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A Victory! COOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today's Classroom Good News for a change! Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad I am so grateful!! Interesting stuff Leadership of the highest kind Manly Stuff One Hell of a Good Fight Our Great Kids Real men Soldiering Stand & Deliver This great Nation & Its People War
Smedley Butler: The Marine Who Earned Two Medals of Honor by Will Dabbs
Major General Smedley Butler collected two Medals of Honor, fought across the globe, battled corruption at home, and later claimed powerful businessmen wanted him at the center of an American coup.
Before Smedley Butler, Let’s Talk About Names
My name is Willis. I might have preferred William, but I didn’t pick it. Mine is a family name. As such things go, it certainly could be worse.
Many famous individuals, particularly actors, often choose a new name if their original names seem insufficiently photogenic. John Wayne entered the world as Marion Robert Morrison. Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach. Michael Caine was Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Charlie Sheen was Carlos Irwin Estevez. Comedian Jonah Hill was originally Jonah Feldstein. Vin Diesel began life as Mark Sinclair. Diesel changed his name at age seventeen when he became a professional bouncer at a fashionable New York nightclub.
There are countless examples. Famed British actress Helen Mirren was originally Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov. Olivia Wilde was Olivia Jane Cockburn before she became enamored with the playwright Oscar Wilde. Natalie Portman was Natalie Hershlag, but changed her name in a failed effort at protecting her privacy.
Caryn Elaine Johnson had such a problem with passing gas that her coworkers called her “Whoopi Cushion.” When her show business career began to take off, she adopted Whoopi Goldberg because somebody told her that folks with Jewish-sounding names did better in Hollywood. Apparently, it worked. She’s worth $60 million today.
The point is simply that some names can make surviving Second Grade pretty tough. Despite having been saddled with an objectively awkward moniker, Smedley Darlington Butler went on to do some pretty amazing things.
Butler was one of only two Marines in American history to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice for two different combat engagements. In 1933, he was also tagged to lead a military coup to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. That effort kind of fizzled, but Smedley Butler was nonetheless a simply fascinating guy.
Smedley Butler Before the Legend: A Quaker Goes to War
Smedley Butler was born on 30 July 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of three sons born to Quaker parents. Butler was an accomplished athlete in High School, serving as captain of his baseball team and quarterback on the gridiron.
He quit school 38 days before his 17th birthday to enlist in the US Marine Corps. His dad was livid, but the young man was terrified he might miss the Spanish-American War. The administrators at his High School had mercy on him and granted him a diploma anyway.
Smedley’s dad served in the US House of Representatives for 31 years. He was chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Having your dad managing the Marine Corps budget likely didn’t hurt the young Jarhead’s career prospects.
The younger Butler lied about his age and was granted a direct commission as a Marine officer. He arrived in Cuba just after the war ended. Butler piddled about the Marine Corps for another year but then mustered out. However, with the Philippine-American War now heating up, the young officer turned around and donned his uniform yet again, this time as a First Lieutenant.
From the Philippines to the Boxer Rebellion
Like many true warriors, Smedley Butler did not handle boredom well. When not in action, he drank excessively. He once got drunk and was relieved of command.
However, in October of 1899, Butler led 300 Marines to seize the town of Noveleta in the Philippines. Though he briefly panicked when his First Sergeant was hit, Butler regained his composure and led his Marines to rout the enemy. Once the carnage abated in the Philippines, Butler headed to China to put down the Boxer Rebellion.
During the Battle of Tientsin in the summer of 1900, Lieutenant Butler was shot through the thigh while rescuing a wounded Marine. Despite the grievous nature of his injury, Butler went on to help evacuate several of his troops under fire.
Four enlisted Marines earned the Medal of Honor in this engagement, but Marine officers were, at that time, not eligible for the award. However, Butler was granted the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, which also included a promotion to Captain. He was one of only twenty Marines in the history of the Corps to be so recognized.
Old Gimlet Eye and the Bloody Banana Wars
Having now tasted proper combat, Captain Butler just couldn’t get enough. He fought across Central America and the Caribbean in what has since come to be called the Banana Wars.
Even though Butler and his Marines were protecting American business interests, they still no doubt faced some profoundly fierce combat. Losing Marines in support of the United Fruit Company and similar corporate concerns made a deep and lasting impression.
In 1903, Butler took a detachment of Marines into Trujillo, Honduras, looking for trouble. Their primary mission was to secure the American consulate there. In a subsequent letter home, he said that he and his Marines were “Prepared to land and shoot everybody and everything that was breaking the peace.”
They landed amidst a 55-hour ongoing firefight between rebels and government forces. They found the American consul hiding in the rafters of the consulate, wrapped in an American flag. Once they got clear of the town with the American diplomat in tow, the opposing forces resumed killing each other.
At some point in all this traipsing about the jungle, Smedley Butler contracted a variety of bizarre tropical diseases. While rescuing the American consul, Butler was feverish with something or other and had sunken red eyes.
His men began calling him “Old Gimlet Eye.” A gimlet is either a cocktail made with gin and lime or a small tool designed to bore holes in wood. This was one of several respectful, though unsettling monikers bestowed upon him by his troops.
Vera Cruz and Smedley Butler’s First Medal of Honor
Butler subsequently fought all over South and Central America. He once led his battalion to relieve a besieged city on the island of Grenada while running a 104-degree fever.
In April of 1914, he led his troops in an assault on Vera Cruz, Mexico. The fight roiled across the city and ultimately cost American forces 17 dead and 63 wounded. Along the way, Smedley Butler earned the Medal of Honor.
His citation reads in part, “For distinguished conduct in battle, engagement of Vera Cruz, 22 April 1914. Major Butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22d and in the final occupation of the city.” The rules had obviously been changed by then to allow officers to earn the rarefied decoration.
Haiti and Smedley Butler’s Second Medal of Honor
Six months later, Smedley Butler invaded Haiti. He first arrived in the lawless area around Fort Dipitie with 44 Marines. They were ambushed by a force of 400 indigenous Cacos and, surrounded, fought them off all night long. The following morning, Butler organized an infantry charge that repelled the enemy forces in disarray.
On 17 November 1915, Butler led an ad hoc battalion of Marines and sailors in an infiltration of Fort Rivière. The subsequent combat was hand-to-hand and pitiless. When they took the fort, 50 Haitians were dead, and Smedley Butler had earned his second Medal of Honor.
Here’s the citation: “For extraordinary heroism in action as Commanding Officer of detachments from the 5th, 13th, 23d Companies and the Marine and sailor detachment from the U.S.S. Connecticut, Major Butler led the attack on Fort Rivière, Haiti, 17 November 1915. Following a concentrated drive, several different detachments of Marines gradually closed in on the old French bastion fort to cut off all avenues of retreat for the Cacos. Reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall, Major Butler gave the signal to attack, and Marines from the 15th Company poured through the breach, engaged the Cacos, took the bastion, and crushed the Cacos resistance.”
World War I Passed Him By, but Smedley Butler Kept Fighting
Butler was not granted a combat command during World War 1. There were several reasons for this, some political and others practical. Along the way, he had developed a reputation for erratic behavior. Butler subsequently came home to command the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.
From Marine General to Philadelphia’s Crime Fighter
This was a different time. In 1924, W. Freeland Kendrick had been elected mayor of Philadelphia and faced a city awash in Prohibition-driven corruption.
President Calvin Coolidge therefore released General Butler to serve as the city’s Director of Public Safety in charge of both fire and police forces. Butler reassigned his police officers to unfamiliar precincts to upset the inevitable protection rackets he knew to be active.
In his first two days on the job, Butler’s cops raided 900 illegal liquor clubs. He was quoted as having told his officers, “I don’t believe there is a single bandit notch on a policeman’s gun in this city; go out and get some.” I wonder how that might go over today….
The Business Plot: Smedley Butler’s Strangest Battle
Butler eventually retired and became an outspoken critic of war profiteering. In November of 1934, Butler claimed that there was a plot afoot led by prominent American businessmen to field a 500,000-man army of military veterans and march on Washington, depose FDR, and install MG Butler as dictator.
Along the way, Butler named names. The alleged conspirators dismissed the claims as bluff and bluster, but subsequent evidence came to light that lent credence to the plot. Regardless, Butler’s testimony before a House committee drove those behind it back into the shadows. Historians now call this sordid episode the Business Plot.
The Fighting Quaker’s Final Years and Legacy
Major General Butler finally retired to Newton Township, Pennsylvania, with his wife. In 1940, he fell ill and was found to be suffering from what was likely stomach cancer. He had a drinking history, and videos I tracked down in preparing this article sounded like he was a smoker as well.
“The Fighting Quaker,” also known as “Old Gimlet Eye,” succumbed to his disease in June of 1940. He was 58 years old. A real “Break Glass in Case of War” Marine, Smedley Butler was indeed a Leatherneck’s Leatherneck.
650-Pound Blue Marlin Caught off San Diego Coast Breaks State Fishing Record
The sports fishing charter, piloted by 32-year-old captain Alec Stockfelt, showed up at the docks of the Southern California city earlier this week, wowing onlookers as the nearly half dozen fisherman wrestled the giant fish to a weigh station at Fisherman’s Landing.
The previous blue marlin sports fishing title holder weighed in at 395, caught in the waters off San Diego in 2021.
The previous record at that location for any fish caught was some 598 pounds, the captain said.
An adult male grizzly bear weighs about 600 pounds, for comparison.
