The father of an enlisted Marine modernizes John Thomason's classic Fix Bayonets!, illustrating that the essence of the Corps since World War I remains the same.
The men who flew or sailed into the Persian Gulf and adjacent Islamic lands in the first few years of the 21st Century, men of the 1st and 2d and 3d Marine Divisions, and, of course, their supporting Marine air services, were gathered from various places.
There were olive-skinned men with black hair whose faces were those of the Conquistadors who had landed five centuries before and the Indians who met them; light-skinned fellows whose ancestors had come from somewhere between Ireland and the Urals and had long since merged into the great American Caucasian mass; and black men whose ancestors had begun the long road out of bondage and forced submission with musket and bayonet 140 years earlier in the not-so-young-anymore history of the United States. And there were not a few yellow-skinned men whose parents were from the jagged, snowy ridges of Korea or the nowcommunized rice paddies of Vietnam, the latter tightly bound to America in a skewed embrace of friend and foe and blood impossible to untangle.
There were strapping college students and not a few graduates who had felt the call of the rifle and machine gun more than that of the campus and classroom after that apocalyptic, awful Tuesday in September 2001. There were husky farm boys from Great Plains that were fast emptying and youngsters for whom the fast-food counter or computer screen had suddenly become terminal boredom. There were more than a few women whose presence testified to the unsettling march of that great equalizer, technology, and the machines it makes possible and the minds it changes.
And there were a number of diverse men who ran curiously to type, with uniformly short but rarely ungroomable hair, and firm awareness of who they were. Their speech was flavored with Navy words, from a bygone heritage when their ancestors had spent much time afloat on all kinds of Navy ships, and with expressions from the Carolinas and Southern California, of Okinawa and Honolulu, and lately of the trackless deserts and ghastly heat of the countries from Kuwait to Kabul. In easy hours or off duty their talk ran from the neon towns of Okinawa, which their grandfathers had helped conquer in 1945; to the merciless sands and head-to-toe covered women of Arab lands; from muggy and buggy Parris Island and Camp Lejeune-very humid-to blue skies and cold Pacific surf of Camp Pendleton and San Diego-very dry-to obscure firefights in Liberia, where maniacal "warriors" wearing women's wigs wore t-shirts with the names of American basketball stars and lopped off arms and legs and women's breasts like monsters.
They drank Kirin on Okinawa, reminisced on Red Stripe in Puerto Rico, and relaxed on Fosters in Australia. Rifles and grenade launchers and machine guns were high and holy things to them, and they knew what a 120-mm tank shell could do. They talked patronizingly of the war of 1990-1991 in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and the not-quite-war with names with no vowels in them of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the starving people and arrogant warlords of Somalia.
They were the Leathernecks, the Old Timers, and they had been practicing their trade, with changes in their weapons and uniforms but very little in their basic tasks and their souls, since 1775. They were the new breed of the American Marine regular, identical to the old breed in regarding the service as home and war as an occupation. They transmitted their temper and character and viewpoint to the high-hearted, cynical yet idealistic, educated yet naive, and affluent yet tough mass of volunteers who filled the junior enlisted ranks of the fighting ground and air units of the United States Marine Corps; as the United States of America, in the 23rd decade of its existence, drove ever deeper into the territory of its fanatical, primitive, and implacable Islamic enemies.
Mr. Goldich retired recently after a 33-year career with the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. His son, Private First Class David L. Goldich, U.S. Marine Corps, received a bachelor of arts degree in history from the University of Virginia in 2004 and is currently a dismount rifleman/HMMWV (HumVee) driver with the Antitank Platoon, 2d Tank Battalion, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He will deploy to Iraq with his unit in March.