The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Norms and Values 93
scenarios, however, especially those of extended duration involving statebuilding
efforts, brotherhood ties of this intensity threaten to undermine
evenhanded jurisprudence on behalf of locals when Marines are in charge
and their brothers violate local norms, legal practices, or are abusive in their
treatment of the native population.
The Corps as an institution and the brotherhood it affords are the most
sainted values on the USMC altar of worship, but the Corps has no shortage
of additional “values.” The Marine Corps values values. Marines are overt
about it. They advertise values, drill values, preach values. The three that
reign supreme are courage, honor, and commitment. 41 Recruits repeat these
three times daily in boot camp: “Honor. Courage. Commitment. Kill, kill.
Marine Corps!” 42 Marines are indoctrinated to see themselves as the bastions
of a long- forgotten conservative America, the still- standing sentries of a
noble value triumvirate. The list of values officers must memorize, drill, and
recite is much longer: bearing, courage, decisiveness, dependability, endurance,
enthusiasm, initiative, integrity, judgment, justice, knowledge, loyalty,
tact, and unselfishness (not to be left out, officers retain the “Kill!” chorus,
which is belted out by candidates at full volume as a response to such banal
commands as to take one’s seat). 43 Courage, honor, and commitment have
pride of place as mantra, but in directives from leadership to the Corps these
are not the values that commandants spend most of their time discussing in
detail. “Professionalism” and “discipline” absorb far more speech and directive
time than do courage, honor, and commitment.
Professionalism and Discipline
Marines see themselves as the “consummate professional[s].” 44 The Corps’s
seminal doctrinal text, Warfighting (known among Marines as MCDP- 1),
defines professionalism as being “true experts in the conduct of war,” achieved
by “intelligent leaders with a penchant for boldness and initiative down to the
lowest levels.” 45 No other attribute is more highly regarded or more repeated
as praise in Spooner’s legends. “Savage is one of the best- damned Marines I’ve
ever known. With a handful of men like him, you could storm the gates of hell
and overrun the Devil’s brigade. He’s a professional, through and through.” 46
Spooner’s use of the term captures the same spirit as the official definition,
as does Fick’s experience as a Force Reconnaissance Marine. Among Recon
Marines, an elite branch within the Corps, being called “hard” is “the greatest
compliment one could pay to another.” Fick explains: “Hardness wasn’t
toughness, nor was it courage, although both were part of it. Hardness was
the ability to face an overwhelming situation with aplomb, smile calmly at it,
and then triumph through sheer professional pride.” 47 The same combat- valor
orientation to “professionalism” appears in this admiring account of the early
twentieth- century Corps that included Marine legend Smedley Butler: