Due Credit for Dental Officers
As a former Naval dental officer assigned to a Marine Corps infantry battalion aid station, my eyes were drawn to the image showing Navy corpsmen carrying a casualty of the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983 in the frontispiece for “Blowup in Beirut,” in the March issue. The other men in utilities may be Marines or Navy men, but the caption implies that all of the men are Marines when plainly they are not.

I read the article carefully, hoping that the two heroic naval dental officers, Lieutenants James J. Ware and Gilbert U. Bigelow, would be recognized for their critical lifesaving work in organizing the immediate casualty care, triage, casualty evacuation and recovery in the wake of the attack. The dental detachment had been billeted in an outlying hooch and escaped being killed, while the battalion medical officer, Lieutenant Hudson, was killed in the BLT structure along with many of the corpsmen.

Using what they had, local anesthetics to block pain, and directing dental techs and surviving hospital corpsmen, they eased much suffering and saved many lives.

Griffin T. Murphey, D.D.S.
Fort Worth, Texas

Beyond Hardtack
Regarding the recipe for SOS in the “Beyond Hardtack” feature in your March issue: It wasn’t SOS unless it was made of chipped dried beef. During the Depression years before WWII, when I was growing up, chipped beef, gravy and toast was standard breakfast fare. We civilians at that time were too polite to call it SOS.

Ivan L. Pfalser
Caney, Kan.

Early Jack
Regarding Marc Leepson’s “Stars and Stripes and Strife” article in the March edition: There is a picture of the painting by N.C. Wyeth of John Paul Jones hoisting the “Continental colors,” whose canton, Leepson wrote, “contained the Union Jack.” Here is some additional information of histori­cal interest regarding the origin of this Union Jack. Since 1270 the English flag consisted of the red cross on a white background of St. George. In 1603 James VI of Scotland became by inheritance James I of England, and the Scottish diagonal white cross on a blue background of St. Andrew was added, forming the first “Union Jack,” although this was often simply called the “Jack,” likely a diminutive of James, the king. Finally, in 1801, following the Act of Union of Ireland with Britain, the red diagonal cross on a white background of St. Patrick was added, to form the Union Jack in existence to this day. Thus in the American War of Independence, the Redcoats of the era served under the old Jack (see the picture in your article), but in the War of 1812 their flag was the final version of the Union Jack.

Keep those great articles coming!

David B. Clark, M.D.
Barrie, Ontario

Flagships of our Fathers
Reading the January/February feature “Pistols and Ten Paces,” by Janine Peterson: I noticed that the ship attributed to Commodore Stephen Decatur in the Second Barbary War was the 74-gun ship-of-the-line Independence. Decatur’s flagship, however, was the recently constructed heavy frigate Guerriere, under the command of Master Commandant William Lewis. Independence did make an appearance as part of the second American force, as the flagship of Commodore William Bainbridge, under the command of Flag-Captain William Crane.

Caleb Greinke
Kansas City, Mo.

The editors respond: Thanks for correcting the error. Completed in 1814, the same year as Guerriere, Independence was the U.S. Navy’s first ship of the line, carrying as many as ninety 32-pounder guns early in its career as flagship of Bainbridge—an appropriate assignment, since Bainbridge had been instrumental in getting Indepen­dence built. Later having a deck cut down and serving as a 52-gun super frigate, Independence served the Navy in one capacity or another until 1913 and was finally burned in 1915.

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