HARD-BOILED HISTORY

Thanks!

You are correct that often I don’t capitalize “marine” when I’m writing up captions for USMC-related images, particularly when I’m saying something basic like “a marine on patrol” or “a group of marines in training.” That’s partly because I’m, ya know, a little lazy and ignorant, and I’m accustomed to not capitalizing words like soldier, infantryman, guerrilla, and partisan. Since I post images of warriors from all over the world and all through history, including Soviet marines, Philippine marines, and Dutch marines, I suppose I started to see the term “marine” in a more global, generic sense.

That said, if an American Marine is willing to lay it all on the line for his/her country, I think I can find the courage to treat the word as the upper-case proper noun that it is. So I’ll be revising some old posts and making sure future captions use Devil Dog capitalization.

You can certainly look forward to more Marine images. Marines are above-average re-bloggers!

Thanks again for commenting. It’s rewarding to see people are actually reading the captions and caring enough to make sure I get it right.