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A bit of verse which sees wide circulation online every Christmastime is generally credited to a Marine stationed in Okinawa, Japan (or, since 11 September 2001, a Marine stationed in Afghanistan): More specifically, the poem is often attributed to an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel named Bruce Lovely, who purportedly penned it on Christmas Eve 1993 while stationed in Korea (and saw it printed under his name in the Ft. Leavenworth Lamp a few years later): This attribution does a great disservice to the poem's true author, James M. Schmidt, who was a Lance Corporal stationed in Washington, D.C., when he wrote the poem back in 1986. As Corporal Schmidt told us in December 2002: Schmidt's original version, entitled Merry Christmas, My Friend, was published in Leatherneck (Magazine of the Marines) in December 1991, a full two years before it was supposedly written by someone else on Christmas Eve 1993 (and had appeared in the Barracks publication Pass in Review four years before it was printed in Leatherneck). As Leatherneck wrote of the poem's author in 2003: Over the years the text of Merry Christmas, My Friend has been altered to change Marine-specific wording into Army references (including the title: U.S. Marines do not refer to themselves as soldiers) and to incorporate line-ending rhyme changes necessitated by those alterations. We reproduce below Corporal Schmidt's version as printed in Leatherneck back in 1991: After leaving the Corps, Corporal Schmidt earned a law degree and now serves as an entertainment attorney in Los Angeles and is director of operations for a security consulting firm. In 2006 we encountered a version of the poem tweaked to make a sailor its central figure:
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