Rep. Murtha: Semper Fi? .........Rrrrrrrriiiigghhhhtt

The American Thinker exposes Rep. Jack Murtha for what he is, a former Marine who puts his "brothers' in jeopardy for sake of his own political career. Disgraceful.

excerpt:

Evans Carlson was the kind of eccentric that abounds in U.S. military history. In the late 1930s, he was serving with the Marines in Tientsin, China, when he took the opportunity to visit Mao and his 8th Route Army at Yenan. Carlson was so overwhelmed by the experience—the comradeship, the ideology, the excitement of being part of a cause – that he became for all practical purposes a convinced Maoist.

Which didn’t prevent him from remaining a Marine. Taking some of the lessons he’d learned (including the Maoist slogan “gung ho” – “work together”), Carlson applied them to Marine Corps tactics and organization. At the outbreak of World War II he convinced his superiors to allow him to form a pair of Raider battalions, units that based their tactics in large part on Mao’s theory of guerilla warfare. After a half-successful raid on the Japanese-held island of Makin, Carlson led a dramatic month-long raid behind enemy lines on Guadalcanal, clearly demonstrating the potential of the raider concept. Though the Raider battalions never quite lived up to Carlson’s billing, they provided valuable service and acted as a basis for postwar Marine practice in units such as Force Recon.

Carlson remained in the Marine Corps, and in the early 50s, came to the attention of one particular ex-Marine, Sen. Joe McCarthy. Always eager to produce an actual communist to back up his rhetoric (most active communists had already been bagged by the time he appeared), McCarthy planned to drag Carlson before his committee and expose him as a follower of the evil Mao tse-Tung, whose troops were even then fighting UN forces in Korea.

At least, that was what he planned until a high-ranking Marine officer stalked into his congressional office and explained to the senator that once a Marine, always a Marine, and that Marines, no matter what the circumstances, never betray their brothers in arms.