General watch out for the mad dog

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James Mattis, the retired Marine general who is under consideration to be Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, is beloved among military types for publicly proclaiming the things many of them whisper in private.

In 2005, for example, he was speaking at a panel discussion in San Diego, when he described how enjoyable it can be to kill the enemy in war.

He continued, “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

That is the kind of rhetoric befitting a military leader with the nickname, “Mad Dog.” But Mattis, who retired in 2013 and joined a conservative think tank, is more cerebral than his nickname — which he dislikes – would suggest. He is also known as a “warrior monk,” who has devoted his life to the military (he is unmarried) and has thought deeply about military strategy. Now 66, the Pacific Northwest native graduated what was then

“General Mattis is a storied and much respected military thinker,” Michele Flournoy, who by all accounts would have led the Pentagon had Hillary Clinton become president, told NPR Monday. “He would be an outstanding candidate.”

Shortly after he left, he criticized the administration over what officials charged was a plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. Mattis said the plot was orchestrated “at the highest levels” of the Iranian government, and he criticized the fact that the U.S. treated it as a law enforcement matter.

Mattis, whose gravelly voice and steely eloquence is right out of central casting, has become known for

But Mattis is also famous for telling his Marines: “The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.”

Charles Krulak, who was the Marine Commandant at the time, told Stars and Stripes newspaper that when he arrived to deliver holiday cookies to a Marine command at Quantico, Virginia, he was told that the duty officer was Mattis, then a brigadier general.

“So I said to him, ‘Jim, what are you standing the duty for?’ ” Krulak told the military newspaper. “And he said, ‘Sir, I looked at the duty roster for today and there was a young major who had it who is married and had a family; and so I’m a bachelor, I thought why should the major miss out on the fun of having Christmas with his family, and so I took the duty for him.’ “