Talk:Donnie Dunagan

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The following information appeared on the forum of Leatherneck Magazine and disputes the claim by several Marine veterans to be the youngest Drill Instructor:


 * The now undisputed title belongs to the late William C. Foster of Dearborn, Michigan, who, enlisted in theCanadian Army paratrooper in the summer of 1941. He was 16 at the time, having been born on Nov. 2,1924. This wrote former drill instructor and Marine Sergeant Eugene Alvarez, PhD, of Ocala, Florida, re-sulted in Foster being ‘honorably discharged for falsifying age,” in a Leatherneck story in October 1983. Stephen R. Wise, PhD, curator of the Parris Island Museum, says it is nearly impossible to determine who the youngest Marine Corps DI is because in other eras, such as World War I, some DI’s were designated while they were in boot camp. “There are so many variations of the DI designation, it would be almost im- possible to name a certain person as the youngest.” Foster, then 17, enlisted in the Marine Corps on 22 November 1941 and when he completed his marksman-ship training in December, 1941, he was prematurely graduated from boot camp and assigned as a juniordrill instructor with Platoon 187 on December 29, 1941. He was 17 years, one month and 27 days old. According to the Social Security Death Index, he died on Aug. 23, 1990.

RexHammock 22:53, 14 March 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rexhammock (talk • contribs)

The Youngest DI
I hope I get this posted correctly.

William C. Foster is the youngest D.I. the Marine Corps has ever had. He was my father and was able to produce all the documentation to support the claim. There have been a lot of people claiming to be the youngest D.I. but nobody has been able to produce documentation showing it. My dad had always known he was the youngest but it wasn't published anywhere until the 80"s when another article was researched and they found my dad to be the youngest. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.144.71.9 (talk) 16:30, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. Not that Foster is the youngest — we need to see proof of that, but remember the ‘original research’ rule — but that Dunagan’s claim is dubious.

I have marked the claim as such.

The only source is a single news article, and the reporter was likely quoting Dunagan.

MWFwiki (talk) 14:51, 23 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Would it not be fair to just phrase the article to make it clear that it is his unverified claim? "Dunagan claims to have been the youngest, though that has not been verified." Something like that? CarbonX (talk) 01:56, 30 August 2022 (UTC)