Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

“World War II was the one event that had the greatest impact on my life. I enlisted imbued with a rather flamboyant concept of this country’s destiny as the leader of a free world and the necessity of the use of armed force. I emerged a corporal three years later in a state of great turmoil, at the core of which was an angry awareness of war as the most vicious and fraudulent self-deception man had ever devised.”

“the whole challenge of life [is] to act with honor and hope and generosity.… 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.”

service is its own reward. In that miserable era, we all just ate that up.”

Our choice is not to be Sam Damon or Courtney Massengale but rather to realize that we must be ourselves. It is in this knowledge that our real commitment to our profession—and to leadership—begins.”

How do we preserve in peace, the virtues necessary to win in war?

“You can’t help what you were born and you may not have much to say about where you die, but you can and you should try to pass the days in between as a good man.”

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

“You spend half your life telling people things you don’t believe yourself.”

If your leadership & tactical sense is better than your superior’s & if you are certain a battle would be lost if orders of that superior allowed to stand, you MIGHT be justified in seizing initiative yourself; BUT you must be prepared to accept consequences, in either victory or defeat. Arnold was not.

The recruiting sergeant, a tall Texan with a low forehead and a broad, engaging smile, was delighted with him. He’d make a first-rate soldier, he could promise him that. Advancement was rapid, it was a slick army, an expanding army—they were going to war with Mexico any day now, and then you’d see the fur fly. And he’d passed the West Point exams, had he? Keen, that was keen—his colonel would rush that through in no time at all …

“You don’t join the army in peacetime, to consort with thieves and drunkards, ignorant moonshiners and the riff-raff of the cities of the East …” Sam glanced at Uncle Bill, expecting him to flare with anger, but the old sergeant was only wagging his head unhappily and scratching his chin. “Outlaws, and men without names—that’s what the Army’s filled with now, boy …”

Inflexibility—it was the worst human failing: you could learn to check impetuosity, you could overcome fear through confidence and laziness through discipline, but rigidity of mind allowed for no antidote. It carried the seeds of its own destruction.

“There’s more to this game than shooting …”

Major Caldwell had said; the French were eager for a look at the Americans—and God knew how they’d carry it off

Black Jack shook his head, demurring, smiled, turned to a young officer on his staff, a captain Damon had never seen, who after a short consultation advanced to the tomb.

“The American soldier has always wanted to know why, Sergeant. Baron von Steuben remarked on it at Valley Forge. Don’t discourage it—it’s a good thing. It’s what distinguishes him from any other private soldier the world over—this feeling that it’s his right to know why he’s doing something. And why shouldn’t he know? It’s his life he’s risking, isn’t it?”

Krazewski had been all right when they first got over.

He had been up for drunkenness twice, once for a fight with an engineer from the 17th, a man he’d beaten senseless and robbed into the bargain.

“Hell, you should have run him up. Let Crowder iron him out.”

“Company punishment will ruin him, Dev. It’ll just feed his gripe—he’ll become a stockade rebel and be fit for nothing.

Raebyrne nodded, miserable. He had gone to sleep on watch. When his buddies depended on him for their safety. Their lives. Even now he could hardly comprehend what had happened. He could go to prison for years. Years and years behind stone walls, in the dark. “Sarge,” he mumbled. “It won’t happen again

“No man deserves another chance after an exhibition as disgraceful as this. But I’m going to give you one. I’m going to leave this between you

“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you gentlemen that the situation is grave, to put it mildly. We are entering the line at a crucial moment, a desperate moment. A great deal—a very great deal—will hinge on the quality of our efforts here.”

“There is no time to lose. Make your troop dispositions as rapidly as possible. Make your orders brief ones, and above all encourage the greatest possible use of individual initiative by the men of your commands.”

Damon, owed a debt to the men he had lived with and trained for battle.

