About

Greetings Marines!

These are the significant dates that form our Corps:

Our Detachment was charted on June 23, 2001 in Howard County Maryland. We are a growing detachment looking for new members to continue with our public projects which include a scholarship program for Howard County High School Seniors, providing a funeral detail for our fallen brothers in arms, assisting the local Marine Corps unit with the Toys-for-Tots program, participating in the Adopt-a-Highway program, and visiting our wounded comrades at Walter Reed Medical Center.

If you are a Marine with an Honorable Discharge, on either Active duty, or in the Reserves and miss the camaraderie you had with fellow Marines, please join us. We are also a social organization with several events to celebrate our Marine Corps experience.

Please contact one of the officers posted in this site, we will be more than happy to assist you. Semper Fi!

Check out our Facebook page and be sure to “like” us if you have a Facebook account.

What Is The Marine Corps League?

The Marine Corps League consists of former, current, & retired Marines who come together in the spirit of:

• Camaraderie
• Community Service
• Love of Country and Corps
• Patriotism

The Marine Corps League operates at many levels in the same way a platoon is part of a company and a company is part of a batallion. The smallest level is the detachment. Our detachment is under the Department of Maryland, which is under the Mid-East Division, which is under the National level.

Mission Statement

Members of the Marine Corps League join together in camaraderie and fellowship for the purpose of preserving the traditions and promoting the interests of the United States Marine Corps. This is accomplished by banding together those who are now serving in the United States Marine Corps and those who have been honorably discharged from that service; voluntarily aiding and rendering assistance to all Marines and former Marines and to their widows and orphans; and by perpetuating the history of the United States Marine Corps through fitting acts to observe the anniversaries of historical occasions of particular interest to Marines.

Who are we?

We are the Marine Corps League, SSgt Karl G. Taylor, Sr. Detachment 1084. We are a fraternal organization comprised of Marines, former Marines, and people interested in bonding with Marines and former Marines. Our home base is Howard County, Maryland. For more information on who is eligible for membership, follow this link to the Requirements for Membership page.

What Makes a Marine a Marine?

Ask a Marine what’s so special about the Marines and the answer would be “esprit de corps,” an unhelpful French phrase that means exactly what it looks like – the Spirit of the Corps. But what is that spirit and where does it come from?

The Marine Corps is the only branch of the U.S. Armed Forces that recruits people specifically to fight. The Army emphasizes personal development (“An Army of one”), the Navy promises fun (“Let the journey begin”), the Air Force offers security (“It’s a great way of life”). Missing all of those advertisements is the hard fact that a soldier’s lot is to take lives at the risk of his own and perhaps to suffer and die for his country. Even the thematic music of the services reflects this evasion. The Army’s “Caisson Song” describes a pleasant country outing over hill and dale, lacking only a picnic basket. “Anchors Aweigh,” the Navy’s celebration of the joys of sailing, could have been penned by Jimmy Buffet. The Air Force song is a lyric poem of blue skies and engine thrust. All is joyful and invigorating, and in the main, safe. There are no snipers in the hills or land mines in the dales, no torpedoes or cruise missiles threaten the ocean cruise, and no bandits are lurking on your “six” to shoot you out of the sky in the wild blue yonder. The Marines’ Hymn, in contrast, is all combat. “We fight our country’s battles, First to fight for right and freedom, We have fought in every clime and place where we could take a gun, in many a strife we have fought for life and never lost our nerve.”

The choice is clearly made. You may join the Army to go to adventure training, or join the Navy to go to Bangkok, or join the Air Force to go to computer school. You join the Marine Corps to go to war! But the mere act of signing the enlistment contract confers no status in the Corps. The Army recruit is told from his first minute in uniform that, “You’re in the Army now, soldier!” The Navy and Air Force enlistees are sailors or airmen as soon as they get off the bus at the recruit training center. The new arrival at Marine Corps boot camp is called a recruit, or worse (a lot worse), but never, never, ever a Marine. Not yet, maybe never. He or she must earn the right to claim the title of UNITED STATES MARINE and failure returns you to civilian life without hesitation or ceremony. Recruit Platoon #2210 at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, California trained from October through December of 1968. In Vietnam, the Marines were taking two hundred casualties a week and the major rainy season operation, Meade River, had not yet even begun as yet. But Drill Instructors had no qualms about winnowing out almost a quarter of their 112 recruits, graduating only 81.

