Happy Birthday USMC!

The Marine Corps celebrates its 229th birthday today. And with that in mind, Mamamontezz sent me a link to this story from the New York Post:

FORTUNATE SON

By WILLIAM McGURN

November 10, 2004 -- FORGIVE Mindy Evnin if she's not up for cake and candles today. Even if she knows how important this birthday was for her son.
On this day in a Philadelphia tavern, the Continental Congress gave birth to the Marine Corps almost a full year before the Declaration of Independence. More than two centuries later in Fallujah, America still looks to the Marines to do the job no one else can.

And no one knows better than Mindy Evnin the price: On a dusty Iraqi roadside in April 2003, her son, Cpl. Mark Evnin, gave his life wearing that same uniform.

But you hear only admiration for the corps from Mindy.

Until the Marine recruiter came to her home the day after Thanksgiving during Mark's senior year at South Burlington (Vt.) High, his mother didn't know what her son would do with his life. And once he did know, it was sometimes hard to explain to her social circles: "At a book club where the other mothers were all talking about which college their children were going off to," says Mindy Evnin, "I shared that Mark wanted to go to sniper school."

Mark's recruiter had given Mindy a Marine bumper sticker — which, he noted, she had no right to affix to her car until Mark had made it through boot camp. As she confesses over lunch in Manhattan, "I told Mark I wasn't sure then I could ever put it on my car."

Gradually, however, as she watched the changes in her son and his pride in his achievements, she realized that the little boy who wore fatigues to Hebrew school was finally where he was meant to be: with his fellow Marines.

In Iraq last April, a San Francisco Chronicle correspondent embedded with Mark's unit let him use his satellite phone to call home. Two days later, Cpl. Mark Evnin was killed in action while returning fire in an Iraqi ambush.

Click Continue Reading for the rest of this amazing story.

The United States Marine Corps is a relatively small elite group of true patriots. The brave men and women of the USMC have been kicking ass and taking names for Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty for more than two centuries.

Happy Birthday USMC!

SlagleRock Out!

And that's when Mindy really learned about the Marines. When Mark's buddies came back from Iraq, they wrote her as they might their own moms, and Mindy flew out to the base at 29 Palms, Calif., to spend some time with them. The young Marine recruiter who was in Burlington when Mark was killed recently invited Mindy to his wedding — and insisted on seating her in the row reserved for his family.

The sergeant-major whom Cpl. Evnin was driving when he was killed invited Mindy to his wedding. And on the first anniversary of Mark's death earlier this year, Marines sent her a bouquet of crimson-and-gold. (Actually, they had them delivered the day before, so she wouldn't be disturbed that painful day.)

Mindy's done her own work. She tells me she was particularly taken with a book by novelist Frank Schaeffer, "Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary," written after his son joined a Marine Corps that was initially as alien to him as the Navajo.

"I was able to relate to him," she says, "because he describes himself as a Volvo-driving eastern-establishment parent who did not know anyone in the military before his son enlisted, and whose friends wondered what was wrong with his son's private-school education that allowed this to happen."

Like Frank Schaeffer, Mindy was well aware of the Marine reputation for ferocity in battle. Nothing either has learned since changes that. But they have also learned what few outside the corps seem to appreciate: That Marines' heroics have mostly to do with the courage and pluck shown in looking out for one's fellow Marine.

So, the next time you hear of a hopelessly polarized America, remember Cpl. MarK Evnin, USMC, and the life he freely gave for something larger than himself.

And on this special birthday, with Marines fighting for Fallujah, remember too the Jewish mother in Vermont, a self-described product of the '60s, whose car now sports a bumper sticker that not so long ago would have been inconceivable: Proud Parent of a U.S. Marine.

Posted by SlagleRock at November 10, 2004 05:55 PM