The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

150 Chapter 6
an indisputable marker of Nicaraguan readiness to take the helm. 61 The
Marines did not get Sandino.
Sandino, however, agreed to amnesty in the wake of the Marines’ departure.
His Sandinistas agreed to disarm and come in from the field. They were
later assassinated by the Guardia forces of Jefe Director Anastasio Somoza,
this to include Sandino himself after an evening dining with Somoza. 62
Somoza, in turn, took advantage of the upheaval to unseat the elected president
and, Guardia in hand, establish a family dictatorship that would rule
Nicaragua for forty- five years. 63
The Marines, for their part, left the Caribbean with accrued small- wars
competence but a decidedly bitter bent toward irregular conflicts, which
required so high a price and were often treated as inconsequential at home.
Writing in 1937, Capt. Evans Carlson voiced a common feeling:
[Small- wars] deaths tended to emphasize to the people of the
United States that the work of training a national constabulary was
far from being a peaceful and safe occupation. The yeoman work
of this nature which so often falls to the lot of the Marines is too
frequently considered by the folks at home as a normal peacetime
function which is free of the hazards which are ordinarily associated
with a major war. But a man is just as dead if he is killed in a
minor engagement of a minor expedition as he is if he succumbs in
the greatest battle of a major war. It perhaps takes more courage
to carry on in a minor war for often the individual lacks the moral
support which is provided by the propinquity of large numbers in
a major operation. 64 Intervening Years
The Caribbean episodes imposed stress on a range of Marine norms and values
and inspired a discussion of best practices in counterinsurgency environments.
As the discussion matured, its proponents resolved that the lessons
identified must be incorporated into practice by the Marine Corps through
changes in training. Toward this end they assembled a new doctrinal text: the
Small Wars Manual. Had the Marines’ next major engagement been faced in
the bush, the lessons drawn from this manual might have been trained into
action and cemented into Marine fighting form. Instead, Marine attention
turned to the Pacific, and the Small Wars Manual was shelved. 65 The result:
The bulk of previously established default norms within the Corps persisted,
even those in sharp contrast with the most emphasized lessons learned in the
laboriously assembled Small Wars text.
Not all was lost, however. The temporal proximity of Vietnam to the
Banana Wars meant that some in senior positions during the 1960s carried