A fascinating biography of veteran Marine Corps officer Colonel John W. Thomason, dedicated soldier and talented artist. On a spring morning in 1917, in fact the very day the United States declared war on Germany, a twenty-four-year-old Texan strode into the recruiting office of the Marine Corps branch of the Texas Naval Militia at Houston, and let it be known somewhat emphatically to authority there present that he desired to enlist. They assigned him to Company A, 1st Texas Battalion of Marines, and the same day they packed him off on the first train through town bound for New Orleans. Within a month's time he was appointed a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, and for the ensuing twenty-seven years he was to devote his life to that branch of the naval service. During those years he served within the continental limits of the United States, in France and Germany, aboard ship and ashore in the Caribbean, in Cuba, in certain of the Central American Republics, in the Orient, and briefly in the South Pacific. This newly-commissioned young officer, John William Thomason, Jr., of Huntsville, Texas, brought with him into the Marine Corps a variety of skills and talents. Throughout his service career he was to continue to employ his unusual abilities and to develop them and to contribute materially not only to the betterment of his Corps but also to his fellow comrades. He was unique in a service where uniqueness is not unknown but rather wherein individuality is encouraged for the common good. His record in combat as well as in the administrative field was outstanding in a military organization long known to demand perfection as a matter of course. And at his death in 1944, it would appear he left the artistic, the literary, and the military worlds far wealthier than he had found them.
