Ed Palm.
So much for reasoning the need, but there is a humanly redemptive sense in which I believe we still need the Marine Corps.
I grew up in a single-parent working-class home in a bad neighborhood. I had no prospects for college. I seemed destined for a life of industrial-strength monotony, and the Corps at the time was the only avenue to distinction open to me. The Marines shored up my flagging self-respect and self-confidence, and I’m sure it has done likewise for countless young men, and now women, who have been put down and underestimated by the authority figures in their lives. In the words of the poet, “I took the [road] less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference.”
The difference is that the Marine Corps is not just a branch of the military. The Army has its elite units; the Navy has its SEALS. But the Marine Corps is an elite fraternity (in a genderless sense) with a distinctive sense of esprit de corps.
That fraternal sense is a Marine thing. If you’ve never been a Marine, you may not understand it.
This is a heartfelt tribute to the history of the U.S. Marine Corps and what it has meant to our history, so I hate to say it to Ed, but this comes from another time, another culture, and another world.
My son saw it after Iraq when the Corps wouldn’t allow him to train his “boots” the same way he was trained. He also observed that they were intentionally attempting to rid the Corps of combat experience.
It didn’t take too long until women were invited to join Marine Corps infantry officer training at Quantico, and then on to integrated men/women training at boot camp. The U.S. Marine Corps is but a shell of what it once was.
They could have taken a different route. It would have involved making enlistments five or six years instead of four, raising entrance standards for all Marines, more specialized schools, jettisoning the ridiculous notion of large scale amphibious landings, learning to operate in stealth and with distributed operations in smaller teams, learning and applying different means of ingress and egress, and so on. In other words, many of the things the Marine Raiders do now, except on a wider scale.
It’s too late. The DoD relies too heavily on JSOC for that sort of thing, so much so that their operational tempo has caused problems. You can add to all of this the vaccine mandate, and the entire DoD has been eviscerated.
What Ed Palm remembers is now just a phantom – a ghost.