The Bactra Review   Making the Corps

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I think that when he sets out to compare the Marines to Japan (pp. 199--201), he really ends up comparing them to a long-running western idea of the Collectivist Threat in the East, which was the Soviet Union before it was Japan, and was Germany before it was the Soviets. (See my review of Krugman's Pop Internationalism.) In places he contradicts himself: he repeatedly says that the armed forces have dealt with the drug problem, but also reports one of the recruits he followed as having, at his first assignment after boot camp, another Marine in his unit who "grows marijuana in his locker" (p. 251).