1. Retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly is a Boston native.
2. Kelly hitchhiked across the country and rode a freight train from Seattle to Chicago by his 16th birthday.
3. Kelly enlisted in the Marines in 1970 and was discharged in 1972. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts—Boston in 1976 and then attended Officer Candidate School at Virginia’s Marine Corps Base Quantico, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
4. Kelly's two sons, John and Robert, followed their father into the Marine Corps. In November 2010, Robert stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan and was killed at age 29.
5. Once a Marine, always a Marine: “One day, you’ll get out of the Marine Corps, you’ll put your uniform up, but you’ll never not be a Marine,” he has said.
6. Kelly spent a year as a merchant mariner; “my first time overseas was taking 10,000 tons of beer to Vietnam,” he said.
7. Kelly facilitated the 2014 exchange of five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for captured U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
8. Kelly relinquished command of United States Southern Command in 2016, and ended his military career that began in 1970 after more than 45 years of service.
9. At his last Pentagon news conference before retiring, General Kelly offered his take on what would happen if former detainees returned to the battlefield: “If they go back to the fight, we’ll probably kill them. So that’s a good thing.”
10. “I’d love to find a way to keep giving,” Kelly said in 2016 about his post-retirement life. “My fear was of being offered a job that would be kind of a full-time position at a veterans organization or even in the government … I’d prefer to not be that, to come up the Beltway every day.”
