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Most Marine and Navy Corpsmen who have seen active combat have, at one time or another, experienced a close call when they were seconds or perhaps inches from death yet survived because of a quick reaction, divine intervention or just plain luck. From Pearl Harbor to Baghdad, this volume contains the stories of 62 Marines who narrowly escaped death while fighting in America's wars. Inspired by the author's own close call in May 1968, it recounts a great variety of harrowing experiences. Personal background from before and after the close calls provides a more human facet while additional research adds historical information to these fascinating stories of Marines and Navy Corpsmen.
This comprehensive survey profiles one of history's greatest fighting forces, on land, sea, and air. The United States Marine Corps: A Chronology, 1775 to the Present touches upon all aspects of the Continental and U.S. Marine Corps since their inception. All major battles in all major wars are covered, along with innumerable smaller clashes and deployments abroad. The evolution of amphibious doctrine, so essential to Marine Corps activity in the 20th and 21st centuries, is likewise covered in detail, along with the rise of Marine Corps aviation. Through a diary of daily occurrences proffered in the context of greater historical events, this chronology captures the entire sweep of U.S. Marine Corps history. It follows the Corps from the American Revolution to the halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli, through World Wars I and II, and up to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM and Operation ENDURING FREEDOM in Afghanistan. Entries delineate battlefield events, but also significant political and administrative changes that have affected the Marines. Notable events in the careers of generals and other individuals are included as well.
In this insightful, erudite history of presidential campaign music, musicologist Benjamin Schoening and political scientist Eric Kasper explain how politicians use music in American presidential campaigns to convey a range of political messages. From “Follow Washington” to “I Like Ike” to “I Got a Crush on Obama,” they describe the ways that song use by and for presidential candidates has evolved, including the addition of lyrics to familiar songs, the current trend of using existing popular music to connect with voters, and the rapid change of music’s relationship to presidential campaigns due to Internet sites like YouTube, JibJab, and Facebook. Readers are ultimately treated to an entertaining account of American political development through popular music and the complex, two-way relationship between music and presidential campaigns.
A memoir of a tough childhood—and tough combat—by an “adventurous, lively, outspoken, opinionated” WWII Marine veteran (Columbus Dispatch). On September 15, 1944, the US First Marine Division landed on a small island in the Central Pacific called Peleliu as a prelude to the liberation of the Philippines. Among the first wave of Marines that hit the beach that day was twenty-two-year-old George Peto. Growing up on an Ohio farm, George always preferred being outdoors and exploring. This made school a challenge, but his hunting, fishing, and trapping skills helped put food on his family’s table. As a poor teenager living in a rough area, he got into regular brawls, and he found holding down a job hard because of his wanderlust. After working out west with the CCC, he decided that joining the Marines offered him the opportunity for adventure, plus three square meals a day—so he and his brother joined the Corps in 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor. Following boot camp and training, he was initially assigned to various guard units until he was shipped out to the Pacific and assigned to the 1st Marines. His first combat experience was the landing at Finschhaven, followed by Cape Gloucester. Then as a Forward Observer, he went ashore in one of the lead amtracs at Peleliu and saw fierce fighting for a week before the regiment was relieved due to massive casualties. Six months later, his division became the immediate reserve for the initial landing on Okinawa. They encountered no resistance when they came ashore, but would go on to fight on Okinawa for over six months. This is the wild and remarkable story of an “Old Breed” Marine—his youth in the Great Depression, his training and combat in the Pacific, and his life after the war, told in his own words.
In 2014, the US marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the basis for the Johnson administration’s escalation of American military involvement in Southeast Asia and war against North Vietnam. Vietnam War Slang outlines the context behind the slang used by members of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. Troops facing and inflicting death display a high degree of linguistic creativity. Vietnam was the last American war fought by an army with conscripts, and their involuntary participation in the war added a dimension to the language. War has always been an incubator for slang; it is brutal, and brutality demands a vocabulary to describe what we don’t encounter in peacetime civilian life. Furthermore, such language serves to create an intense bond between comrades in the armed forces, helping them to support the heavy burdens of war. The troops in Vietnam faced the usual demands of war, as well as several that were unique to Vietnam – a murky political basis for the war, widespread corruption in the ruling government, untraditional guerilla warfare, an unpredictable civilian population in Vietnam, and a growing lack of popular support for the war back in the US. For all these reasons, the language of those who fought in Vietnam was a vivid reflection of life in wartime. Vietnam War Slang lays out the definitive record of the lexicon of Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Assuming no prior knowledge, it presents around 2000 headwords, with each entry divided into sections giving parts of speech, definitions, glosses, the countries of origin, dates of earliest known citations, and citations. It will be an essential resource for Vietnam veterans and their families, students and readers of history, and anyone interested in the principles underpinning the development of slang.
Clifton B. Cates's fame came from his consistent and courageous demeanour throughout the war. In the bloody second half of 1918 with the 6th Marine Regiment, he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, was recognized by the French government with the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre, and earned the nickname 'Lucky'. I Will Hold is the inspiring, brutal, and incredible true life story of a Marine Corps legend whose grit and unstoppable spirit on the battlefield matched his personal drive and sage wisdom off of it.
Dryden’s Second Hundred Years (Part II) does two exceptional things. First, its tight focus on local participation in World War II paradoxically chronicles the entire war, a conflict which drew its combatants from small rural townships like Dryden NY, assigned and scattered them throughout the world, and then delivered the survivors back home again, creating in every small American community a microcosm of the entire conflict, an eye-witnessing of the whole story. Second, that story is told here largely in local participants’ own words, in letters from camps, troopships, carriers, cruisers, foxholes, and hospitals, their voices a quiet backdrop to the horrific war they had been asked to fight. The resulting narrative suggests that those who don’t know history – while not always doomed to repeat it – are very likely doomed to live their lives without perspective, to mistake inconvenience for hardship, and hardship for catastrophe, and to be blind to the miracle of everyday normal life.
Based on comprehensive interviews with survivors, extensive military records, as well as personal letters, diaries and photographs, the full story is revealed behind the deadly truck bomb that exploded at the U.S. Marine Corp barracks in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983.
Deployed to Iraq in March 2004 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, US Marine Michael Zacchea thought he had landed a plum assignment. His team's mission was to build, train, and lead in combat the first Iraqi Army battalion trained by the US military. Quickly, he realized he was faced with a nearly impossible task. With just two weeks' training based on outdated and irrelevant materials, no language instruction, and few cultural tips for interacting with his battalion of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Yazidis, and others, Zacchea arrived at his base in Kirkush to learn his recruits would need beds, boots, uniforms, and equipment. His Iraqi officer counterparts spoke little English. He had little time to transform his troops—mostly poor, uneducated farmers—into a cohesive rifle battalion that would fight a new insurgency erupting across Iraq. In order to stand up a fighting battalion, Zacchea knew, he would have to understand his men. Unlike other combat Marines in Iraq at the time, he immersed himself in Iraq's culture: learning its languages, eating its foods, observing its traditions—even being inducted into one of its Sunni tribes. A constant source of both pride and frustration, the Iraqi Army Fifth Battalion went on to fight bravely at the Battle of Fallujah against the forces that would eventually form ISIS. The Ragged Edge is Zacchea's deeply personal and powerful account of hopeful determination, of brotherhood and betrayal, and of cultural ignorance and misunderstanding. It sheds light on the dangerous pitfalls of training foreign troops to fight murderous insurgents and terrorists, precisely when such wartime collaboration is happening more than at any other time in US history.