Anglers and captains expect 2026 to be a robust year for records due to El Niño weather patterns bringing in more exotic sea life.
Marlin belong to a rare group, less than 1% of fish species, that exhibit regional endothermy. They maintain a “heater organ” near the eyes and brain. This organ keeps neural tissue warm even when the fish dives into cold, deep waters to hunt.
In addition, this warm-blooded adaptation gives them a massive neurological advantage. Their visual processing and reaction times remain sharp at depth. Therefore, they can detect and pursue prey far more effectively than their cold-blooded targets.
The Pacific blue marlin world record, caught off Kona, Hawaii in 1982, stands at 1,376 pounds.
Gun culture isn’t necessarily what we think it is. Brent Wheat got an unexpected education
at a recent gun show. Photo illustration via Google Gemini
I’ve been going to gun shows for a long, long time. I’ve bought guns there, sold guns, worked, written and generally spent enough time wandering their aisles. I know the territory. I knew the sights and sounds, the merchandise and the characters.
I have talked to the guy with the old Winchester for sale, the collector looking for a particular Colt and the bargain hunter who wanted to dicker over two dollars. I’m not exactly a tourist.
This weekend, however, I felt like I journeyed someplace I’d never been. The building, tables and guns were familiar, but the people, the language and the overall vibe felt totally foreign. I had the odd sensation of visiting the place I grew up and finding they’d bulldozed it flat to build an amusement park.
At the show there were a surprising number of young people attending, and after a few hours, I began to realize it wasn’t simply a newer generation of the gun culture I knew. I was looking at a completely different universe.
Sadly, because I wasn’t selling anything of interest to this crowd, I had plenty of time to observe. True fact: my total gross sales on Sunday amounted to $33. You can understand why I spent a lot of time watching and listening.
The first thing that caught my attention was the hardware. There were AR-15 pistols everywhere, including some so short that calling them firearms seemed almost laughable. Most were dressed up in ways I considered unusual (for me, anyway): bright red muzzle devices, gaudy buffer tubes and gold or other flashy Cerakote finishes and accessories chosen as much for appearance as function.
GLOCKs were everywhere, too, stuck down the front of low-slung pants or sometimes carried under shoulders on elastic cord. Nearly all of them sported long stick magazines, and I soon learned white 33-round magazines have become something of a major status symbol.
None of this is particularly difficult to understand from a purely commercial standpoint. If somebody wants a red muzzle device or a GLOCK drum magazine and is willing to pay for it, there’s a market. In fact, the guy across from me was selling extended magazines faster than he could operate his cash register.
Hardware Just the Beginning
For most of my life, firearms have generally been an extension of an existing interest or identity. A hunter buys a shotgun because he hunts, the collector buys an old Colt because he’s fascinated by Colts and the competitive shooter buys equipment because he wants to shoot faster.
However, what I saw was something different — the gun was more of a symbol of the identity, a significant artifact, rather than a means to an end.
Granted, there was a fair amount of what I can only describe as posing. Some of the young guys were clearly trying very hard to look hard, adopting street language and mannerisms that seemed slightly disconnected from the suburban environment from which they appeared to have emerged.
We overheard a couple of conversations that were so obviously performative we had to laugh. There is something almost endearing about a kid trying desperately to convince the world that he’s a dangerous hard-bangin’ street tough when his private speech and mannerisms suggest he is addicted to Starbucks caramel mocha latte with extra sprinkles.
But even this illustrated something important: the guns weren’t simply being purchased as a vehicle to accomplish something. They were part of building a certain persona almost every young person desperately wants to advertise to the world.
Some of it was harmless. Unfortunately, I’d wager some of it wasn’t.
Cop Talk
This is where I have to acknowledge my own bias. I was a police officer for 30 years, and cops develop a pretty strong radar for people who are up to no good. It isn’t magic, and I’ll wholly, completely admit it isn’t infallible. It’s a collection of observations: clothing, speech, body language, associations, how someone handles a firearm, how they react to other people and what they say when they don’t realize anyone is listening.
Any one of those things by itself usually means nothing. But, put enough of them together, and it usually means quite a bit.
I saw people with possible gang affiliation and young men handling guns with very little apparent familiarity or discipline but much overt bravado. I overheard countless conversations — using language I couldn’t even begin to print on this website — that didn’t sound anything like the traditional gun-show crowd discussing hunting or the relative merits of a 1911 versus a 2011.
And I wasn’t the only person noticing. My booth partner quickly observed it, too, as did several other vendors. Granted, nobody was standing around making grand declarations about criminals taking over the show. The comments were quieter — the kind of knowing observations and glances exchanged between people who were seeing the same thing but didn’t need to explain it to one another.
I don’t know what crimes any of these people may or may not have committed. I don’t know what they intended to do with the guns they bought and carried. I won’t turn a haircut, a bandana or a manner of speaking into evidence of criminal activity.
