Some Assumptions....

[GyG1345]

How many times have we heard/or read someone say that assumptions are rarely correct?

Many times, I'm sure.

The problem is that we usually just assume that our assumptions are correct--sometimes they are, sometimes not.

Take the issue of the use of the term EGA Vs. Emblem. The other day, I posted a website response to some brouhaha which resulted in a write-up in Leatherneck magazine a couple years ago regarding a former Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps who had been visiting Quantico and observed that young Marines had come to refer to the Marine Corps emblem as an EGA.

The SgtMaj had been given a write-up on this topic in leatherneck where he proceeded to lambast those who used the term EGA. I agree.

But, from another point of view, I know of nothing that specifically precludes the general use of EGA by any Marine, just as there has never been anything to preclude the use of Semper Fi vice Semper Fidelis, etc.

Marines, in general, also tend to "correct" anyone using the term ex-Marine. But where in the Marine Corps Manual (if one still exists) does it say that. The term ex-Marine has always been used by many Marines--in my experience--many of them Marines who were then old salts way back in 1952 when I came upon the scene.

So, are many of these things that have come into vogue, from time to time--they come and go--just assumptions on our part? Or Assumptions on the part of the majority? Who knows if the majoity is the majority or not--has anyone taken a poll on any of these? Not likely.

I would say that most of these things have never been up for an official ruling of any kind. So one man's assumption is another's truth.

Can we really tell another Marine that there is no such thing as an ex-Marine, and/or no such thing as an EGA?

Those are just a couple examples. Probably too much data for one post here anyway.

DickG

[GyG1345]

Well, OK--it posted!

Take the subject of hands in yer pockets--definitely a Marine Corps/military no-no. But there are at least two different photos of The Marines' Marine w/his hands in his pockets. I have never been able to find these on the Internet, just a couple books, else I would have used them together w/this topic as a webpage/messageboard discussion or something.

Why not? If this same Marines' Marine had stated that it was not right to use the terms EGA and ex-Marine, all of us would be referring to that as a reference and authority.

Just something to think about.

Dickg

[Barndog]

At the same time Gunny - when 'did' all of these changes begin to occur? I never heard a Marine refer to another (either senior or junior for that matter) as 'that E-4 or that E-2'. On the same note, I would never refer to the Eagle Globe and Anchor as an 'EGA'.
I read the Sergeant Major's article. I do concurr 110%.

On the subject of 'ex-Marines' - I've never personally known one, except one who didn't make it through boot camp for one reason or another. Then I properly and righty correct their sorry ass.
The cover that sits atop my BHG at this very moment says:

USMC NEVER RETIRED - ALWAYS A MARINE.

Semper Fidelis

[GyG1345]

As usual, I don't expect anyone to agree for the most part w/the position I took for purposes of a discussion here on this topic.

And, I used the example of the General's photos w/his hands in his pockets because they were more extreme than the examples of the EGA and ex-Marine--certainly the former case was clearly incorrect (and likely written authority to show that) whereas the two latter cases probably cannot be pinned down so easily, beyond some individual/individuals staement to the contrrary, which would be an opinion only, I think. if you say that the status of the individual making the statement would strengthen the statement--then back to the photos.

DickG

[GyG1345]

I have always heard--and I receive e-mail from WWII Marines referring to themselves as ex-Marines--not all but enough to indicate that my memory is correct in that it was once a common thing, and still is to those not regularly on the Internet and wary of being attacked for it.

On the E-whatever vice ranks--I'm sure that came into being w/the 1959 rank structure changeover where the two rank structures were maintained together w/an Acting preceeding your old rank, and your rank ending w/an E-XX, whatever. Because things were so confused, at that time, it was just easier to refer to someone as an E-4 or E-5 to save confusion. That's how this got started.

At that time I was stationed at HQMC and the E-X thing had become so out of hand that we had several officer/ SNCO meetings in the base theatre in an effort to stamp it out! We lost.

Just about 4 years ago I was seated in the Burger-King (or whatever) in the MCX Complex at Pendleton, and the Marines in the next booth were referring to one another as E-4, E-3, and so forth,

Over forty years since the rank structure of '59 and it's still w/us!
And these Marines were not even born then--no wonder that SgtMaj is POd at the EGA thing--barracks talk and other BS can become tradition.

Dick G

[Barndog]

Psssssst Hey Gunny......

I was born in '57 LOL I have a couple Jarhead drinkin buddies that are of the era you are. They've expressed the same sentiments about the E-X - whatever. LOL

Beyond my pay grade! But, I would never call someone E-2 or some sh it like that. (I remember you posting abotu that issue at Pendleton)
I find that not only degrading, but unprofessional conduct.

