The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Identity and Role 57
Against that modern portrait flow historical narratives and images of a
sometimes very different sort. A look at the recruitment posters of the early
Banana Wars era (1913–16) reveals a Marine Corps whose selling tag is
“good pay, foreign travel, and congenial employment”—the very tangibles
that Marine Corps recruiters treat with contempt today. This is not yet the
Marine Corps that can exist on its brand. Poster images in the pre–World
War I era depict Marines rushing to “colonial” duty in tropic scenes. Two
themes dear to modern Devil Dogs and already emergent here are “first”
and “fighting.” Marine posters brag: “First to Hoist Old Glory on Foreign
Soil” and “For Fighting . . . Join the Marines.”
“First” and “fighting” persist as two of the Corps’s most salient identity
themes. “First to Fight!” is still a quintessentially Marine slogan (and title of
the Corps’s most recommended book, authored by Marine leadership legend
Victor “Brute” Krulak) 20 and is reflected in a number of identity labels,
including “shock troops” and “the nation’s 911 force.” 21 Combat readiness
is an essential feature of this Marine Corps role. 22 Given the significant
overlap in Marine Corps function with the other services, readiness, or the
ability to immediately sprint into action, provides a distinguishing trait, one
essential to modern security and one that the Corps seeks to protect. Thus,
the dispatch of US Army Special Forces as America’s first entry force into
Afghanistan in 2001 and their domination, alongside Central Intelligence
Agency operatives, of the early phase of the war, supplied a painful shock to
Marine identity. In an award- winning essay published in a 2003 edition of
the Marine Corps Gazette, Capt. Owen West laments, “No service was better
prepared to fight the war on terror than the Marine Corps, yet it was relegated
to the periphery. Has the Nation’s premiere small unit infantry been
replaced by the joint Special Operations Command?” 23 Although Marines
led in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, worries over retaining their premier status
as a first- response crisis force continue to prick at the Corps.
World War I marked a dramatic shift in Marine Corps identity and
recruitment calls. Unsurprisingly, posters of that era are loaded with scenes
of the war front. Perhaps more surprisingly, many of the Marines depicted
are aboard ship. Although the Marines of World War I were already claiming
far more in common with infantrymen than sailors, the Corps was
reluctant to give up its naval image. 24 Most posters of this era bridge the
gap between services by touting Marines as “soldiers of the sea.” Neither
contemporary Marines nor their predecessors ever called themselves “sailors”—despite
the fact that the Corps’s departmental affiliation lies with the
Navy. The explanation is partly bound up with the Marines’ earliest origins
as guard detachments aboard ships. 25 One of their primary responsibilities
was keeping potentially unruly sailors from engaging in mutiny or any other
nefarious deeds. To call oneself a “sailor” would be to stoop to the level
of those policed. Even today, sailors far more than soldiers are the butt of
Marine jokes when the ire is directed at other services. 26 The second, and