But I also refuse to pretend that 30 years of law enforcement street experience suddenly became worthless because I can’t put a name and case number to something I saw for two minutes.
I witnessed some people who looked like they were playing a part, some who appeared to be perfectly legitimate young gun owners and some whose combination of behavior, conversation, appearance and equipment gave me a very strong feeling that their reasons for acquiring firearms weren’t particularly wholesome.
I trust that assessment, though you should never confuse it with proof. Having said all that, I came away from the gun show with a generally bad feeling.
Trouble Brewing?
One of the more memorable moments involved a boy who appeared to be about 12 or 13 years old. He picked out a 33-round GLOCK magazine and his mother (who seemed much more concerned about her phone conversation than Junior’s intended purchase) paid for it. There was nothing furtive about it, and nobody seemed particularly concerned. To them, this was apparently a normal Saturday activity.
I’ve been around guns long enough that a kid being interested in firearms doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, it usually inspires me a bit. I was interested in guns as a youngster, and most people reading this were, too. But I found myself wondering what this particular kid believed the magazine represented and why Mom showed zero interest.
Maybe this kid was a graduate of a 4-H shooting class or hunter education and was simply fascinated by extended magazines for the pistol he could someday legally own. But based on my observations, I don’t believe this was the case.
What disturbed me most were the two people with brass catchers attached to their “pistols.” Now, a brass catcher isn’t inherently suspicious. Competitive shooters and reloaders use them; heck, I’ve got one around here someplace. Anyone who has spent an afternoon crawling around a range looking for spent cases understands the appeal.
However, context matters.
These men weren’t competitive shooters, as far as I could tell, and they weren’t standing around discussing reloading or buying powder. They were part of a group of questionable-looking young men who had already caught my attention for all the wrong reasons.
Maybe there was an innocent explanation, and I hope there was. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t wonder whether those pistols were intended for some future unsavory purpose.
Maybe they didn’t want to leave evidence behind after a crime or maybe they simply wanted to be like their video heroes; I have no idea. Either way, it was disheartening.
Hard Questions
Unfortunately, I can’t magically divide these people neatly into responsible gun owners and potential problems. There is no algorithm to tell us which ones will become the next generation of hunters, competitors, collectors and responsible gun owners, and which ones will become the people the rest of us have to answer for.
But there’s another question at work: If firearms are increasingly becoming identity markers rather than tools — objects that tell the world something about who you are — what happens to the culture that traditionally gave those tools their meaning?
For most of us who grew up around guns, the firearm was the beginning of the conversation. What came next was the important part: hunting, competition, collecting, training, craftsmanship or simply the pleasure of shooting. The gun was a tool that connected us to something else.
What happens when the gun itself becomes a prop?
What I do know is this: this weekend represents how a number of younger people view firearms, whether traditional gun people like it or not. They view firearms primarily as props, status symbols, emblems and even tools of intimidation. Whether they intend to commit crimes or simply want to look the part, the effect is the same: it throws gun ownership in a negative light.
I’ve never seen a gun-owning group quite like this.
Ignoring or overlooking it won’t make it disappear, and pretending it isn’t part of gun culture doesn’t make it any less real.
I don’t particularly like it. I don’t endorse a lot of what I saw, and some of it genuinely concerns and angers me. I’m not going to profess otherwise just to make this piece more politically palatable. But if the firearms industry and shooting community want to understand this generation, we’d better start paying attention, even to the parts we want to ignore or pretend don’t exist.
The uncomfortable truth is that gun culture doesn’t belong exclusively to the people who built the version I grew up in. If people use firearms to construct identity, project status or signal affiliation, that’s part of the culture too, whether we approve of it or not.
And before anyone (inevitably) accuses me of being an old guy complaining about young people, let me acknowledge every generation has its own version of such things. Young men have always used clothes, cars, music and other objects to announce who they think they are. What’s different here is the object and its potential for destruction.
I walked into the gun show thinking I generally understood the gun world. I walked out realizing I only understood my corner of it and for that weekend, I was clearly a stranger in a strange land.
But, then again, maybe I wasn’t visiting a strange land at all — maybe I was getting a glimpse of the future, at least one possible future.
My guess is that what with the high price of Ammo in LA. That a few of those folks do! Grumpy
Now I have always wanted to go to Africa and bag me a Cape Buffalo & that’s it. But the closest I got was to go to Egypt. Which was a lot of fun by the way and I really recommend going there.
But life got in my way and now with a broken back, well it ain’t going to happen for me. Also PLEASE do not send me a gee Grumpy I’m sorry about that comment. As I have had a lot more fun in my life than I thought I would.
So bottom line is my advice to you is this. If you get a chance then go! Enough said now on this subject. Grumpy
