Read This: Brute

Lt. General Victor “Brute” Krulak is credited, in Robert Coram’s Brute with a crucial role in developing the amphibious landing vehicles that helped the United States Marine Corps push their way through the Pacific theater of operations during the Second World War, and with developing a strategy for counterinsurgent tactics which, had it actually been used during the Vietnam War, might have led to a different outcome. Coram also honors Krulak for his work in making sure that the other branches of the American military, jealous of the Marines’ success and their prestige, did not succeed in decimating the Corps in the 1940s and 1950s. (Even Truman and Eisenhower resented the Marines and tried to massively reduce their fighting power.) And, after the scandalous death of several recruits during a late-night march through a swamp led by a drunken drill instructor, Krulak overhauled the basic training program, essentially creating the boot camp experience that both my parents (you read that right) went through when they enlisted in the 1960s. So there’s definitely some level of personal interest in Krulak’s story on my part.

That said, Brute is the sort of book I’d recommend more for the story it tells than for the quality of the telling. Coram does a respectably solid job of explaining Krulak’s profound significance to the modern Marine Corps, not just in combat operations from Okinawa to Vietnam but in the bureaucratic battles between the wars, but he tends to push his inferences about Krulak’s character, such as a deliberate suppression of his Jewish background, a bit harder than I’m comfortable with (although, honestly, that’s just about where Coram and I would draw the line between speculating as to Krulak’s motives and flat-out insisting upon them). And while I consider myself pretty gung-ho where the Corps is concerned, even I think Coram lays the mystique on a little thick, setting out lines like “another piece of barren soil soaked by Marine blood, fertilized by Marine grief, and consecrated by Marine valor” (his description of Khe Sanh) with some frequency. Still, there is plenty of interesting material here, including some preliminary gestures towards a revisionist approach towards Vietnam-era history (which could actually be a fertile field for research by younger scholars whose attitudes weren’t formed in the crucible of the boomers’ cultural conflict). On the whole, I’d have to agree with Dwight Garner, who’s also reviewing Brute today: Coram’s account of Krulak’s life and legacy is “at times ragged and hectoring, but always plainspoken and absorbing.”

10 November 2010 | read this |