Fightin' Marines #47

M/SGT. Lew Pardee, a twelve-year Marine veteran, inherits a platoon of green recruits he nicknames "the Civilians"—men he believes were mistakenly sent to Guadalcanal despite their raw inexperience. When his lieutenant and his men face their first combat on the island's beaches and jungle perimeter, Pardee must keep them alive long enough to learn what it means to be a Marine in the heat of actual warfare. Over five grueling days alongside the battered Dog Company, the untested second platoon discovers whether grit and training can close the gap between boot camp and survival.

When Communist director Vlastilov threatens to imprison Corporal Reardon for helping a young girl retrieve her balloon from the Eastern German zone, the G.I. takes matters into his own hands—and lands himself in hot water with both sides of the Iron Curtain. What starts as a simple act of compassion spirals into a tense standoff that tests how far one soldier will go against a brutal regime.

Marine Captain Rube Whittaker finds himself pinned down by Chinese Communist troops in Korea, forced to think fast when enemy soldiers close in on his position. Mixing in with Korean refugees to slip through the lines, he spots additional Communist infiltrators moving toward the American perimeter and decides to stay embedded with them to gather intelligence. With the help of his fellow Marines and a veteran sergeant, Whittaker turns the tables on the enemy soldiers and proves that once you've earned the title, the Marine training never leaves you.

A ten-year-old Micronesian boy loses his family to the chaos of World War II and spends two years sabotaging the Japanese occupiers of his tiny Pacific island, only to face a new moral test when American Marines arrive to retake it. Written with letters by typeset, "The Foreign Devils" asks whether a child who has learned to hate invaders can recognize an ally—and whether the Marines themselves might offer him something neither army could before.