Thinking About the Marines

Events around the U.S. Embassy in Moscow have forced us, as they have many Americans, to think about Marines and about who they are and what they represent. They are, among other things, the self-conscious young men you see now and then on solitary parade in their hometowns after boot camp in their--let’s face it, gaudy--dress blues.

In time we suppose that they all come to understand that if Americans think of them in serious ways at all, they think of them as roofing contractors with hand grenades, people to be called during storms when a neglected roof has sprung a leak and the buckets are all full. Some may well be the grandsons of men who went ashore at Iwo Jima and into one of the most brutal battles since Thermopylae, or the sons of Marines who walked out of the snow-packed inferno of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. All obviously liked the ring of the recruiting slogan, “The Marines are looking for a few good men.”

The impressions of many Americans today--among people who may never have read about battles like that, let alone be old enough to remember them--are about as brutal, but not nearly so heroic. One is of Marines who died in Lebanon for no particular cause except that a judgment was made in Washington that the United States needed to show the flag, but not from behind very thick walls. The other is of Marines as oversexed innocents abroad, easy marks for every Tatiana or Natasha with a KGB connection.

The Marine Corps has taken more than its share of punishment over the embassy episode. Its reputation is tarnished partly because it was not harsh enough in screening candidates for embassy duty, although you have to believe that just because they are Marines the screen has very fine mesh these days. But a big part of the problem is that Washington, first in Lebanon and then in Moscow, put them in a position where the Marine tradition of fighting its way out was not an option. Gen. P. X. Kelley, the Marine Corps commandant, says that the corps has guarded the embassy for 38 years without a problem, and that it will clean up its own mess. Protocol dictates that a commandant not say much more or less than that.

But it also must be said that the embassy problem cannot be considered in isolation. With Washington’s preoccupation with high technology, summit photo opportunities, MX missiles and arguments over how many short-range missiles can safely be pulled out of Europe, Americans have not been encouraged to think much about why there are Marines in the first place. They exist because, if the world ever loses control of its temper again, the only way it can avoid nuclear devastation is to settle its scores as it always has: close up and on the ground. Americans might keep that in mind, whatever else they may be thinking of Marines.