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The man who has had it roughest is the man to be most admired. Conversely, he who has had it the easiest is the least praiseworthy.
It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political rallies; athletes tell us what brand of cigarette to smoke.
But above all he had a voice. It pulsed with power as he counted the cadence, marching us from the administration building to the quartermaster’s. It whipped us, this ragged remnant, and stiffened our slouching civilian backs. Nowhere else but in the Marine Corps do you hear that peculiar lilting cadence of command.
We were like St. Augustine’s definition of time: “Out of the future that is not yet, into the present that is just becoming, back to the past that no longer
Even in the mess hall we learned that nothing mattered so little as a man’s own likes or dislikes.
If you are undone in Parris Island, taken apart in those first few weeks, it is at the rifle range that they start to put you together again.
If a man must live in mud and go hungry and risk his flesh you must give him a reason for it, you must give him a cause. A conclusion is not a cause.
A soldier’s pack is like a woman’s purse: it is filled with his personality. I have saddened to see the mementos in the packs of dead Japanese. They had strong family ties, these smooth-faced men, and their packs were full of their families.
The food was hot, as was the coffee, and men living in the open demand no more.
It is glorious to drink the wine of the enemy.
It is not always or immediately saddening to hear “who got it.” Except for one’s close buddies, it is difficult to feel deep, wracking grief for the dead, and now, hearing the lieutenant tolling off the names, I had to force my face into a mask of mourning, deliberately adorn my heart with black, as it were, for I was shocked to gaze inward and see no sorrow there. Rather than permit myself to know myself a monster (as I seemed, then) I deliberately deluded myself by feigning bereavement. So did we all.
Smell, the sense which somehow seems a joke, is the one most susceptible to outrage. It will give you no rest. One can close one's eyes to ugliness or shield the ears from sound; but from a powerful smell there is no recourse but flight.
Victory was possible, that was all; it would be easy or difficult, quick or prolonged, but it would be victory.
Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability.
But crisis never comes without being preceded by false optimism.
The Marine Corps is a fermenter; it is divided into two distinct camps — the Old Salts and the Boots — who are forever warring: the Old Salt defending his past and his traditions against the furious assault of the Boot who is striving to exalt the Present at the expense of the Past, seeking to deflate the aplomb of the Old Salt by collapsing this puffed-up Past upon which it reposes. But the Boot will forever feel inferior to the Old Salt; he must always attack, for he has not the confidence of defense. The moment he ceases to slash at Tradition with the bright saber of present deeds, the
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I was the deliverer in the land he has saved.
Hope was a classic — the classic barmaid, the sort whose broad behind has left a lasting imprint on the pages of history.
For it is most especially a Marine sentiment, and when analyzed, it turns out to be not shameless or shocking, but merely this: a man who lands in the brig is apt to be a man of bold spirit and independent mind, who must occasionally rebel against the harsh and unrelenting discipline of the camp.
Now, to pity the enemy either is madness or it is a sign of strength.
I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew — no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.
An officers’ mess is one of the surest barometers of military success. So long as the officers continue to pig it with the men, there is danger of defeat. But once the officers’ mess appears — raised almost on the bodies of the foe, contrived of sticks and pieces of canvas or perhaps only an imaginary line like a taboo — once this appears, and caste is restored. we know that victory is ours.
Keep it up, America, keep telling your youth that mud and danger are fit only for intellectual pigs. Keep on saying that only the stupid are fit to sacrifice, that America must be defended by the low-brow and enjoyed by the high-brow. Keep vaunting head over heart, and soon the head will arrive at the complete folly of any kind of fight and meekly surrender the treasure to the first bandit with enough heart to demand it.
Unfortunately, you marines can’t go home unless you’re carried home.
The hand is the artisan of the soul. It is the second member of the human trinity of head and hand and heart. A man has no faculty more human than his hand, none more beautiful nor expressive nor productive.
Still more was required in facing up to the fact that my turn was next. And here is the point in battle where one needs the rallying cry. Here where the banner must be unfurled or the song sung or the name of the cause flung at the enemy like a challenge. Here is mounted the charge, the thing as old as warfare itself, that either overwhelms the defense and wins the battle, or is broken and brings on defeat.
It is to sacrifice that men go to war. They do not go to kill, they go to be killed, to risk their flesh, to insert their precious persons in the path of destruction.
That is why women weep when their men go off to war. They do not weep for their victims, they weep for them as Victim. That is why, with the immemorial insight of mankind, there are gay songs and colorful bands to send them off — to fortify their failing hearts, not to quicken their lust for blood. That is why there are no glorious living, but only glorious dead. Heroes turn traitor, warriors age and grow soft — but a victim is changeless, sacrifice is eternal.
