From there to China, where Butler earned the first decoration of the many that would eventually make him the most decorated Marine ever to leave the battlefield. In honor of his first victory, he tattooed the Marine Corps emblem on his chest. His men were afraid for their life, and so was Butler, but he stood up and started firing anyway, which in turn encouraged his men to do so and the rout was on. In his first action, fighting the Filipino soldiers who had taken their country back from Spain and would not surrender it to the US, Butler found his platoon pinned down in a rice paddy. Maine, and he overheard his Congressman father talking of the need for new Marine Corps officers, that he bullied his mother into vouching for his adulthood and headed off to war. So it was only natural that when the Hearst papers ran with the headlines announcing the demise of the U.S.S. Colonel David Hackworth once asked, "What is it with most Marine generals? Do they get inoculated with double shots of truth serum in boot camp?" Who knows, but both camps, the Marine Corps war heroes and the anti-war heroes, could claim the same man as their standard-bearer: Smedley Darlington Butler.īutler was born to a long line of Quakers but grew up reveling in his grandfathers' tales of the Civil War, on whose behalf they both fought despite their pacifism. The leading Marine Corps General in the First Gulf War, Anthony Zinni, started campaigning against a subsequent invasion of Iraq during the Clinton Administration and continues to give speeches critical of our ongoing disaster in that country. Not one crammed down their throat by Americans. I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody dollar-crooked fingers out of the businesses of nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they (would) arrive at a solution of their own that they design(ed) and want(ed). Shoup said in a famous '60s anti-war speech: What's harder to imagine is the long list of the Marine Corps' anti-war heroes, such as Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, or David Shoup, also a Medal of Honor winner, who resigned as Commander of the Marine Corps in 1963 over his disagreements with the President about our action in Vietnam. His son, Lewis Puller, Jr., went instead and lost his legs. These are the guys who are, as they say in the Corps, "Brass balls and bulletproof." Puller even petitioned, at age 68, to go to Vietnam in 1966, but was denied. It's easy enough to imagine the long history of Marine Corps war heroes: Dan Daly cutting the pistol from a dead horse to continue fighting in Haiti, where he earned his second Medal of Honor barrel-chested Lewis "Chesty" Puller, serving in campaigns stretching from World War I to Korea, storming over a frozen Korean ridge for his fifth Bronze Star.
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