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The late Ronald Lee Ermey (better known as R. Lee Ermey), who passed away on 15 Aprli 2018, was a former U.S. Marine Staff Sergeant who served from 1961 to 1971 (including tours in Vietnam) and took up acting after he was retired from active duty on a medical disability. (He was later awarded the honorary rank of Gunnery Sergeant.) Ermey's most memorable role was playing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, the punishing Drill Instructor featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket, and he became a familiar face on television through of the History Channel's Mail Call program, in which he answered viewer questions about the weapons and technology used throughout history by the armed forces. A widely circulated bit of online text from 2004 mimicked the vulgar, shouting, take-no-prisoners style Ermey employed for his role in Full Metal Jacket: Despite its attribution, there was no connection between the actor and this press conference transcript. This piece (which began showing up in our inbox in December 2004) is a commentary about the controversy over a November 2004 incident during which a U.S. Marine corporal shot and killed an apparently wounded and unarmed Iraqi insurgent while storming a mosque in Fallujah, Iraq — an event that drew extraordinary worldwide coverage because it was captured on videotape by an NBC cameraman. (Military investigators eventually concluded that the Marine corporal had acted in self-defense and within military law, so no charges were brought against him.) The anonymous author of this item adopted the common technique of grabbing attention by putting his words into the mouth of a colorful, well-known figure, and — as often happens — some readers took the abstraction a little too literally.
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