"We will fight our country's battles," the Marines Hymn assures us in song, "in the air, on land and sea." But 245 years of USMC history points to other successes where strafing enemy positions and planting the American flag on some desolate, war-savaged hill was not required. America's Corps of Marines guarded the U.S. mail in 1921; they earned the name "Sea Angels" in Tsunami-clobbered Bangladesh in 1992; and they have fought forest fires out West on a number of occasions in the last three decades. And at this writing, busloads of incoming recruits anxiously await their turn on Parris Island's feared and fabled "yellow footprints" – which will happen only after two weeks' cautious COVID testing in Jacksonville, where the Palm Coast and its legendary civilian-military partnership put together the means to feed, house and process a few hundred "almost Marines."