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Editorial: R.I.P., Devil Dog

Devil Dog, the iconic moniker attached to Marines since World War I, died this year from wounds sustained in the Battle to Be Politically Correct. It was 90 years old.

Born near Paris on the French battlefields of Belleau Wood, Devil Dog’s rise to fame was the result of a marriage between bloody, bayonet-to-chest combat and slick Marine Corps’ marketing. An American newspaper carried the story of how one German prisoner allegedly claimed that the leathernecks fought in that misty forest as men possessed.

They would not retreat, for they just got here, and they did not want to live forever.

They were like “Teufelshunde” — devil dogs, vicious hounds from Hell — and they would never surrender, never die.

True or not, the story stuck, and Devil Dog became a badge of honor for millions of troops for generations, second only to the title Marine. For more than eight decades, the nickname followed The Few into every clime and place, often inked into biceps and printed on T-shirts.

Over the past decade, however, Devil Dog faced a mutiny on all fronts, as its beloved Corps turned its back on history. During the fight to turn the Corps into a more politically correct society and eliminate insults and cursing, Devil Dog dropped off the radar of the senior Marines charged with keeping the notion alive.

Newly minted Marines, fresh from the drill field, would come to think of Devil Dog not as a vicious warrior, but as a screw-up, a goofball. In a world where cursing at a junior Marine is not allowed, Devil Dog took a beating. Officers and senior enlisted lost sight of its once proud meaning, and used the term primarily as a correction for negative behavior.

Adrift in the fight, Devil Dog went missing in action. But no one really noticed. Its status was officially changed to killed in action this week.

The newspapers giveth, and the newspapers taketh away.