Commandant

Tattoos and Terminal Lance: the 5 most surprising things we learned from the commandant’s live Q&A

By Hope Hodge Seck on March 17, 2014 Commandant, Pop culture, Rumors, Special operations, The blogosphere, The CMC

The commandant and sergeant major of the Marine Corps took to Facebook last Friday afternoon, answering nearly 30 candid questions from the Marine Corps community in the space of an hour as part of his ongoing “Reawakening” effort to engage directly with enlisted Marines. According to site administrators on the official Marines Facebook page, some 900 questions and comments rolled in during the hour Gen. Jim Amos and Sgt. Maj. Mike Barrett were online. While Amos addressed a number of popular themes, such as women in combat arms roles, recruiting, and sexual assault prevention, he also revealed some surprising facts…

Handwriting experts: you shouldn’t cross the commandant

By Hope Hodge Seck on July 29, 2013 Battle Rattle, Commandant, General officers, Pop culture

Dynamic. Self-assertive. Self-protective. These are words some experts used to describe Marine Corps commandant Gen. Jim Amos–or at least, how they believe his signature describes him. Writing for MilitaryTimes’ Off Duty section, handwriting experts Sheila Lowe, Kimon Ianetta and Reed Hayes took a look at the John Hancocks of all the military service leaders, including the Commander-in-Chief. President Barack Obama’s mostly-illegible signature “signals a strong need for privacy,” Lowe said, while Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is “unable or unwilling to tell it like it is” judging from his autograph, she said. As for…

Mythbusters: The First Commandant

By Hope Hodge Seck on May 16, 2013 Commandant, History and heritage

Our story about the group installing a gravestone for Maj. Samuel Nicholas, first commandant of the Marine Corps, got tons of great attention online, much of it from people who know their Marine Corps history forward and backward and love it. I hope some of those history-lovers will be able to make it to Philadelphia June 1 for the headstone’s installation ceremony, which organizers say will draw a crowd of “between 50 and 10,000.” That said, the history buffs did raise a few issues that could not go unaddressed in order to keep the historical record intact. The first note is…

The Corps gets the Jeopardy! treatment

By Hope Hodge Seck on March 29, 2013 Battle Rattle, Competitions, Marines, Pop culture, Rumors

What is Oorah? The classic trivia game show Jeopardy had a motivated night on Thursday with a second-round category titled “The United States Marines.” Contestants Rebecca Rider, Brian Daner, and Tom Carroll could have used some time in history and heritage training; of the five questions in the category, they got two wrong. Maybe they need more practice: a search of the fan-curated episode archive shows that while a category on Marine biology pops up about once a year, the last time the Corps got a dedicated category was 2009, when the National Museum of the Marine Corps was featured. See…

Browsing: Commandant