![]() ![]() They fought with Europeans as allies like the British at Peking and as enemies like the Spaniards at Guantanamo Bay. Imperial postings also gave them the opportunity to position themselves against other militaries. They began to frame themselves as the US military’s vanguard and as “jacks of all trades” who could perform any army or navy tasks and better than either service. The marines’ imperial service in Cuba, Philippines, and China, however, gave the service a new purpose. It was thought that sailors should be policed by their peers and not an external force, like the marines. The American aspect of marine policing was further complicated by ideas of democracy which extended into the armed forces. Without that important naval posting, however, marines would be reduced to just soldiers and military police. Both sailors, soldiers, and neither, marines had trouble convincing the navy that they had a place on board vessels. This, shows Venable, was built on the foundations of the nineteenth century, which was a period far less kind to the marines. This mythos valued tradition, longevity, battle-ready masculinity, and a can-do attitude promoting that marines could do anything and did it better than sailors or soldiers. She shows how a small service stuck between two larger corps with distinct missions-the army, who are soldiers on land and the navy who are sailors at sea-harnessed diversified advertising to create a marine mythos which sold the corps to the American public and, importantly, to incoming marines. Heather Venable’s book How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918 traces the creation of the marine identity and iconography that was so pervasive by the 1980s that it could be used as shorthand in this way. The film uses the established elite status of the marines, which the main characters denigrate, to underscore the even more elite military masculinity of the protagonists. Their officer derisively points out that they “look as much like a marine as a bridesmaid.” Later, their scrappy fighting to rescue the film’s damsel overwhelms the uniforms too prim to contain their muscles and their identities as elite Army Rangers, the false skin shreds off like a useless husk. They share a look of derision and then the film hard cuts to Dudikoff and James in the immaculate and stiff pageantry. In American Ninja II: The Confrontation a marine officer orders US Army Rangers Michael Dudikoff and Steve James to go undercover in US Marine Corps dress uniform. How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918. ![]()
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