Thank you!

Thanks, Jeff!

It's a hell of a story, and I've greatly enjoyed the past several years of research. I am fortunate to be the first historian ever to gain access to Carlson's personal papers, making possible the first full, three-dimensional biography of him that's ever been written. I hope you'll give it a read.

A war correspondent in 1944 described him as the most beloved officer in the Marine Corps to the enlisted men. But his reputation would be posthumously destroyed in the McCarthy era on account of his connections to the Chinese Communists. Today he is forgotten.

Carlson was a darling of the wartime press and one of the most decorated Marines of his time. Here he is receiving his third Navy Cross from Admiral Nimitz:

He modeled his Raider battalion directly on what he had learned in China. As he wrote to a friend from Guadalcanal, "The old master's philosophy is the guiding force in my organization." The "old master" was Zhu De, the tactical genius behind China's Red Army.

After Pearl Harbor, Carlson founded the legendary 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, an early U.S. special forces unit that would gain national fame in the Pacific. Here they are on Guadalcanal: