The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

214 Chapter 8
5. Fuller, “Its Own War College?,” 359.
6. Bickel, Mars Learning, 137–39.
7. Schmidt, Maverick Marine, 75, 111.
8. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 163.
9. Bickel, Mars Learning, 6.
10. Utley, “Introduction to the Tactics,” 50.
11. Ibid., 50; Maj. Samuel M. Harrington, “The Strategy and Tactics of Small
Wars,” Marine Corps Gazette (December 1921): 480; Maj. E. H. Ellis, “Bush
Brigades,” Marine Corps Gazette (March 1921): 1–15. A disagreeing voice is
Capt. G. A. Johnson, “Junior Marines in Minor Irregular Warfare,” Marine
Corps Gazette (June 1921): 152–63.
12. Utley, “Introduction to the Tactics,” 50.
13. Simmons, United States Marines, 95.
14. Schmidt, United States Occupation of Haiti, 93.
15. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 170–71. See also Millett, Semper Fidelis, 199.
16. Langley, Banana Wars, 147.
17. Bickel, Mars Learning, 138.
18. Schmidt offers this enormously imbalanced kill ratio as partial evidence: 3,250
Haitians to 14–16 Marines. Schmidt, United States Occupation of Haiti, 104.
19. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, 17; Cable, Conflict of Myths, 99. The United States
Marine Corps (hereafter USMC) official history of the Dominican experience,
written in 1974, does not characterize it as counterinsurgency but rather the
“suppression of banditry.” See Fuller and Cosmas, Marines in the Dominican
Republic, 33. For typical prose regarding “bandits”—persisting even a near
century later—see Lt. Col. Richard J. Macak Jr., “Lessons from Yesterday’s
Operations Short of War,” Marine Corps Gazette (November 1996): 59.
20. Ellis, “Bush Brigades,” 3. See also Capt. G. A. Johnson, who defines irregular
warfare during the same period as “campaigns against nature, surprise, treachery,
inferior weapons, tactics, and people. The enemy, if he has any tactics at
all, usually descends to mere bushwhacking.” In a particularly ironic twist, this
author makes the point, some pages later, that one should “rather over- rate
than under- rate the enemy in making your plans.” “Junior Marines in Minor
Irregular Warfare,” 152, 161.
21. Ellis, “Bush Brigades,” 3.
22. USMC, Small Wars Manual, ch. 1, “Introduction,” 43.
23. Ibid., 8.
24. For instance, one article points out that in the accounting of the time more
Marines in the Nicaraguan campaign had died of accidents and disease (sixtyfive)
than of wounds sustained in action (forty- eight). “The Marines Return
from Nicaragua,” Marine Corps Gazette (February 1933): 25.
25. CAP Marines learned quickly to hold their VC and NVA foes in high esteem.
See Hop Brown, oral history in Hemingway, Our War Was Different, 25;
Edward Palm, oral history, ibid., 39; Tony Vieira, ibid., 43; and oral history file
2367, USMC Vietnam War Oral History Collection, Marine Corps Archives