MARINE CORPS GAZETTE – The SS, Snowflakes, and Supervision

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Like a Marine in a properly executed MCMAP training session, the Marine Corps is taking its lumps in the image department lately. In April of last year, Lance Corporal Harry Lew committed suicide in Afghanistan after experiencing sustained hazing on the part of his squadmates. Although there is no way to tell if the hazing caused LCpl Lew’s suicide, it almost certainly contributed to it. The story remains in the news as the Marines involved go through the court martial process. In January, the story broke that Marines, including Staff NCOs, had filmed themselves urinating on corpses of Taliban fighters. I’m not going to comment specifically on these two issues as the failure in ethics is pretty obvious. Anytime a Marine is ostracized in his unit, for whatever reason, the leadership has failed. The desecration of human corpses, whether filmed or not, is indefensible.

I will, however, comment more specifically about the use of the SS logo on flags since there seems to be some debate over whether or not it was appropriate. I’ll ignore the fact that scout snipers apparently think that they are special snowflakes entitled to their own flag above and beyond the traditional scarlet and gold Marine Corps flag that every other unit uses. The first excuse posited by those who want to brush this most recent PR nightmare under the rug is that the scout snipers were ignorant of what the symbol meant. I guess that’s possible. What’s not possible is that every SNCO and Officer in charge of every scout sniper unit that used the flag shared that ignorance. No way. They just refused to do anything about it.

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