How Semper Fi?

Every boot who ever lived has had the lesson drummed into his shaved head: the U.S. Marine Corps is the best goddam outfit that ever existed. Its traditions are the most glorious, its battles the bloodiest, its men the bravest.

Last week the Marine Corps reeled under a humiliating attack that purpled faces from Quantico to Korea. Reason for all the commotion: an article in Cavalier, a corpuscular magazine with a large barracksroom circulation, that made the Marines' Hymn and many of the corps' proudest boasts sound like the Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. To compound the horror, the author was a certified leatherneck with 26 years' service in the corps, retired Brigadier General William B. McKean.

The Marines, McKean claims, were a tinhorn elite corps until World War I, when Correspondent Floyd Gibbons immortalized the 4th Marine Brigade in the Battle of Belleau Wood. Actually, Gibbons wrote his flaming story in advance, was wounded by a stray bullet that cost him his left eye, and never saw the battle he described so vividly. Nor did he mention the other 20,000 soldiers of the Army's 2nd Division, who fought just as--bravely as the 8,000 marines in the French forest. There is no question that the marines displayed surpassing gallantry at Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal and Chosin Reservoir and countless other places, but, says McKean, their exploits have been frequently and flagrantly exaggerated. Items:

P: Marines aboard the sinking Bon Homme Richard did indeed capture the British Serapis in a bloody, muzzle-to-muzzle fight. But all of the 137 enlisted men were Frenchmen, in alien uniforms, vagrants recruited by John Paul Jones on the docks of L'Orient.

P:U.S. marines did fight in the halls of Montezuma-- and on the shores of Tripoli, but not as impressively as the Marines' Hymn implies. Eight marines helped 150 Greeks and Arabs capture the fortress city of Tripoli from the Barbary pirates in 1804. In the battle for the castle at Chapultepec in 1847, fewer than 200 of Winfield Scott's 7,200 troops were marines. The actual heroes of Chapultepec, moreover, were the Mexican boy cadets, Los Ninos Heroes, who, with a small number of regular troops, forced the gringos to retreat three times in 24 hours, and finally died fighting.

P:The claim that marines have never deserted is belied by the facts: during the Civil War, marine desertions equaled the maximum strength of the corps.

In the uproar over the Cavalier treatment of the corps, the magazine was banned at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and at the Parris Island, S.C., marine training center.

Growled Major General R. B. Luckey. commanding officer at Camp Lejeune: "I don't know whether or not there were any marines at Tripoli. How the hell would I know? But I've believed it for 33 years, and I'm going to go right on believing it."

Many marines suspected that McKean's attack was not without rancor: as a colonel, he was in charge of training at Parris Island in 1956 during the tragic drowning of six boots on a night-time disciplinary march through Ribbon Creek. Although he was not officially blamed, McKean voluntarily retired from the corps two months later, after he learned that he was about to be transferred to Panama. (His retired rank is a so-called "tombstone promotion.") At week's end, General David Shoup, the no-nonsense Marine commandant, ordered the offensive copies of Cavalier back on sale at all Marine bases. The story was out, the corps and its esprit had survived, and there was no point in not telling it to the marines.

-- Another error, which distresses Mexicans. Correct name of the Aztec emperor: Moctezuma.

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