar in a drunken fury, or having slapped a prostitute around, or having exhibited disrespect to a superior.
I noticed that White Marines were astonishingly impressive men, both the boots (novices) and the salts (career Marines). As a general rule, the White Marines worked very hard, played very hard, drank very hard, fought very hard, and were ferociously loyal to each other and to their families. They were patriotic to the point of mawkishness, fond of poetry and wordplay and the easy, casual brutality that passes for practical jokes in the world of the Marine. These young White leathernecks were the ones who did all the “hardcore” jobs. They were the Drill Instructors, the squad leaders, the platoon sergeants, the nitpicking detail-oriented inspectors. They were the ones photographed for recruiting posters, the ones who played in “The President’s Own” Marine Corps Band, the ones who hurled immaculate rifles with such deadly precision as part of the fabled Silent Drill Team.
The Marine Corps had always been the most distinctly Southern of the armed forces, a fact that did not escape former lions of the Corps like James Webb and Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller. At schools and programs all across the Marine world, men like Lee and Jackson were held up as the epitome of the gentleman warrior. When I was a Marine, the most common decoration of an enlisted man’s barracks room was a Confederate battle flag. At one duty station, I noticed that the commanding general would regularly ask the band to play “Nothing Could Be Finer (Than To Be In Carolina)” and “Dixie” at the morning colors ceremonies. And while I wore the uniform, I noticed that these things began to cause rumblings from other races, both within and without our little camouflaged world. Letters to the editor of The Marine Corps Gazette made it clear that the majority White, pro-South Marine Corps was not going to be tolerated much longer.
But it wasn’t until long after I left the Corps that I saw the wicked forces within American culture finally mar the image and soul of the Marines. In recent years, I have noticed that television recruiting ads feature mostly Negro or non-White individuals. The actor who does the voice-overs for these ads is a Negro. When the Silent Drill Team is shown, there is always a Negro rifleman at the very front of the formation, where he cannot be missed (and friends of mine who remain in or close to the Corps tell me that such Negros are photogenic props, pure and simple, that the Negroes in the Silent Drill Team are few and not in leadership positions, that Negroes tend to be unable to memorize the incredibly long and complex routines performed with no verbal commands). In recent television documentaries, the producers focus on non-White Marines and their families, particularly non-White women Marines (and this is yet another layer of corruption: when I was serving, female Marines were known officially as “WM’s,” or “Women Marines.” In today’s Corps, regulations forbid distinguishing between males and females. The women who wear the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor are known simply as “Marines”).
Other documentaries have examined the recruit training experience of boot camp. When I arrived at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, the haircut was one of the first orders of business. We were herded into a large shed-like building where a team of elderly barbers (who I later learned were brothers, all of Italian extraction) relieved us of our locks. The men worked quickly, quietly, and treated us with respect (and a little dash of pity; they knew what was coming for us). In one of the recent documentaries on television, the barbers at one of the recruit depots were young, hulking Negroes. But not just Negroes. Negros with do-rags on their heads and grills in their mouths. Negroes who bullied and badgered and taunted the scared and dazed recruits. And on the screen, the Drill Instructors stood by and did nothing to protect the recruits from these felonious gorillas. My Drill Instructors, delighted sadists that they were, were yet always very quick to point out that no **********ing silly-vilian had any business saying anything to any of us, and ordered us to report anything a civilian on the base might say to one of us.
I am told that the majority of Drill Instructors in the Marine Corps are now non-White. I can only imagine the caliber of training and inspiration the young recruits are receiving. Instead of breathing the air of Valhalla, these youngsters inhale the dank fumes of the ‘hood. And it’s all dressed up with the Stars and Stripes and the Marine Corps emblem tacked on for vulgar decoration.
The news reports from today’s distant, absurd war serve to underpin my belief that the Corps is dying. Discipline problems in the ranks abound (just as they did in the Vietnam war with its integrated troops), and some of the problems are race-related (just as they were in the Vietnam was with its Project 100,000 troops). While race hustlers who’ve never worn a uniform call for equality in a military choked with gang members, White boys from decent families die every day in the desert. The Commandant of the Marine Corps and his senior officers make the standard mewlings about diversity and inclusiveness. And the once-proud force that roared out from Tun Tavern in 1775 is eaten by a canker from within.
In my young years, I wore a uniform. On the wall where I write these words hangs a photo of me in that uniform. I appear so young; it shocks me to look at the image. Next to that photo is a large framed print of the Marine Corps Emblem. And above these two icons hangs my USMC Noncommissioned Officer’s sword, gleaming and quiet in its scabbard. I used to be so proud of these things, of what they represented, of what they reminded me. But the Marine Corps is now exactly like the United States; it is exactly like the church visible; it is exactly like my own people. The Marine Corps is rotten and weak and ruined. And I am no longer proud of my association with the Corps. Certainly, I am proud of what I did, what I accomplished, what I proved (because I needed to prove something) to myself. And I am grateful for the friendships I forged in those years, and for the travel and the magic of the rites we used to perform together with rifle grease on our hands and cordite in our nostrils. But I am ashamed of the Marine Corps of today. The Marine Corps of today is like this country, like the church, like my people. It is rotten and weak and ruined.
And it promotes a lie with its own motto, Semper Fidelis. Always faithful? No. Not anymore. The Marine Corps of today is uninterested in its own culture and history and tradition and the realities of what it calls well-intentioned men to do. The Marine Corps of today is a social experiment.
The Marine Corps of the postmodern world is never faithful, because it has forgotten.
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