R.B. Miller Stepping Off

Staying on the Dear Dotti theme, I tried to get another picture of her during the Iraq war, but failed. For the duration of the WWN's existence, Dotti claimed to be in her 20s, so 50 probably wasn't a stretch. Unfortunately, she only printed the letter. For today's Marine usage tip, "Marine" should always be capitalized, though I'll give Dotti a pass. This doesn't go for soldier, sailor, or airman, but try not capitalizing Marine around a sergeant major or drill instructor and see what happens. Various style manuals say this capitalization isn't correct -- guess if we care? One of my great regrets from the Iraq war is never finding out which of my letters were printed and which were not. Okay, I disappeared for 17 months, blah, blah, blah, two young kids at home, blah, blah, blah, but my wife wasn't able to check every single issue of the WWN for Dear Dotti letters. I have no idea what happened to the letters below. ...

Whenever I visited a new country, my goal was to get a letter published in the Dear Dotti column of the Weekly World News (1979-2007). Prior to enlisting, I'd had many letters published from the U.S., and one from France. The highlight of my literary career was getting this letter published in the run-up to Desert Storm: Okay, the letter wasn't actually true -- I'd kill any Saudi trying to take my Dotti picture -- but it prompted her to send me a picture, something I'd failed at many times previously. It's hard to articulate why I first enlisted, but the 1991-2019 portion of my career reflected my pride that Dotti was behind me, supporting what I did and wanting me to Kick Butt. One usage error that Marines rarely tolerate is being called soldiers. Marines aren't soldiers. Soldiers are in the Army. Whenever a newspaper -- even the Wall Street Journal , Washington Post , or New York City Times -- gets a picture of men in uniform, they label the...

Two tenets of feminism that don't play nicely together are: - Men and women are exactly the same. - Women are better than men. There is overwhelming contradictory evidence for the first -- look down -- and conclusive confirmatory evidence for the second. A current example was highlighted recently in a  Marine Corps Times  article. What percent of pervs who plant video cameras in bathrooms are women? 0.1%? 0.01%? What is the ratio of pornography aimed at male consumption to that aimed at female consumption? 100:1? 1000:1? More? In Stepping Off , Eileen is never afraid to identify differences between the sexes. Here, she's using a restroom along a marathon route: I almost abandoned my plan due to another reminder of man’s foulness. Though I was miles behind the winners, only 2% of runners beat me—a few hundred people. Near the 19-mile mark, on a peninsula with sparse crowds, I had to pee. At most stops, johns fill with spectators. Here, some were open; I jumped in...

From the beginning of time until a few years ago, it was considered normal to hate your enemy during wars. Okay, there were a few incidents where Americans and Krauts sang Silent Night together before killing each other the next day, but for the most part, armies have hated one another. Is that bad? The above recruiting poster is among the Marines' most famous. Wouldn't this be considered a hate crime today if posted on a college campus? I'm sure that 100 years ago, my Hun ancestors in Wisconsin didn't take it the wrong way. It was a war. Watch even the most sanitized, bloodless WWII movie, e.g., Sands of Iwo Jima . Racial caricatures abound. Characters speak of Japs, Nips, little lemon-colored characters, etc. And that was made a few years after the war. T.R. Fehrenbach claimed that (paraphrasing) most Indian tribes called themselves by a word that meant "The true human beings" in their language, as if everyone else wasn't. So give G...

From Stepping Off : 1. Ponch is a haircut Nazi. He continually orders haircuts. Our only clippers cost $12 at an off-limits PX for bigwigs. Americans use 120V electricity. Foreigners, their cars sipping liters of diesel and their foreheads flattened by soccer balls, use 240V electricity. Ponch plugged ten sets of U.S. clippers into 240V outlets. Each burned up within minutes, but before catching fire, they cut hair really fast. Americans will do anything to plug 120V devices into 240V outlets: The result is always the same: Sorry, 1stSgt, but you voided the warranty:

Wait, no, that was Saddam. Still, it baffles me when people describe Jordan as an ally. From what I can tell, this is how they've spent my lifetime: 6 days: trying to annihilate World Jewry 53.98 years: shipping ammunition to Iraq Between the Gulf War and the Iraq invasion, I've seen plenty of unlabeled enemy ordnance, but I've never seen labeled ordnance that wasn't from Jordan. This was typical: Here's another theory about WMDs: maybe we never found any because the whole country was floor-to-ceiling artillery shells. Elementary schools were filled with artillery shells. Foyers were filled with artillery shells. Sports complexes were filled with artillery shells. If one in 100,000 shells contained nerve gas, that would still have been an enormous arsenal. I'm not exonerating the Americans here. In the months after Baghdad fell, nobody came to inspect any of these caches with Geiger counters or gas chromatographs. When we left this posit...

A common misconception in war is that, worst case, an ally is useless. A common misconception in business is that, worst case, HR or IT is useless. In fact, it's easy for a group or country to have negative value. Consider this passage from Stepping Off in the 1991 Gulf War: “Tomaso, you missed it. The BBC just discussed that Wop pilot who surrendered. Lucky he had the white flag, or they’d have shot him, and he wouldn’t be on TV denouncing his country.” “Well, they didn’t cover Luftwaffe pilots surrendering since they were busy strafing refugee camps. Qatar sent more troops than you Nazis did.” “Remember the rumor that five Italian planes turned back with mechanical problems and the sixth was shot down? That was false.” “See!” “The BBC said seven turned back and the eighth was shot down.” “And you’re a Nazi.” Remember that the Italians were assigned a mission. It wasn't the most important mission, or it wouldn't have been assigned to Italians, bu...