Note that this was post-enlistment attrition; every one of those who were dropped had been passed by the recruiters as “fit for service.” But they failed the test of Boot Camp, not necessarily for physical reasons because at least two of them were outstanding high school athletes for whom the calisthenics and running were child’s play. The cause of their failure was not in the biceps or the legs, but in the spirit – in the spirit that should have been in them but even their Drill Instructors could not instill it. They had lacked the will to endure the mental and emotional strain, so these young men would not become Marines. Heavy commitments and high combat casualties notwithstanding, the Corps reserves the right to pick and choose. It always will.

History classes in boot camp? Stop a soldier on the street and ask him to name a battle of World War I. Pick a sailor at random and ask him to describe the epic battle between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis. Most everyone has heard of McGuire Air Force Base. So ask any airman who Major Thomas McGuire was and why he is so commemorated. All of the services have glorious traditions, but no one teaches the young soldier, sailor, or airman what his uniform means and why he should be proud to wear it. But if you ask a Marine about the battle for Belleau Wood, he’ll tell you about it. Faced with an enemy of superior numbers entrenched in tangled forest undergrowth and reachable only by crossing an open wheat field under murderous machinegun fire, the Marines received an order to attack that could only be charitably called “ill-advised.” It was insane. Artillery support was absent and air support had yet to be invented, so the brigade charged the German machineguns with only bayoneted rifles, grenades, and an indomitable fighting spirit. A bandy-legged little barrel of a gunnery sergeant, Daniel J. Daly, rallied his company with a shouted, “C’mon, you sonsabitches! Do you want to live forever?” He took out three machineguns himself, and would have been given the Medal of Honor had he not already been awarded two of them. French liaison officers, hardened though they were by four years of trench-bound slaughter, were shocked as the Marines charged across the wheat field under a blazing sun and directly into the teeth of the German fire. Their action was so anachronistic on the twentieth century battlefield that they might as well have been swinging cutlasses, but the enemy could not stand up to this. The Marines took Belleau Wood and the Germans thereafter called them “Teuful Hunden” – “Devil Dogs.”

Every Marine knows this story and dozens more. We are taught them in boot camp as a regular part of the curriculum. Every Marine will always be taught them. You can learn to don a gas mask anytime, even on a plane in route to the war zone, but before you can wear the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor and claim the title, you must learn about the exploits which made that emblem and title meaningful. As long as you can march and shoot and revere the legacy of the Corps, you can take your place in line. And that line is as unified in spirit as in purpose. A soldier wears branch of service insignia on his collar along with metal shoulder pins and cloth sleeve patches to identify his unit. Sailors wear a rating badge that identifies what they do for the Navy. Marines wear only the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor – that and personal ribbons and the cherished marksmanship badges. There is nothing on a Marine’s uniform to indicate what he or she does, nor to what unit the Marine belongs. You cannot tell by looking at a Marine’s uniform whether you are seeing a truck driver, a computer programmer, or a machine gunner. The Corps explains this as a security measure to conceal the identity and location of units, but the Marines’ penchant for publicity makes this the least likely of explanations. No, the Marine is amorphous, even anonymous, by conscious design. No matter what other skills he has learned, every Marine is a rifleman – first and foremost. Whether a Marine has been schooled in automated supply or automotive mechanics or aviation electronics is immaterial. Those things are secondary – the Corps teaches them because it must use them on the modern battlefield requiring technical appliances and since the enemy has them, we must, too. But no Marine boasts mastery of these skills. Our pride is in our discipline, marksmanship, and our membership in a fraternity of courage and sacrifice. A Marine may serve a four year enlistment or even a twenty-plus year career without ever seeing action, but if the order is given, Marines will charge across the wheat field again!

Edgar Guest wrote of Belleau Wood, “For the honor of the fallen, for the glory of the dead, the living line of courage kept the faith and moved ahead.” They are all gone now, those Marines who made a French farmer‘s little wheat field into one of the most enduring of Marine Corps legends. Many of them did not survive the day and eight decades have claimed the rest. But their actions are immortal.

The Corps remembers them and honors what they did – so they live forever and Dan Daly’s shouted challenge takes on its true meaning. If you lie in the trenches you may survive for now, but someday you will die and no one will care. If you charge the guns, you may die in the next two minutes, but you will be one of the immortals. All Marines die, be it in the red flash of battle or in the white cold of a nursing home – in the vigor of youth or the infirmity of age, all will eventually die – but the Marine Corps lives on. Every Marine is living still in the Marines who claim the title today. It is the sense of belong to something that will outlive your own passing which gives people a light to live by and a flame to mark their passing.

THE TITLE “UNITED STATES MARINE.” HARD-EARNED – BUT ONCE EARNED, IT’S YOURS FOR LIFE! SEMPER FIDELIS.

Not sure who originally wrote this. It has been passed on from one Marine to another for some time now. As far as I can tell, the original author signed his name “The Gunner.”