Why Marines Fight by James Brady

From the Publisher

United States Marines, for more than two centuries, have been among the world's fiercest and most admired of warriors. They have fought from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan and Iraq, in famous battles become bone and sinew of American lore. But why do Marines fight? Why fight so well? Why run toward the guns? Now comes a thrilling new book, pounding and magnificent in scope, by the author some Marines consider the unofficial “poet laureate” of their Corps.

James Brady interviews combat Marines from wars ranging from World War II to Afghanistan, their replies in their own individual voices unique and powerful, an authentically American story of a country at war, as seen through the eyes of its warriors.  

Culling his own correspondence and comradeship with hundreds of fellow Marines, Brady compiles a story---lyrical and historical---of the motivations and emotions behind this compelling question. Included are the accounts of Senator James Webb and his lance corporal son, Jim; New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly; Yankee second baseman (and Marine fighter pilot) Jerry Coleman, and of teachers, firemen, authors, cops, Harvard football players, and just plain grunts, as well as the unforgettable story of Jack Rowe, who lost an eye and other parts and now grows avocados and chases rattlesnakes. Their stories poignantly and profoundly illustrate the lives and legacies of battlefront Marines.

Why Marines Fight is a ruthlessly candid book about professional killers not ashamed to recall their doubts as well as exult in their savagely triumphant battle cries.  A book of weight and heft that Marines, and Americans everywhere,will want to read, and may find impossible to forget.

Praise for James Brady

The Scariest Place in the World

“[A] graceful, even elegant, and always eloquent tribute to men at arms in a war that, in a way, never ended.”

---Kirkus Reviews

“James Brady has done it again.  A riveting and illuminating insight into a dark corner of the world.”

---Tim Russert, NBC's Meet the Press

The Coldest War

“His story reads like a novel, but it is war reporting at its best---a graphic depiction, in all its horrors, of the war we've almost forgotten.”

---Walter Cronkite

“A marvelous memoir. A sensitive and superbly written narrative that eventually explodes off the pages like a grenade in the gut . . .taut, tight, and telling.”

---Dan Rather

The Marine

“In The Marine, James Brady again gives us a novel in which history is a leading character, sharing the stage in this case with a man as surely born to be a gallant warrior as any knight in sixth-century Camelot.”

---Kurt Vonnegut

The Marines of Autumn

“Mr. Brady knows war, the smell and the feel of it.”

---The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

The reasons are almost as numerous as the Marine combat veterans quoted and profiled in this engaging collection of reminiscences. Many cite the training and discipline drilled into recruits and the determination not to let down one's buddies. Others are motivated by vengeance after a friend is killed. Gen. Smedley Butler, after a career invading banana republics in the early 20th century, opines that he fought mainly as "a gangster for Capitalism." Some fight for the thrill of it ("the heavy machine gun made you feel like no one could touch you"), and some fight out of the sheer cussedness personified by Sgt. Dan Daley, who shouted, "Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?" as he led his men against the Germans in France in 1918. Parade columnist Brady (The Coldest War), a Korean War Marine vet, sketches vivid thumbnails of his interlocutors and sets the right leatherneck vibe-sympathetic, irreverent, comradely-to draw them out. Some tales meander; this is very much a meeting of old (and a few young) soldiers catching up and telling war stories in a glow of nostalgia. Still, Brady assembles from them an unusually personal and revealing collage of the nation in arms. (Nov.)

Steve Forbes - Forbes Magazine

This stirring story of Marine officer James Cromwell (a Catholic whose nickname is, you guessed it, Oliver) is historical fiction at its best. During World War II, college-educated, occasional pugilist Cromwell joins a famed Marine special commando unit, the members of which are an incredibly motley lot reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders. No John Wayne glosses here; the triumphs and the bloody screwups are realistically portrayed. Especially memorable is a canoe trip Cromwell and his colleagues make during the Guadalcanal campaign. Later on and equally riveting is Brady's all-too-accurate depiction of the humiliating chaos of the early days of the Korean War. Brady skillfully interweaves his hero's tale with historic fact and characters. The ending is sharp, poignant. Ernest Hemingway could not have written this story better. (23 Nov 2003)

