The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

66 Chapter 3
the campaign was part of a major strategic defeat. For the Marines,
the campaign was a victory, for the march out from the Chosin
saved X Corps and virtually destroyed seven PLA [People’s Liberation
Army] divisions. The 1st Division did so against heavy odds
and at center stage for world military and press observers. 78
In his history of the Marine Corps, Semper Fidelis, Millett writes, “At a cost
of almost seven thousand casualties (about half from critical frostbite), the
1st Marine Division had polished the Corps’s reputation for valor and skill
at a time when Army divisions of the Eighth Army appeared infected with
defeatism.” 79
It didn’t hurt the Marine ego any that the Army’s own Gen. Douglas
MacArthur reported, “I have just returned from visiting the Marines at
the front, and there is not a finer fighting organization in the world.” 80
Marine experiences in conventional war only reinforced for the Marines,
and for the American public, the swagger included in the third verse of
“The Marines’ Hymn”:
Here’s health to you and to our Corps
Which we are proud to serve;
In many a strife we’ve fought for life
And never lost our nerve.
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines. 81
Even after the malaise imposed by the Vietnam War, Victor Krulak
would claim, “Woven through [the Marine] sense of belonging, like a steel
thread, is an elitist spirit. Marines are convinced that, being few in number,
they are selective, better, and above all, different.” 82 Aaron O’Connell,
writing on Marine Corps culture, sees this concept as foundational: “At the
root of the Marines’ ideas about themselves were narratives of exceptionalism—an
ideology that made them feel separate from and superior to everyone
else, both soldiers and civilians. This exceptionalism, with its attendant
sentiments of insularity and mistrust of outsiders, was the first principle of
Marine Corps culture.” 83
And at what are they exceptional? Above all, fighting. In his 1944 attempt
to analyze what makes the Marine Corps so special, what force binds its
brotherhood and inspires its esprit de corps, Col. Charles A. Wynn writes:
It is something deep down inside the soul of the Corps which I
have often tried to analyze. It isn’t because the Marines have served
in every corner of the world; the Navy has done that. So has the