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“One more word—This is just a raid, not a battle. It’s a demonstration of firepower and frightfulness. Our mission is to let the enemy know that we could have destroyed their city—but didn’t—but that they aren’t safe even though we refrain from total bombing.
As they keep telling you in Basic, doing something constructive at once is better than figuring out the best thing to do hours later.
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”
But exercise will keep you warm and they saw to it that we got plenty of that.
But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail.
There was a short silence to which I contributed.
Zim says (correctly) that any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.
“Don’t you know about sergeants?” “Well . . . I’m learning.” “They don’t have mothers. Just ask any trained private.” He blew smoke toward us. “They reproduce by fission . . . like all bacteria.”
Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you’ve ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don’t need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he’s as happy as a worm in an apple—asleep.
Then we buried them with full honors to the strains of “This Land Is Ours” and with the posthumous rank of PFC, the first of our boot regiment to go that high—because a cap trooper isn’t necessarily expected to stay alive (dying is part of his trade) . . . but they care a lot about how you die. It has to be heads up, on the bounce, and still trying.
“There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men. We’re trying to teach you to be dangerous—to the enemy. Dangerous even without a knife. Deadly as long as you still have one hand or one foot and are still alive. If
War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence.
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly . . . it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. —Thomas Paine
To have Captain Frankel agree with him—as to the seriousness of the failure, I mean—and then rub his nose in it, chew him out. Well! I mean really. Sergeants don’t get chewed out; sergeants do the chewing. A law of nature.
his nose in it, chew him out. Well! I mean really. Sergeants don’t get chewed out; sergeants do the chewing. A law of nature.
The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.
“‘Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.”
“This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him.
“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.”
I pity the poverty of your wealth.
The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.”
seconds are jewels beyond price in combat.
It’s a whole lot safer to have a blank file on your flank than to have an alleged soldier who is nursing the “conscript” syndrome.
If it has to be done, a man—a real man—shoots his own dog himself; he doesn’t hire a proxy who may bungle it.
While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment—and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism?
“No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.
developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.
Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”
The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots . . . —Thomas Jefferson, 1787
“Peace” is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence—unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when “peace” meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it.
Everything up to then and still later were “incidents,” “patrols,” or “police actions.” However, you are just as dead if you buy a farm in an “incident” as you are if you buy it in a declared war.
This is silly, of course; you don’t win a war by defense but by attack—no “Department of Defense” ever won a war; see the histories.
A real fight ordinarily can last only a second or two, because that is all the time it takes to kill a man, or knock him out, or disable him to the point where he can’t fight.
What a man doesn’t know he can’t spill if he is captured; neither drugs, nor torture, nor brainwash, nor endless lack of sleep can squeeze out a secret he doesn’t possess.
however the trouble with “lessons from history” is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part . . . and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”
It is by no means enough that an officer should be capable. . . . He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor. . . . No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate. True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending . . . the ships themselves must be ruled under a system of absolute despotism. I trust that I have now made clear to you the tremendous
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He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal . . . but a man
Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.
To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.
“Because revolution—armed uprising—requires not only dissatisfaction but aggressiveness. A revolutionist has to be willing to fight and die—or he’s just a parlor pink. If you separate out the aggressive ones and make them the sheep dogs, the sheep will never give you trouble.”
The universe will let us know—later—whether or not Man has any “right” to expand through it.
That’s why we always commission a dead cadet, son—so we can send him home to his mates.”
Regrettably there is no method known to military science to tell a real officer from a glib imitation with pips on his shoulders, other than through ordeal by fire. Real ones come through—or die gallantly; imitations crack up.
I want you to worry about it, doing it in advance, planning what steps you might take against any combination of bad news that can come your way, keenly aware that your life belongs to your men and is not yours to throw away in a suicidal reach for glory . . . and that your life isn’t yours to save, either, if the situation requires that you expend it.
The one thing—the only thing!—that can strike terror in the heart of a good platoon sergeant is to find that he’s working for a boss who can’t make up his mind.
“An officer can’t look scared or tense; it’s contagious.
How think ye? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? —Matthew XII:12
