The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

130 Chapter 5
It is the soldier’s reason for being. It is his purpose. It is why he’s
been sent to war.
. . . A commander can drop dead in the midst of a fight, but his
unit will persist. They will press on without him because they don’t
fight for him. They fight for the mission, for the end- state. In the
absence of his direction, they will recall what he said before he died.
They’ll remember the “commander’s intent” and they will continue
to operate on that basis. That’s mission- type orders. And that is why
the mission statement is so critical to know and understand. That’s
why it’s not just a matter of semantics. The mission statement is
why our troops fight. 79
Marine heroes do not possess a common set of personality traits or
leadership characteristics. They range from disciplined to maverick, cool
and taciturn to outrageous and undiplomatic; their human strengths and
failings cover the full range. What they do have in common is a commitment
to mission accomplishment against all odds and with uncommon
bravery and audacity. These men are not heroes because they save Marine
lives. They are heroes because they accomplished the objective. In fact, if
the objective required a high number of lives, this only increases Marine
prestige in accomplishing the mission. Focusing on the Marines of the
Pacific campaign, O’Connell observes that continuous assault was a “cultural”
course of action that “was preferred to safer but less Marine- like
tactics”:
In short, the Marines continued forward because their ideas about
proper Marine behavior gave them no alternative. Death was not
unimaginable; it could be incorporated into the Marine’s stories
about his own identity. Failing one’s comrades or appearing to prefer
the Army, however, could not. As one Marine noted in his last
letter to his wife before being killed in the assault on Tarawa: “The
Marines have a way of making you afraid—not of dying but of not
doing your job.” 80
High casualty rates could be incorporated into the Marines’ cultural
themes of prestige earned via suffering and dying. O’Connell claims that
“the Corps’ steadily increasing casualties in World War II—which were
twelve times greater in the last year of fighting than they were in the first—
further convinced Marines that their service was superior to the others
around them.” The bloody price of their victories compounded the insularity
of the Corps and only deepened its members’ attachment: “The narratives
of Marine exceptionalism continued to function, even when the service’s
principal marker of difference was greater suffering and dying.” 81 Spooner’s
legends carry much the same theme. A lot of Marines die. They do not “get