School Library Journal

The reasons are almost as numerous as the Marine combat veterans quoted and profiled in this engaging collection of reminiscences. Many cite the training and discipline drilled into recruits and the determination not to let down one's buddies. Others are motivated by vengeance after a friend is killed. Gen. Smedley Butler, after a career invading banana republics in the early 20th century, opines that he fought mainly as "a gangster for Capitalism." Some fight for the thrill of it ("the heavy machine gun made you feel like no one could touch you"), and some fight out of the sheer cussedness personified by Sgt. Dan Daley, who shouted, "Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?" as he led his men against the Germans in France in 1918. Parade columnist Brady (The Coldest War), a Korean War Marine vet, sketches vivid thumbnails of his interlocutors and sets the right leatherneck vibe-sympathetic, irreverent, comradely-to draw them out. Some tales meander; this is very much a meeting of old (and a few young) soldiers catching up and telling war stories in a glow of nostalgia. Still, Brady assembles from them an unusually personal and revealing collage of the nation in arms. (Nov.)

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Product Details

• ISBN: 0312372809
  
• ISBN-13: 9780312372804
• Format: Hardcover, 320pp
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Pub. Date: October 2007
• Sales Rank: 60,070

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Is that why we fight? Because we're cussed at and shamed into it? Was that what motivated the men of the 4th Brigade in 1918 who went into the deadly wheat field? Do today's Marines who take out combat patrols in Anbar Province and hunt the Taliban somewhere west of the Khyber have the same motivations as Dan Daly's men? Or the Marines who once waded the bloody lagoon for General Howland M. “Howlin' Mad” Smith at Tarawa, scaled Mount Suribachi, defied the Japanese at Wake Island, fought the Chinese in the snows of North Korea, and fought and died on the Perfume River at Hue and in a thousand other bloody places?

The Marines in this book answer those questions; each in his own way attempts to say why we aredrawn to the guns.

Dan Daly had his methods: Curse the sons of bitches and lead them into the field. The men were impressed, by the man if not by his shouting, knowing Daly as a legend, with two Medals of Honor already. But was Daly's leadership and their own training all it took for Marines to get up and run at the machine guns of Belleau Wood? It became a question I kept asking.

General Jim Jones, tall and tough, a former commandant and more recently NATO commander, has a mantra: “Sergeants run the Marine Corps,” he told me once on a rainswept drive from Quantico to the Pentagon. Jones wasn't just blowing smoke, keeping up noncom morale when he said that. He was attempting to tell me what he believed differentiates the Marine Corps from other military arms. Without its seemingly inexhaustible supply of good, tough sergeants, the Marine Corps would be nothing more than a smaller version of the army. Most Marines, officers or enlisted, would agree. They've had their own Dan Dalys. We all have.

I found mine, thirty-three years after Daly, in a North Korean winter on a snowy ridgeline, the senior NCOs of Dog Company, a couple of blue-collar Marine lifers, hard men from the South Pacific and up through the ranks, one hard-earned noncommissioned stripe after another, who tutored me about war, not off their college diplomas but out of their own vast experience of service and combat, and incidentally about life, women, and other fascinating matters. These were the professionals; I was the amateur learning from them, not in any classroom but in a quite deadly field.

Stoneking, the platoon sergeant, was a big, rawboned Oklahoman maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine, who drove a bootlegger's truck back home and was married to an attractive brunette WAVE who sent him erotic photos of herself. He had been a Marine eight or nine years, had fought the Japanese, and was in the bad Korea fighting. The men knew that if it came to that, he would (against the rules) strip his blouse and fight another enlisted man who was giving him angst. Stoneking was a cold, distant man with little regard for me or for most people (I don't believe he really gave a shit about anyone), although for forty-six consecutive nights that winter he and I slept head to toe in our sleeping bags in a stinking, six-by-eight-foot bunker with a log-and-sandbagged roof so low it had to be crawled into and out of. That miserable hole was where we lived like animals and where from Stoneking I began to learn what it was to be and to lead Marines. Once when I'd been in a shooting and crawled back late that night into our bunker to tell about it, Stoneking wasn't much impressed. “So you got yourself into a firefight,” he remarked, and rolled against the dirt wall to get back to sleep. “Yeah,” I said deflated, and got into my own sleeping bag. A pivotal event in my young life meant nothing to a hard case like Stoney.

The right guide, our platoon's ranking number three, was the more affable Sergeant Wooten.

We weren't supposed to keep diaries (in case we were captured or the damned things were found on our bodies) but I wanted one day to work on newspapers and write about people and things, so, to keep a record and get around the diary rule, I wrote long letters home to family and girlfriends for them to save. The mail back then wasn't censored. Wooten might occasionally have composed a postcard, and little more, but he enjoyed watching me scribble away, marveled at my industry. “You are a cack-ter, suh.” Cack-ter being his pronunciation of “character,” in Wooten's mind a compliment. He was leagues less surly than Stoney, so I occasionally lured him into deep, Socratic conversation.

“It ain't much of a war, Lieutenant,” Wooten would concede, having listened to me blather on, and then patiently explaining his own philosophy to a young replacement officer, “but it's the only war we got.” He had other, maturely and placidly thought out commentaries on life and the fates, remarking with sly, rural witticisms on the nightly firefights and their bloody casualty rolls, “Sometimes you eat the bear / sometimes the bear eats you.” Or declaring as an unexpected salvo of enemy shells slammed into the ridgeline, scattering the men in dusty, ear-splitting, and too-often lethal chaos, sending us diving into holes amid incongruous laughter, “There ain't been such excitement since the pigs ate my little brother.”

You rarely heard a line like that back in Brooklyn.

I ended up loving these men, as chill, as caustic, or as odd as they may first have seemed when I got to the war, an innocent who had never heard the bullets sing, had never fought, who yet, by the fluke of education and rank, was now anointed the commanding officer of hardened veterans of such eminence and stature. Maybe I could better explain about such men and why Marines fight and generally fight so well if only I were able to tell you fully and precisely about combat as my old-timers knew it, and how it really was. And how I would have to learn it.

It's difficult unless you've been there.

War is a strange country, violent and often beautiful at the same time, with its own folklore and recorded history, its heroes and villains. It is as well a profession, strange and sad, poorly paid but highly specialized. Cruel, too. War is very cruel. And surprising, in that it can be incredibly thrilling and rewarding, though not for everyone. There is a sort of complicated ritual to it, a freemasonry, a violent priesthood. Only fighting men are qualified to exchange the secret fraternal handshake, the mythic nod and wink of understanding.

Not all men are meant to fight in wars and fewer still do it well. Others, revolted by its horrors, its sorrows and pity, yet hold dear its memories, the camaraderie, its occasional joys. I have even heard men admit, without shame and rather proudly, “I love this shit,” speaking candidly about war and their strange passion for it. There are such Marines, plenty of them, men hooked on combat. They love it the way men love a woman in a relationship they suspect will end badly. Others are honest enough to admit they hate and fear it but go anyway. Their reasons may be strangely inspiring, or murky, puzzling.

A few Marines can't or won't go to the battle, and they don't last long, not in the infantry, not in the line outfits. They are transferred out to someplace less. They may still be fine men but they are no longer Marines.

I never knew better, truer men than in the rifle company ranks in which I served, bold and resourceful Americans, beautiful men in a violent life. What each of them was and did later at home and at peace, having let slip the leash of discipline, I can't always say. But in combat such men, even the rogues and rare scoundrels, were magnificent, hard men living in risky places. In this book, I write about some of them. Forget my commentary; hear the Marines, listen to their voices.

The third platoon's right guide, Sergeant Wooten, that salty career man, was a crafty rifleman who knew a little about demolitions. He once volunteered in North Korea to blow a Fox Company Marine's body out of the ice of a frozen mountain stream; using too heavy a charge, he got the guy out, but in two pieces. When he came back to us at Dog Company he looked terrible, like a man after an all-night drunk. “You okay, Wooten?” “No, sir, I ain't. After I got that boy out that way, I threw up on the spot.” A three-striper who had fought the damned Japanese for three years, all across the Pacific, Wooten took a drink. He'd been up and down the noncommissioned ranks, as high as gunnery sergeant and then broken back to buck sergeant, a lean, leathery, drawling rustic maybe fifteen years older than I was and lots wiser. Sometimes Wooten lost patience with those who were critical of the Korean War we were then fighting. He was pretty much enjoying himself and thought those people ought to shut the hell up and cut the bitching. As, giving me that flat-mouthed grin of his, Wooten declared with professional regret: “It's the only war we got.”

Copyright © 2007 by James Brady. All rights reserved.

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Why Marines Fight

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