It's been nearly 40 years since John Wayne, portraying Marine Sergeant John M. Stryker, was cut down by a sniper's bullet atop Mount Suribachi in Sands of Iwo Jima. But the Leatherneck values of courage, loyalty and discipline that Wayne came to personify still survive in recruiting offices around the country. Just last week in Atlanta, even as the Marines reeled from the Moscow spy scandal, Michael Dunn, 20, was ready to sign up. Like generations before him, Dunn says he wants to be a Marine "because I need the discipline." Dunn, a sophomore at Morris Brown College, explains, "I've looked at the other services, talked to my friends, and I'd rather be with the best."
The best. That has been the Marines' coda from Tripoli to Belleau Wood, from Guadalcanal to Inchon. But in the past few years, these gleaming images have dissolved into others: blood-spattered rubble in Beirut, interservice turf battles in Grenada, a can-do lieutenant colonel wearing a medal-bedecked uniform while invoking the Fifth Amendment, furtive Moscow nights of sex for secrets. Says former California Congressman Pete McCloskey, a twice-wounded Marine veteran of Korea: "When I saw 200-plus Marines in Beirut bunched up in violation of every standard precept, I winced a lot. When I saw Ollie North, I winced a lot. And Moscow. It just killed us."
The 1983 Marine-barracks bombing in Beirut, in which 241 servicemen died, was a tragedy of a new order for a Corps that had long ago grown inured to more than its share of casualties on the battlefield. Afterward the investigation by the Long commission faulted the Marine command for its lack of defensive preparations and for its ill-fated decision to house the men in a single barracks. The invasion of Grenada did little to burnish the Corps's fabled reputation as the "first to fight." Owing to the demands of interservice glory sharing, only 36 minutes after the Marines landed at Pearls airport, the rival Army Rangers parachuted onto the airstrip at the other end of the island at Point Salines. It was a successful operation, and the Marines did themselves proud, but it raised questions about their unique role as the nation's elite amphibious strike force. And fairly or not, the Iranian arms fiasco has been partly associated with the gung-ho "Marine mind-set" of Oliver North and the command-and-control system of former Marines Robert McFarlane and Donald Regan.
Since their formation in 1775, the Marines have evolved into an arm of American foreign policy based on rapier-sharp discipline, a powerful code of integrity and a lustrous reputation as the nation's truest warriors. With just 196,000 members, the Marine Corps regards itself as the elite military service, though it is technically an arm of the Navy. But what most distinguishes the Marine Corps, forging the powerful esprit and the ideal of Semper Fidelis, is the basic training.