An American Lion

You do know that these Marines of ours were badasses, right?

In his new novel, “The Marine,” author and columnist James Brady revisits the turbulent period of what he calls the “forgotten war,” a war that took 37,000 American lives.

Brady visited The Saturday Early Show to discuss his book.

The protagonist of “The Marine,” James “Ollie” Cromwell, was raised on Park Avenue, son to a lawyer, and educated in private schools. He studied hard and hit hard, his toughness developed from fighting with the German and Irish kids on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His affluent upbringing led him to college at Notre Dame, just after the famed Knute Rockne years, in 1933.

When his four years at Notre Dame ended, Ollie came to a crossroads, as most young men do at that time in their lives. His father asked him about his future. Brady writes in the book:

“I’d like to see you go to law school after South Bend. You’ve got the grades. But that’s your call, Jim. I badgered you into football, and it didn’t work out very well. So you’ll get no pressure on law school. Have you thought what else you might do?”

Ollie had expected the question and assumed it would come sooner or later. And he had thought about it for a long time now, back to Regis High, where the Jesuits started him off right away in freshman Latin on Julius Caesar’s “Gallic War.” They followed up with other tales, some in Latin, others in English, of Rome’s famed Tenth Legion, of their epic fights against Gauls and Belgians, and especially of Vercingetorix, noblest of the barbarians and a favorite of young Cromwell. It was Vercingetorix who got the boy to ponder soldiering, who set him on a path to boot camps where soldiers were made. What the “noblest of barbarians” didn’t do, a close perusal in history class of “Lee’s Lieutenants” did. And when he began Greek, Ollie realized that he preferred the Spartans, rude fellows who were forever waging war, to the Athenians, philosophers and aesthetes.

“Yessir,” Ollie said now in the smokey Berlin dive; he had been thinking ahead. “Not many jobs out there waiting, not in hard times. I thought instead of three years at law school, I might go in the service for three or four years. No war on right now that involves us, and I can just wait out the Depression. Then try whatever comes along with my newfound maturity and store of globe-trotting adventures.” All this offhandedly, poking fun at himself.

So it was settled and Cromwell joined the Marines, eventually ending up as a Marine detachment aboard the Navy cruiser “Juneau,” in San Diego. It was where he would meet the famous Evans Carlson, and become part of the famed “Raiders” unit. And it eventually led him through two of the biggest wars in American history, World War II and Korea.

Interesting. Every day, fewer and fewer of these men are with us. Time marches on, but if we forget the lessons of the past, another bunch of young men are going to march off to another war, another Chosin Resevoir.