General Mattis

A couple of months ago, when I told General Krulak, the former

Commandant of the Marine Corps, now the chair of the Naval

Academy Board of Visitors, that we were having General Mattis

speak this evening, he said, “Let me tell you a Jim Mattis story.”

General Krulak said, when he was Commandant of the Marine

Corps, every year, starting about a week before Christmas, he

and his wife would bake hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

Christmas cookies. They would package them in small bundles.

Then on Christmas day, he would load his vehicle. At about

4 a.m., General Krulak would drive himself to every Marine

guard post in the Washington-Annapolis-Baltimore area and

deliver a small package of Christmas cookies to whatever Marines

were pulling guard duty that day. He said that one year, he had

gone down to Quantico as one of his stops to deliver Christmas

cookies to the Marines on guard duty. He went to the command

center and gave a package to the lance corporal who was on duty.

He asked, “Who’s the officer of the day?” The lance corporal

said, “Sir, it’s Brigadier General Mattis.” And General Krulak

said, “No, no, no. I know who General Mattis is. I mean, who’s

the officer of the day today, Christmas day?” The lance corporal,

feeling a little anxious, said, “Sir, it is Brigadier General Mattis.”

General Krulak said that, about that time, he spotted in the back

room a cot, or a daybed. He said, “No, Lance Corporal. Who

slept in that bed last night?” The lance corporal said, “Sir, it was

Brigadier General Mattis.” About that time, General Krulak said

that General Mattis came in, in a duty uniform with a sword, and

General Krulak said, “Jim, what are you doing here on

Christmas day? Why do you have duty?” General Mattis told

him that the young officer who was scheduled to have duty on

Christmas day had a family, and General Mattis decided it was

better for the young officer to spend Christmas Day with his

family, and so he chose to have duty on Christmas Day. General

Krulak said, “That’s the kind of officer that Jim Mattis is.”

The story above was told by Dr. Albert C. Pierce, the Director of the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at The United States Naval Academy. He was introducing General James Mattis who gave a lecture on Ethical Challenges in Contemporary Conflict in the spring of 2006. This was taken from the transcript of that lecture.