“But nothing. The object of war is to kill, right? Destroy the enemy—by the use of mass, economy of force, movement, surprise. That’s the aim of the game. We used surprise, right?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” Lujak stammered. “It was when you were at the window, after you’d grabbed my blanket … You butcher!” Lujak shrieked all at once, “you filthy bastard butcher—you’ll kill us all! You don’t care …”

“I see.” Caldwell nodded again. “You’re a lieutenant, Damon. As of this moment.”

The elation he had dreamed of would not come.

He had done what he’d promised himself—what he’d known in all wild ignorance he would; and yet none of it was what he had known it would be. It was not like it at all.

They cared for things here; it was an attitude he’d learned to respect in the Army. But war didn’t respect any thing, or place, or person. It crushed everything that happened to stand in its way

“We got the best platoon leader in the whole Ass End First.

Successful armies were built on esprit, on conviction in the face of those clouds of great uncertainty in which Clausewitz said three-quarters of all military endeavor was hidden—

Let them talk if they wanted to talk. He intended to field the best platoon in the AEF, and he would do it the way he wanted.

Analogy between Damon and medical. Is he fighting with a hidden belief that of he takes one more hill, pushes his men and himself just a little harder, it will lead to the end of this mess. Do physicians at times suffer from the delusion that we can change the world, end human suffering? This is harmful if we don’t also accept the reality that we probably can’t

Clay tried to drop out and he tongue-lashed him back into ranks. He hated Clay with a vengeance—the boy’s natural build and conventional good looks, his free-and-easy manner. Smart little rich boy, father owned half of Cleveland; wait till they went over … Then in the next instant he regretted that, pushed the thought away.

“I know. It can’t be helped. We must do it anyway.” He clapped the Sergeant on the shoulder once, lightly. “We’ll catch ’em with their pants down. You’ll see.”

wood—

Yet he found himself crawling along, working his way forward with all the craft he possessed, cringing and gasping when the bullets sang their threatful way close above him, sizzling in the heavy heads of wheat; cursing himself for being such an insane fool, such a bloody automaton as to go on with this but constrained nonetheless, creeping and crawling, a filthy, hungry, frightened animal, toward what he knew could only, finally be his death …

And suddenly he knew: he was afraid of Sam. He loved him, he owed him his freedom and perhaps his life, he respected him as all that a man and a soldier might be—but he was afraid of what he now saw in Sam’s face. He felt his legs start to tremble.

“Faute de mieux.” Again that calm, steady smile. Damon was filled with consternation. Jesus! How could he be so calm?

With a little luck it could end the war …” “Do you mean it?” Damon murmured. The tempest of confusion and carnage and losses he’d been tossed in all day bore no relation he could see to anything so majestic as the end of a war.

“We’ve done a great day’s work, Sam.” Damon slowly lowered his glasses. “I hope so, sir,” he said. “We haven’t got much of any battalion left.”

…Victory is a matter of opportunities clearly seen and swiftly exploited.”

Damon had stared at his commanding officer in wrathful incredulity. “Frontally … but that’s—there’s no point in it! That’s pure and simple butchery—they’ll get away, all of them …”

“Opportunity once forsaken is opportunity lost forever.”

Peering at the oval mess gear in his lap piled high with other men’s meat he was swept with a mountainous surge of anger at a system that would snatch men up and lash them forward to such massive butchery on empty bellies, decimate them and starve them—and then fail to execute the simplest, most rudimentary principles of war.

“Tim, you got more grabofrobias than my Grand Aunt Tirzah.”

the most blissful anticipation. He was barely recognizable as the sergeant Damon had played against in Texas. “… I’d think even you’ve had enough for a while, Merrick.”

“I see. For good?” “For ever and a day. There’s no point in it, Sam. No point in it … All that slaughter. At Brigny and Soissons. And for what? So the frigging brass could foul it up all over again. You and I could have done better than that stupid bastard Benoît. A five-year-old kid could have done better—you know that …”

“No! I say he is brave to stay, the bravest of the brave—and you, all the rest of you, are the cowards, the cattle, the craven, drunken fools …”