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    Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps
    Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps
    Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps
    Audiobook11 hours

    Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps

    Written by Aaron B. O'Connell

    Narrated by Danny Campbell

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    About this audiobook

    The Marine Corps has always considered itself a breed apart. Since 1775, America's smallest armed service has been suspicious of outsiders and deeply loyal to its traditions. Marines believe in nothing more strongly than the Corps' uniqueness and superiority, and this undying faith in its own exceptionalism is what has made the Marines one of the sharpest, swiftest tools of American military power. Along with unapologetic self-promotion, a strong sense of identity has enabled the Corps to exert a powerful influence on American politics and culture.

    Aaron O'Connell focuses on the period from World War II to Vietnam, when the Marine Corps transformed itself from America's least respected to its most elite armed force. He describes how the distinctive Marine culture played a role in this ascendancy. Venerating sacrifice and suffering, privileging the collective over the individual, Corps culture was saturated with romantic and religious overtones that had enormous marketing potential in a postwar America energized by new global responsibilities. Capitalizing on this, the Marines curried the favor of the nation's best reporters, befriended publishers, courted Hollywood and Congress, and built a public relations infrastructure that would eventually brand it as the most prestigious military service in America.

    But the Corps' triumphs did not come without costs, and O'Connell writes of those, too, including a culture of violence that sometimes spread beyond the battlefield. And as he considers how the Corps' interventions in American politics have ushered in a more militarized approach to national security, O'Connell questions its sustainability.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 25, 2013
    ISBN9781452682433

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    • 4/5
      Cultural history of the Marines during and since WWII. O’Connell emphasizes the Marines’ grasp of PR, used in service of their overwhelming and constant sense of being under threat, more often from other services than from actual hostile combatants. However, there was also plenty of actual trauma and PTSD, given that Marines faced more combat exposure than other services and also adopted tactics that emphasized speed of victory over safety of fighters. So the homefront involved political maneuvering to position the Marines as the true guarantor of manhood versus both civilians and other services—the others liked planes and nuclear bombs and other tech, while the Marines focused on the fighting man as a man and a soldier. This also required the Marines to carefully manage their perceived relationship with violence to keep from becoming offputting to civilians, especially women—O’Connell calls their claim that brutal training was a fatherly way of making boys into men “tender violence.” It didn’t work all that well in practice, as O’Connell’s discussion of high domestic violence and alcoholism rates indicates, but it definitely achieved its PR objectives. I was surprised to learn how dirty the Marines played in politics, leaking top secret military reports to their congressional supporters, and it was also a reminder how longstanding the conservative self-positioning as victims really is.