If you don't recognize his name, Mattis is known among a select few as "Mad Dog". In more polite circles, he's General Mattis, USMC [Retired]. He lead combined forces in Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He was probably the best read officer in recent years who was not employed as an instructor in one of the service academies. I appreciate that Hollywood presents Marines as a collection of meatheads, but that's never been the case.
The reason for his zeal for history is that, in his profession, errors lead to problems that are not encountered in other arenas:
The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.He's also famous for some other quotations, such as this one that he offered to some Afghani chieftains, “I’m going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for 10,000 years.”