Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

The object of the exercise is to move future leaders from cocksure ignorance to wise uncertainty.

Albert Schweitzer advised: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know; the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

General Robert E. Lee wrote: “DUTY is the sublimest word in the language, you can never do more than your duty; you should never wish to do less.”

“They don’t respect us. And they don’t respect us because we don’t properly value ourselves—and that is because we refuse to accept the bloody world as it is

Don’t let the weight of things numb you. Read, think, disagree with everything, if you like—but force your mind outward. Promise me that.”

They had come with all their hope and eager bravery and fire, and been cut down, and others had come to take their places and been cut down in turn. They had their moment, their brief, imperiled time of laughter, of fear and wonder and spendthrift valor, a sweet and indispensable nobility—and then they were gone, shoveled under the alien French soil, and there was nothing left of them to keep them alive.

The world can’t go through another one like this.” The General’s face became serious and intent. “No. It can’t. That’s true.” He said in an even, musing tone: “It will have to go through one of a different kind.”

“Sam: do you honestly believe people are going to stop being greedy and resentful and full of pride and prejudice? Do you think they will quit hating and fearing—do you think the lordly heads of government are going to abandon their methods of seizing and holding power, of gaining advantages over their neighbors? Why should they change? What should cause them to abhor the only rules to the game they know? And even if they were to do so, do you believe for one minute their own citizens would let them get away with it?”

War: war was not an oriflamme-adventure filled with noble deeds and tilts with destiny, as he had believed, but a vast, uncaring universe of butchery and attrition, in which the imaginative, the sensitive were crippled and corrupted, the vulgar and tough-fibered were augmented—and the lucky were lucky and survived, and they alone …

No man knew what was in him, deeply and irrevocably his: we were all of us strange creatures under our skins—poets and seers, captains and pioneers—what man could say what was finally his destiny?

And I thought, What a mistake life is: you’re never ready for each thing that happens to you. And then I thought, No, that’s the marvel of it—if you were ready there’d be nothing to it at all, it would be like frogs in a pool, eating and propagating and swimming around endlessly, nothing more than that … Pain makes you think, doesn’t it?”

This was for them, this boy: for their dreams, their passion, their tremulous mortality. They were not dead, they still lived on in memory, and in the promise of this boy—

Men don’t ever stick with anything, for the simple reason they don’t have to. There aren’t any consequences. We’ve got the consequences, all of them, and they know it and it makes them feel guilty, so they go running off and fire rifles or blow up old tar-paper shacks or throw a baseball at each other as hard as they can. It gives them the illusion they’re doing something grand …

Chaos is the condition of man—chaos and uncertainty. The person who can act with force and decision at such a moment, turns the consciousness of his time.

No one back home would ever know what this had meant, in blood and agony and terror and iron determination: no one.

“A world without color lines, without one-tenth of its people living like kings and the other nine-tenths like desperate animals … If we simply sink back into the same tired old world of spheres of influence and power politics and gunboat diplomacy, there isn’t an awful lot of sense in it.”

Poor little babes in jungleland. All those hifalutin history and government and economics courses and they understood nothing of what made the world hum: their tremulous youth refused to see that there would always be the avenues to power, and that men—being men—would always snatch at them;

The certainty—the cold, oppressive certainty that so many of those kids below us, all around us, will be dead. The dirty, diseased hand of waste. Waste of time and lives and hope and innocence.

The essence of leadership was an unerring ability to winnow the essential from the trivial or extraneous. Fine. But it wasn’t that simple. In the terrible, impromptu colloquy that was war the essential could melt away, the trivial could translate itself into the desperately crucial with a rush.

“That’s the whole challenge of life—to act with honor and hope and generosity, no matter what you’ve drawn.

You can’t help when or what you were born, you may not be able to help how you die; but you can—and you should—try to pass the days between as a good man …”

Well. Sometimes they were all we had—words. They had to serve, flesh out the heart’s soft cry …

Massengale’s sin—there was none greater—was that he had decided neither grace nor nobility nor love existed in this world.

For the good of the service. Was he turning into a circumspect subaltern, loyal to the point of subservience, drowning moral principle in the common good, a perfect tool for the arrogant and conniving—was he becoming the kind of soldier he’d always hated and despised?

And they did not make that payment for a world of rockets and bombs and barbed wire, or for a world of overseas markets and a favorable gold balance and the wolfish gutting of what we are pleased to call the underdeveloped nations. Old friends, we can build a new Jerusalem—but we will reach only what we seek

One way is the path of generosity, dignity and a respect for other races and customs; the other leads most certainly to greed, suspicion, hatred and the old, bloody course of violence and waste

It’s got to come to a head. Between those who want us to be a democracy—a real one, not a show-window one—and those who want us to be a Great Power. In caps and with all the trimmings.”

People are going to go on being scared and vindictive and greedy and forgetful and everything else they happen to be. And all you can do is keep on going yourself, do what you can and hope for the best.

“Well: say not the struggle naught availeth. Perseverance keeps honor bright, they say.”

That’s what Sam was: the kind of man people said they’d want to have with them in a rough deal, when all the chips were down, the kind of man they always went to when they were in trouble

What did it matter whether Khotiane was controlled by Communists or a Fascist junta or an imperialist viceroy or a sun worshipers’ convention? All they wanted—she and that wiry little Khotianese woman—were their men, safe at home, sweaty, carefree, singing in the shower

Once that word is said—that one, final, utterly irrecoverable word—then there is no turning back: the wraps are off, the game is on, all manner of deviltry is unleashed … And so I shrink from the saying of that word. Yes. I know everything it means.”

It is still, as a very fine soldier said some years ago, the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.