Semper FI

[GyG1345]

Barndog:

I was retired in Sept 72--so I actually have no direct knowledge that the E-X thing faded from existence after that or not--but it seems unlikely that it did inasmuch as I saw/heard them still using it in the example I already cited. And, i still see it from time-to-time on other boards, e-mail that I receive, etc.

There had always been the anti-lifer attitude on the part of some of the troops, and it was common that many of them felt much like the draftees of the early 50s that I served with--I would say most of them (draftees) were real good people, whereas others were attitude problems as much as they could get away with. But they were all gone by 1954.

In the early 60s we were beginning to see a distinct change in the (some) of the people coming into the Corps. Clearly the beginnings of the hippies/drugs influence in the big society. By the time I retired in 72 things were indeed out of hand--read the piece by Heinl dated back in the 70s--although he excludes the Marine Corps from his findings, I believe it was a clear picture.--I'll post it here if I can find it.

DickG

[GyG1345]

The Collapse Of The Armed Forces -- Col R.D. Heinl USMC
by Dick G (Login Dick Gaines)
Forum Owner

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES

By Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr.
North American Newspaper Alliance
Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971

Table of Contents

Introduction

Back To The Campus

Bounties And Evasions

Society Notes

The Action Groups

Tough Laws, Weak Courts

Tactics of Harassment

Racial Incidents

Drugs and the Military

No Street Is Safe

Desertions and Disasters

Non-Volunteer Force?

Soulbone Connected to the Backbone

No Office for the Ombudsman

The Vocalists

Word to the Whys

A Hard Lot at Best

THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.

Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.

The responses of the services to these unheard-of conditions, forces and new public attitudes, are confused, resentful, occasional pollyanna-ish, and in some cases even calculated to worsen the malaise that is wracking. While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services.

Historical precedents do not exist for some of the services' problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.

By several orders of magnitude, the Army seems to be in worse trouble. But the Navy has serious and unprecedented problems, while the Air Force, on the surface at least still clear of the quicksands in which the Army is sinking, is itself facing disquieting difficulties.

Only the Marines - who have made news this year by their hard line against indiscipline and general permissiveness - seem with their expected staunchness and tough tradition, to be weathering the storm.

Back To The Campus

To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam that the rearguard of a 500,000 man army, in its day and in the observation of the writer the best army the United States ever put into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.

"They have set up separate companies," writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, "for men who refuse to go into the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don't even put on their uniforms any more... The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key...There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion."

Can all this really be typical or even truthful?

Unfortunately the answer is yes.

"Frag incidents" or just "fragging" is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield's Montana was fragged in his sleep) the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970(109) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96).

Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.

In one such division -- the morale plagued Americal -- fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.

Yet fraggings, though hard to document, form part of the ugly lore of every war. The first such verified incident known to have taken place occurred 190 years ago when Pennsylvania soldiers in the Continental Army killed one of their captains during the night of 1 January 1781.

Bounties And Evasions

Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.

Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969,the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, "G.I. Says", publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the officer who ordered(and led) the attack. Despite several attempts, however, Honeycutt managed to live out his tour and return Stateside.

"Another Hamburger Hill," (i.e., toughly contested assault), conceded a veteran major, is definitely out."

The issue of "combat refusal", and official euphemism for disobedience of orders to fight -- the soldier's gravest crime – has only recently been again precipitated on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry's mass refusal to recapture their captain's command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders.

As early as mid-1969, however, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused -- on CBS-TV -- to advance down a dangerous trail.

(Yet combat refusals have been heard of before: as early as 1813,a corps of 4,000 Kentucky soldiers declined to engage British Indians who just sacked and massacred Ft Dearborn (later Chicago).)

While denying further unit refusals the Air Cav has admitted some 35 individual refusals in 1970 alone. By comparison, only two years earlier in 1968, the entire number of officially recorded refusals for our whole army in Vietnam -- from over seven divisions - was 68.

"Search and evade" (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, "CYA (cover your ass) and get home!"

That "search-and-evade" has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation's recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them. The same statement boasted - not without foundation in fact - that American defectors are in the VC ranks.

Symbolic anti-war fasts (such as the one at Pleiku where an entire medical unit, led by its officers, refused Thanksgiving turkey), peace symbols, "V"-signs not for victory but for peace, booing a

Note:
Too long to post here-click on link at Top for all of it...