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General Douglas MacArthur:
Thayer Award Acceptance Address General Westmoreland, General Grove, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps! As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, "Where are you bound for, General?" And when I replied, "West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place. Have you ever been there before?" No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this [Thayer
Award]. Coming from a profession I have served so long, and a people I have
loved so well, it fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is
not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral
code -- the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of
culture and ancient descent. That is the animation of this medallion. For all
eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American
soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses
a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always: Duty, Honor,
Country. Those three hallowed words reverently
dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your
rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith
when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes
forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of
imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean. The
unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase.
Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker,
and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try
to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule. But these are some of the things they do.
They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the
custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you
are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you
to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success;
not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to
face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in
the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before
you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high;
to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet
never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously;
to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the
open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper
of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness
of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over
timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your
heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and
inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a
gentleman. And what sort of soldiers are those you are
to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory? Their
story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man-at-arms. My
estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many, many years ago, and has
never changed. I regarded him then as I regard him now -- as one of the world's
noblest figures, not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as
one of the most stainless. His name and fame are the birthright of every
American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all
that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me or from any
other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's
breast. But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under
fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I
cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest
examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of
future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the
present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements. In 20 campaigns, on a
hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that
enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible
determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people. From one
end of the world to the other he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs [of the glee club], in memory's eye I could see
those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs, on
many a weary march from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle-deep
through the mire of shell-shocked roads, to form grimly for the attack,
blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving
home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God. I do not know the dignity of their birth,
but I do know the glory of their death.
They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their
lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always, for them: Duty, Honor, Country;
always their blood and sweat and tears, as we sought the way and the light and
the truth. And 20 years after, on the other side of
the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches,
the slime of dripping dugouts; those boiling suns of relentless heat, those
torrential rains of devastating storms; the loneliness and utter desolation of
jungle trails; the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and
cherished; the deadly pestilence of tropical disease; the horror of stricken
areas of war; their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure
attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory -- always
victory. Always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the
vision of gaunt, ghastly men reverently following your password of: Duty, Honor,
Country. The code which those words perpetuate
embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or
philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are
for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are
wrong.
The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of
religious training -- sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and
death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when he created
man in his own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the
place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may
be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country
is the noblest development of mankind. You now face a new world -- a world of
change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles mark
the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more
billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the
three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never
been a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this
world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries
of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms: of harnessing
the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard
synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to
purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth
and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of
controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of
rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no
longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil
populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister
forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make
life the most exciting of all time.
And through all this welter of change and development, your mission remains
fixed, determined, inviolable: it is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career
is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other
public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for
their accomplishment. But you are the ones who are trained to fight. Yours is
the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is
no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that
the very obsession of your public service must be: Duty, Honor, Country. Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds; but serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war-guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice. You are the leaven which binds together the
entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great
captains who hold the nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin
sounds. The Long Gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million
ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their
white crosses thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country. This does not mean that you are war mongers. On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps. You may listen to the audio of this speech at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/christianrhetoric.htm |
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