Rivalry between Corps, Army lives on in desert

By Steven Komarow
USA Today


CAMP BULLRUSH, Northern Kuwait — Why would a young man or woman choose the Marine Corps instead of the Army? Marine Cpl. Benjamin Kallas takes a thoughtful pause before answering.
“The Army is about average. And I’ve always been an above-average person,” says Kallas, 22, of Minnesota, from the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines.

And why didn’t Army Staff Sgt. Ramon Coote, a signal corpsman of the V Corps, join the Marines? “I have friends in the Marines, and they’re all crazy,” he says.

Commanders play it down, but a rivalry far older than America’s distaste for Saddam Hussein is playing out in the desert.

Looking north to Baghdad from here, the Marines are on the right and the Army is on the left. Both sides know that bragging rights for years could be the reward for the service that performs the best.

Benis Frank, a retired Marine historian, says the rivalry dates back to the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I.

American Marines were fighting there with the Army to defend France from the Germans. There was strict censorship of the fight. But after a newspaper correspondent covering the Marines was badly injured, news if the battle got out and the Marines became heroes. The Marines also actively recruited journalists to serve in uniform, making sure their exploits became widely known.

Army leaders — the Army fought most of the 1914 battle — never forgot. Among the junior officers then was an artilleryman named Harry Truman. Thirty-six years later, Truman was president and the Marines were seeking a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which they eventually got.

Truman opposed it. Officially, it was on the grounds that the Marines, which fall under the Department of the Navy, already were represented. After a California congressman tried to change his mind, Truman responded. “For your information the Marine Corps is the Navy’s police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain,” he wrote in 1950. “They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.”

Today, the two forces are becoming more similar. Overall, the Army has about 481,000 troops and the Marines have roughly 170,000. The Marines, traditionally based on ships for quick actions far from home, have geared up for longer fights farther from shore. The Army, meantime, plans to be quicker to respond while retaining its role as the long-term force.

In Iraq, “you will see both forces applying combat power the same way,” says Brig. Gen. Daniel Hahn, the chief of staff of the Army’s V Corps. Hahn formerly served under the Marines’ commander in Kuwait, Lt. Gen. James Conway.

But the rivalry remains. Privately, Marine commanders say the Army is ponderous and spends too much money. Army leaders say the Marines don’t have the staying power for the long, hard fights.

A classic example of the different approach: The Army is relying on complex testing and special vehicles to warn troops of chemical weapons. The Marines are using pigeons. They will bring the birds with them into combat, like coal miners who carried canaries.

Army Sgt. Maj. Charles Griffin, 43, says it’s a healthy rivalry that keeps both services sharp.

“Two different breeds, to a certain extent,” says Griffin, a 25-year veteran, from the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Armored Division based at Fort Riley, Kan. “But in the end, we’ll be all one happy family.”

Lt. Greg Johnson, 29, of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, agrees — to a point. He points with pride to the anti-tank platoon he leads, guys with porn magazines in their trucks and names like “Boom-Boom Room” on their pup tents. “They may cuss and they may try to kill everything that they see,” he says. “But you don’t always want to send the Boy Scouts in to do the job.”



Sempers,

Roger