On Memorial Day 2026, Eric Dowell offers a tribute unlike any other: a sustained, clear-eyed work of narrative nonfiction that looks directly at the cost of what the medals are for.
Smedley Darlington Butler and Daniel Joseph Daly are the only two Marines in history to have received the Medal of Honor twice, for separate acts in separate wars. All four medals were awarded between 1900 and 1915. In the century since, their names have been carried on destroyers and stamped on postage and preserved in the regimental histories. Butler became famous for War Is a Racket, his searing indictment of American military adventurism, written after thirty-three years as what he called a high-class muscle man for Wall Street. Daly became famous for a line he half-said at Belleau Wood that was cleaned up and put on recruiting posters. Neither of them asked to be famous for what they became famous for.
Dowell's account traces the two men from their unlikely origins - Butler, the well-connected Quaker boy who lied about his age to get a commission, Daly, the semi-pro boxer from Long Island who walked into a recruiting office without much explanation - through thirty years of shared campaigns in China, the Philippines, Haiti, and France. The narrative moves with the precision of military history and the compression of literary journalism: the Tartar Wall in Peking, where Daly held a position alone through the night against waves of Boxer fighters; Veracruz, where Butler led his battalion through streets lined with cadets and midshipmen and tried twice to return his medal; the night patrol above Fort Dipitie, where Daly stripped off his gear and went into a cold river at two in the morning to recover a machine gun from a dead horse; the drainage tunnel at Fort Riviere, where Butler went in third behind a sergeant and a corporal into a fort full of armed Cacos; and the wheat field at Belleau Wood, where Daly, forty-four years old, got his company out of the tree line.
It is also a book about the aftermath. Butler came home and spent the last nine years of his life arguing publicly that every war he had fought had been a racket - not in abstract terms, but with specific companies, specific profits, specific dead. Daly came home and took a job guarding a bank on Wall Street. The irony was either lost on him or noted and not commented on. He died in his sister's house in Queens in 1937. The Corps noticed. The country did not.
Profiles in Courage: Memorial Day does not sentimentalize its subjects. Dowell is clear that Butler and Daly were not nice men in every respect, that the interventions they fought in were often ugly, and that the men they killed included people defending what they understood to be their own country against an invasion, which it was. What the medals are, mostly, is evidence of a particular kind of conduct under fire. The book is an attempt to see that conduct clearly, and through it, to see the dead it was done for.
