Marines Facts

Sergeant Reckless was a Mongolian mare bought for $250 by US Marines in 1952. During one day of battle in 1953, she made 51 solo trips hauling ammunition to the front lines, covering over 35 miles under fire. She was formally promoted to Staff Sergeant by the Commandant of the Marine Corps - with a 1,700-Marine parade in her honor.

During World War II, dog lovers asked American families to lend their pets to the military. Owners signed up more than 40,000 dogs. Over 10,000 of them served as sentries, scouts and messengers. When the war ended, the military retrained the survivors to be family pets again. Many came home with honorable discharge papers.

Diane Hendricks handcrafted a Raggedy Ann doll and asked her husband Bill - a Marine Corps Reserve major in Los Angeles - to find an organization that could give it to a child in need. No such organization existed. So he started one. By Christmas, his Marine unit had collected 5,000 toys. Toys for Tots has since delivered over 708 million toys to 314 million children.

The gaunt face on the POW/MIA flag is a real person. When designer Newt Heisley needed a model for the silhouette, his son Jeffrey had just come home from Marine training, sick and hollow-cheeked, so Heisley sketched his own son onto the flag and never copyrighted it. It is the only flag permanently installed in the Capitol Rotunda, and it still flies at post offices across the country.

Shaggy's growling singing voice wasn't natural - he built it mocking his Marine Corps drill instructors to make his platoon laugh. Sergeants started calling him forward to lead cadences. The growl stuck. He served four years as a cannon crewman and deployed to the Gulf War in 1991. "I got this voice by mocking drill instructors in the military."

Peter Cullen almost voiced Optimus Prime like a shouting Hollywood tough guy. His brother Larry was a Marine Corps captain who served in Vietnam. Cullen has said that before his 1984 audition, Larry told him real heroes don't yell: "Be strong enough to be gentle." That advice became Optimus Prime's voice for more than 40 years.

Lucca was a Marine Corps bomb dog who worked Iraq and Afghanistan for six years. In more than 400 missions, no Marine on her patrols was ever hurt. On March 23, 2012, a bomb took her front leg. Her handler carried her out. She was walking again within ten days, and in 2016 became the first US Marine Corps dog awarded Britain's Dickin Medal for bravery. She retired to the Marine who had been her very first handler.