By 1928 the Marines were deep in Nicaragua, hunting the guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino through the jungled mountains of Nueva Segovia. It was a new kind of war for the Corps — small patrols, ambushes, and pursuit — and the Marines learned it the hard way, pioneering close air support with dive-bombing runs and carrying automatic weapons like the Thompson this Marine fires. The lessons of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic were later distilled into the Corps' 1940 Small Wars Manual, a counterinsurgency text studied for generations. It was in these Nicaragua campaigns, too, that a young officer named Lewis Puller won the first of his Navy Crosses leading native patrols.

W. Britain poses the Marine in a wide firing stance, the M1928 Thompson blazing from the hip with spare drum magazines on his belt. He wears the tan field shirt and breeches, canvas leggings, web gear, and the broad campaign hat of the interwar Corps. He carries the expeditionary tradition forward from the 1898 Marine NCO of the Spanish–American War, shares the drum-fed Thompson with the Marine Raider who would carry it into the Pacific, and stands in the same Nicaragua mud that made Chesty Puller a legend.

W. Britain model 13056. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), solid metal hand-painted in a matte finish. Single foot figure on a sculpted groundwork base. Supplied in original W. Britain packaging.