|
March 15, 2003A TIME FOR WARAs the "rush to war" continues at a snail's pace, Horsefeathers has grown tired of the endless, repetitive moralizing of the "peace" protesters. Their arguments are impervious to reason because they amount to utopian faith unrelated to reality. They are self flattering arguments designed to exhibit intelligence and sensibility, a higher, more civilized stance, self evidently superior because it renounces violence. In fact, Horsefeathers believes their objections to military action in dealing with mortal threats amount to cowardice masquerading as moral and intellectual argument. We ARE at war, and were attacked by totalitarian fanatics bent on destroying us. The early attacks, for example, in 1993 on the World Trade Center, were essentially ignored, as we took a post cold war vacation from history. We preferred to entertain ourselves with eight years of a soap opera Presidency. Awakened from our slumbers on 9-11 we ignored the ditherers and doubters and won the first battle, a quick and decisive victory in Afghanistan. Despite this victory, the handwringers and doubters regrouped and are once again out in force. Our chattering class--academics,artists, intellectuals-- counsel against action. What Churchill said of the British intellectual class applies to our own: "The worst difficulties from which we suffer...come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage earners, they come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.." We yield to no one in our admiration for Churchillian prose. It is wonderfully bracing, eloquent and stirring; however, on the verge of war--and we sense that it really is about to happen-- perhaps within 48-72 hours, Horsefeathers feels an American voice, earthy, direct, manly, bracing and truthful is worth quoting again. Here in unexpurgated form, not the George Scott movie version, is George S. Patton: NOTE: This speech contains language that may be considered offensive. User discretion is advised. "Men, this stuff some sources sling around about America wanting to stay out of the war and not wanting to fight is a lot of baloney! Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward; Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost and never will lose a war. You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you, right here today, would be killed in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all of us. And every man is scared in his first action. If he says he's not, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes, but they fight just the same, or get the hell slammed out of them. The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty, to his country and to his manhood. All through your Army careers, you've been bitching about what you call "chicken-shit drills." That, like everything else in the Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is instant obedience to orders and to create and maintain constant alertness! This must be bred into every soldier. A man must be alert all the time if he expects to stay alive. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him with a sock full of shit! There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on his job--but they are German graves, because we caught the bastards asleep! An Army is a team, lives, sleeps, fights, and eats as a team. This individual hero stuff is a lot of horse shit! The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking! Every single man in the Army plays a vital role. Every man has his job to do and must do it. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of a shell overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? What if every man thought, "They won't miss me, just one in millions?" Where in Hell would we be now? Where would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be? No, thank God, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job, serves the whole. Ordnance men supply and maintain the guns and vast machinery of this war, to keep us rolling. Quartermasters bring up clothes and food, for where we're going, there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the guy who boils the water to keep us from getting the G.I. shits! Remember, men, you don't know I'm here. No mention of that is to be made in any letters. The USA is supposed to be wondering what the hell has happened to me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army, I'm not supposed even to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. I want them to look up and howl, "Ach, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again!" We want to get this thing over and get the hell out of here, and get at those purple-pissin' Japs!!! The shortest road home is through Berlin and Tokyo! We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by showing the enemy we have more guts than they have or ever will have! There's one great thing you men can say when it's all over and you're home once more. You can thank God that twenty years from now, when you're sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the war, you won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, "I shoveled shit in Louisiana." Posted at 10:26 PM by
 
|
The version you quote seems a bit abridged. This one's longer:
http://www.pattonhq.com/speech.html
Posted by: Steven Den Beste on March 16, 2003 02:00 AM