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September 9 - September 17, 2020
“From this day to the ending of the World, . . . we in it shall be remembered . . . we band of brothers.”
“We can’t make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had.”
Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers. Their relationship is different from that of lovers. Their trust in, and knowledge of, each other is total.
Men are true comrades only when each is ready to give up his life for the other, without reflection and without thought of personal loss.”
“Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.”
“Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.”
You lead by fear or you lead by example.
Most of what they learned in the training proved to be valuable in combat, but it was that intimacy, that total trust, that comradeship that developed on those long, cold, wet English nights that proved to be invaluable.
“Those days were not lost on me because even at twenty years of age, I knew I was seeing and being a part of something that was never to be again. Wartime London was its own world.”
“stop worrying about me. I joined the parachutists to fight. I intend to fight. If necessary, I shall die fighting, but don’t worry about this because no war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.”
They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.
“Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you . . . . Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”
“You had to be a little bit awed that you were part of a thing that was so much greater than you.”
“when men are in combat, the inevitability of it takes over. They are there, there is nothing they can do to change that, so they accept it. They immediately become callused to the smell of death, the bodies, the destruction, the killing, the danger. Enemy bodies and wounded don’t affect them. Their own wounded and the bodies of their dead friends make only a brief impression, and in that impression is a fleeting feeling of triumph or accomplishment that it was not them.
Let our enemies who have lived by the sword turn from their violence lest they perish by the sword. Help us to serve Thee gallantly and to be humble in victory.”
“soldiers learn more often than civilians ever do that everything external is replaceable, while life is not.”
What is not replaceable is the esteem of comrades, but to the replacement soldier, just arrived, there is no comradeship, so there is nothing to hold him to his post.
If they had to fight, they were determined it would be with their comrades.
The elements of drama were there—courage in the midst of surrounding panic and defeat; courage and grim humor in the midst of physical suffering, cold, and near-fatal shortages; a surrender demand and a four-letter-word rebuttal; and a real comradeship . . . . Courage and comradeship combined to develop a team that the Germans couldn’t whip.”
The experiences of men in combat produces emotions stronger than civilians can know, emotions of terror, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, helplessness, uselessness, and each of these feelings drained energy and mental stability.
some of man’s deepest fears: fear of wounds, fear of death, fear of putting into danger the lives of those for whose well-being one is responsible. They touch too upon some of man’s most violent passions; hatred, rage and the urge to kill.”
War satisfies not only the eye’s lust; it can create, even more than the shared rigors of training, a feeling of comradeship.
