The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

160 Chapter 6
to achieve nation- building aims and those who possessed the most robust
communication connections to the US Congress and domestic public. 104
The American penchant to side with the underdog and to disdain an
established aristocratic class meant that Marines exhibited little restraint in
demonstrating their repugnance of the local elite and were happy to act as
obstructionists to elite agendas. With typical leatherneck contempt for the
entitled upper class, Captain Frank Bride writes:
The better educated as a whole had a tendency to promenade the
streets with a cane as an inseparable companion and discuss among
themselves the best thing to be done and the easiest way for someone
else to do it. “Easy money” was the golden motto. . . . If a man
can read and write he immediately aspires to join the class of “dolittles,”
probably becomes a government employe [sic] and perhaps,
in the past, aspired to direct the secret affairs of some senator or
deputy who could not read or write. 105
Marine contempt for the elite encouraged officers and enlisted to find
opportunity to diminish their upper- class stature, sometimes in the form of
“humiliating arrests for petty offenses.” 106 Anti- elite sentiment was sharpened
by the fact that the elite were not white. Scholar Hans Schmidt writes,
“Negroes were accepted, sometimes with fondness, so long as they ‘stayed in
their place,’ while those who exhibited wealth, education, or ambition were
subject to attack as ‘uppity niggers.’” 107 Even those members of the elite with
whom the US occupiers had reasonably good relations were subjected to
inferior treatment. Butler, who did not exhibit the levels of vitriolic racism
spewed by some, was still no respecter of nonwhite persons, even if they
were head of state. When traveling with the mixed- race Haitian president
Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, Butler slept in the bed while the president slept
on the floor. 108
Physical abuse of the population tended to be more pronounced in areas
of skirmish and conflict. Marines were frustrated by the elusiveness of their
insurgent quarry and tended to take this out on civilians who resided in the
same geographic area. 109 There are clear indications that Marines practiced
“open season” from time to time—wreaking brutality on Haitians without
discrimination between bandit and citizen, burning homes and destroying
property. The atrocity that seems best documented (much is rumored) is the
illegal killing of Haitian prisoners “trying to escape.” Despite active efforts
at the very highest levels of the Corps to keep this in- house and out of congressional
sight, reports continued to leak out until the situation became a
major national issue. 110
While some Marines behaved abusively, others set high standards for
productive counterinsurgency conduct. Capt. Merritt A. “Red Mike” Edson,
who would become famous for his aggressive and successful patrols in